From where I sit, the thing a lot of people need to realize about Dave Chapelle is that the only thing special about him, the only thing, is that he watered down traditional Black comedy enough to be palatable to white people.
I will never understand it (I do, but that's for another thread), why white people love this man so much.
But when you've grown up as a Black Queer person, you know...this particular erasure he employs on Black Queer people (particularly Black Trans people) is intentional, and it is the point.
When he says, "stop punching down on my community," which is something he's been saying for years now, he wants you to buy into his framework that Queerness/Transness, and the pursuit of liberation for LGBTQIA+ in general, is inherently anti-Black. In order for that to work, he can't acknowledge that his own people, by our own birth, can be Queer/Trans. That's gotta get swept under the rug. It's another ploy of the white devil.
(And to be clear, there are some prominent white patriarchal forces within these Queer movements that desperately want these movements to be anti-Black, but that too is for another thread. Y'all ain't ready.)
This framework that he engages through is intentional. It's not an accident. Dave Chapelle knows Black Queer people exist, he knows how he's erasing us in his arguments. But unless Black Queer people are bolstering his arguments, the reality of Black Queer and Trans people specifically is not the reality he wants to weave.
And if you've grown up Black and Queer, you know why. Because he's a hotep. Plain and simple. He's always been a hotep. I'm so sorry to break it to y'all. This is hotepery of the highest degree. There must have been a disturbance in the Game of Hotep because he's now making a play for the iron throne.
And the only thing I can ask, is that a lot of y'all stop engaging in this debate on his terms. Dave Chapelle wants you to forget that Black Queer people exist.
