Sophia Michaels
Dave Chappelle appears to want people to think after trans people protested his show in Minneapolis, that he’s really the victim.
On Tuesday, the comedian — who has been under fire for making transphobic jokes during his stand-up shows — addressed the cancelation of his performance in Minneapolis after the venue stated that they wanted to make their venue a “safe space” for all attendees, regardless of gender expression.
Chappelle went on his Midnight Miracle podcast to react to the backlash he faced, nearly six months after the fact, and used the platform to diminish the marginalization of the trans community and blame them for allegedly inciting violence.
“They wanted me to say something inflammatory,” Chappelle claimed, stating that protesters had thrown eggs at those lined up to watch his show. (A single video of one protestor with eggs in his hand has circulated on the internet.) “In a weird way, they had the intention of inciting violence against themselves for publicity.”
Instead of directly addressing the root of the issue — his hate-filled jokes against a community he isn’t a part of — Chappelle opted for demeaning trans people and categorizing the protesters as people who simply wanted to “fuck his show up.” His response invalidated the fact that his transphobic jokes cause violence in a wider sense, and allow for expressions of anti-transness like his own to continue without consequence.
“The trans [people] and their surrogates, always say that my jokes are somehow gonna be the root cause of some impending violence that they feel like is inevitable for my jokes,” Chappelle said. “But I gotta tell you, as abrasive as they were, the way they were protesting, throwing eggs at people, throwing barricades, cussing and screaming, [none of my fans] beat ‘em up.”
It seems a low bar to conflate not being beat up as evidence of being trans-friendly. Besides, his fans are not the ones who are being called out for transphobia. And, just because it didn’t happen at his show, doesn’t mean it won’t happen elsewhere.
Chappelle also later claimed that he asked the protesters, “’Where are the Black transgenders at? And them n—s were like, ‘They were just here.’ No they weren’t.” We don’t have a breakdown of the protester demographic at his Minneapolis show, but what is known is that Black and Latine folks make up the largest number of deaths in the trans community each year, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Black trans women, specifically, are at the highest risk for violence and have been for years. With this Oppression Olympics take, Chappelle minimizes Black trans people’s experiences and assumes that their identities are mutually exclusive.
“There’s a thing they do where they deliberately obscure what I think they believe is the intent of my work to make a moment of it that I don’t know that the work necessarily merits,” he said. “You know what I mean?” It’s unclear how trans people can “deliberately obscure” the fact that in his The Closer stand-up set, Chappelle literally called himself “team TERF,” or trans-exclusionary feminist, compared trans people’s genitals to plant-based substitutes, and seems to be fixated on making jokes about trans women’s private parts.
Chappelle even had a chance to save himself at one point during the podcast. A co-host tried to imply that Chappelle was “pro-everything” when it came to trans rights and that his performances were separate from his personal beliefs. Chappelle cut him off: “Slow your roll,” he said.
One thing Chappelle did admit was that he got in his feelings after the show was canceled. “I was upset. I wasn’t mad that they canceled the show,” he said. “I was mad at the statement they released… You’re sorry? For booking me? What’s there to be sorry about is the position I was taking… I’m not even mad that they take issue with my work. Good, fine. Who cares? What I take issue with is the idea that because they don’t like it, I’m not allowed to say it.”
“Trying to silence a person like me, I don’t think it has anything to do with being loved,” he said. “They want to be feared. ‘If you say this, then we will punish you. We’ll come to First Avenue and fuck your show up and we’ll come to the Varsity Theater and fuck your show up.’ And they just don’t get to do that.”
Chappelle has one of the biggest platforms as an A-list comedian. Let’s be for real here: no one’s going to stop him from making his outdated jokes. His mentality that people are trying to “silence” him is misguided. All that trans people and their allies appear to be asking for is that he stop weaponizing already-marginalized identities that aren’t his own to make outdated jokes about genitals.
