When Dave Chappelle Lost Decades-Old Victimhood Status

If comedy has any use beyond sheer entertainment, it’s to call out inconvenient and unspeakable truths.

Now that college campus Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (D.E.I.) politics have gone mainstream in most government and corporate decisions, it’s only a matter of time before the sword of satire comes for all the cowards on the Left who enabled such madness.

In an America where no two citizens have equal claims to historic oppression (and the assumption of historic oppression is the lens through which all your accomplishments and mistakes will be perceived), there is at least one conflict that all unenviable identities can appreciate:

The intersectional traffic jam.

This happens when two identities, which are valued by the DEI establishment, come into direct conflict with one another, forcing the determinative Social Justice voices to choose which one to anoint with greater victim status.

In the month after George Floyd’s death, left-leaning black Americans seemed to hold the highest victim status and associated greatest share of the national microphone, and this lasted precisely until Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special “The Closer” was attacked for transphobia.

Comedian Dave Chappelle is refusing to submit to the woke high school students who decried his last comedy special The Closer as transphobic and anti-LGBTQ, saying the more they try to silence him, the more determined he will be to speak out.https://t.co/E3ucRQrt41

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) July 8, 2022

The important phrase to track during moments of intersectional power realignments is which party is said to be “punching down,” meaning their group is considered more privileged than the one they’re joking about, making all ensuing comedy irredeemably offensive.

So when Chappelle jokes about white or Asian people as a black man, he can be applauded for his once-in-a-generation talent.

When Chappelle, a straight “cisgender” man, pokes at a transgender woman in 2021, his once-impenetrable racial victim status is completely irrelevant. Suddenly he is the transphobic oppressor, previous racial oppression, genius, and intent be damned, choosing to venture into verboten territory is one of modern heroism.

The moment when two valued American identities face off in a public determination of greater victim status is simultaneously a moment of rare honesty because no amount of logic or reason is considered in the ultimate Social Justice verdict.

Check out my interview with @GeorgePDenny where we discuss his debut novel 'Wokelynd! PLUS California politics and films. https://t.co/Rg2nFv6b3Y

— Jacob Airey (@realJacobAirey) December 15, 2023

Chappelle has decades of hilarious comedy with appropriate Hollywood politics that are suddenly cast into the peril of suspected “transphobic” bigotry.

No one with a lesser identity needs to argue at all, because they lack the “lived experience” (or victimization-based social clout) to have an opinion worth hearing at all.

So continues the trend of America dividing a little further, each of us withdrawing into our closed-circuit information systems, waiting for another election with which we can all finally communicate with rare finality.

Before Chappelle turned to transgender topics he was a popular truth-teller of the left, with a valued African-American identity, but upon “punching down” into verboten issues, his prior victim status is revoked. 

The best example of this is in Chapelle’s special, The Closer, where he jokes, “DaBaby shot and killed a [man] in Walmart in North Carolina. Nothing bad happened to his career. Do you see where I’m going with this? In our country, you can shoot and kill a [man], but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings.”

In the New California world of my novel “Wokelynd,” it is the same America run by the same neo-racists, only with a few decades to wipe away the veneer of moral authority or kindness that current wokeness still attempts to claim.

The story centers around Quinceton Rift, a Black military sniper, whose life in this altered reality reveals the deep and unsettling changes in society.

The novel is structured into three acts, delving into the evolution of language, the rise of identity politics and the contentious shift from a society rooted in equality to one obsessed with equity. This transformation is not only in government and societal structures but also deeply ingrained in the day-to-day lives of individuals, where personal freedoms and rights are constantly in jeopardy.

Instead of our current, inefficient system of looking at someone’s skin color and sex in the context of their pronouns to understand the power of their identity to an academic admissions office or corporate recruiter, New California’s government simply calculates each citizen’s “Intersectional Score.”

This score determines their opportunity for social advancement. The most valued identities have the chance to be promoted to Knowers, who are empowered to propose new solutions and tactics in the war for “Social Justice.”

Immediate lackeys who deliver such pronouncements to the public are called Speakers.

The following excerpt takes place in San Francisco’s Union Square in 2066:

At the top of the platform waited two very important people: the Speaker and Knower assigned to Criminal Social Justice duty for the day. The Knower’s official gold hat was much taller and shinier than the Speaker’s red one, and both contrasted sharply with the drab jeans and monochrome T-shirts of the crowd. It also helped to instruct the viewer who it was that held court here at a glance, as the Knower sat on a padded seat at the rear of the platform and directed the Speaker with practiced hand gestures, saving all speech for the sound of the chosen voice.

“Silence! Quiet! Silence!” the supervising Speaker shouted with two arms raised. They wore simple Level One Speaker robes but smiled confidently as nearby talk faded into rapt attention. The Speaker read from the first page of a stack of loose paper.

“Before we begin I’d like to present a statement from Knower Gladdius K. Lakanda, regarding her controversial recent gender knowledge work, titled She Centers His Vagina to Platform Their Penis. Knower Lakanda would like to remind all workers, Elect, Speakers, and even other Knowers that it was not her intent to discriminate against any segment of the non-binary community with her choice of vocabulary, and she has not forgotten about those with neither a penis nor a vagina, but a venis. To the venis-offering community, Knower Lakanda pledges herself to future academic efforts breaking down the penis/vagina binary and will reveal why a venis or any combination of remodeled reproductive organs is really the exact same as the original appendage.”

George Denny is a writer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of WOKELYND, a best-selling book on Amazon about the downfall of our culture and California.