The Comforting Addictiveness of Victimhood — Part Two
Is it really oppression, or is it more a fight to keep historical narratives that are no longer relevant alive in the present?
Even though I firmly reject the modern antiracist gaze on the White experience, Black victimhood is nonetheless a deeply sensitive subject for a White man to write about, even if he’s a gay man of a certain age and therefore a member of a far more oppressed group — it isn’t seen that way, for reasons I explain in this piece.
While a writer cannot be canceled, it’s still a minefield that I'm not reckless enough to run across. I’ve given this a great deal of thought; edited out thousands of unworthy words and set them aside for later pieces; taken many a pulse by reading opinions that I value and respect, and a few that I disagree with.
If you haven’t already, please read Part One first for context:
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Recap of Part One:
I have my first breakthrough in therapy, the first of three slaps: My “comfort zone” over half a century of being my family’s “Piggy the Scapegoated Black Sheep” keeps me locked in victimhood, stewing over injustices in an unchangeable dynamic. That unleashes a torrent of corrections in the circuitry of my mind, babbling about it to myself and everyone I meet as a way of debugging corruptions in my ego, until my boyfriend tells me to “shut up about your family” — the second slap.
After breaking down why Wokeism’s Coca-Cola Marxist attempt to keep an oppressor-oppressed dynamic between White men and the rest of America alive and burning is nothing more than a corruption of the nation’s self-image as a whole, I use my own ancestors’ history of subjugation and oppression by the English as a counterpoint to the fraught notion that history is living in the present.
My plans to deconstruct examples of victimhood grievances from all three heads of Woke Cerberus are scuttled mid-scribble when a Rasmussen Reports survey reveals that ~43% of Blacks either disagree with the statement “It’s okay to be White,” or they aren’t sure; it’s actually 47% adjusted by 4 points per Five Thirty-Eight’s ratings system for Rasmussen. Heartbroken by the true breadth of the gulf between the races, I face the reality that, at this juncture, Black racism is as much America’s “original sin” — another willfully divisive, specious Woke construct — as White racism is.
I deconstruct Chris Rock’s response in his Netflix special to being assaulted by the renowned sadist and bully Will Smith in front of the whole world at the 2022 Oscars, at the end of which he blames his cowardly failure to take the correct legal action right there and then — which every responsible adult, especially one of that level of celebrity, is morally obliged to take in a situation like that — on “White people.”
The third slap that delivers me from victimhood for good is yet to come.
DOING THE HUSTLE
I was two weeks late returning to St. Stephen’s in Rome for my sophomore year in high school, after a particularly grueling summer battling my father while trapped in the cage fight of my parents’ endlessly disintegrating marriage; it had long become what I’ve come to call an “asymptotic relationship,” applying the geometric term for a line that continually approaches a given curve but never meets it.
It’s a testament to the steel-cold, brutal family dynamics common to my socio-cultural group that we feel liberated when we get back to boarding school. The fact I was in boarding at all, when our house was only forty-five minutes away by public bus in heavy Roman traffic, is all the “show, don’t tell” I need for the broad strokes of my dynamic with my family.
TWA flight 800, the Expat Shuttle from New York, made a quick stop at Charles de Gaulle to drop off the Paris Chapter and arrived at Rome’s Fumicino in the morning. I went straight to school from the airport. It’s not like I had a room of my own at home to flop down in and sleep off jetlag, wallpapered with posters, a record collection, and normal teen bric-a-brac. Just as Harry Potter lived under the staircase at his Muggle Uncle and Aunt’s house, my designated sleeping area was in a converted vestibule on the main floor across from the study and main staircase, with three doors leading to the foyer, the living room, and the dining room. Nobody would know that a teen lived in it. The family all lived on the floor above me.
Before I was booted out to live at St. Stephen’s, for no viable reason other than the fact I was Piggy the Scapegoated Black Sheep, my vestibule sleeping space was used for its intended purpose whenever my parents entertained: as a coatroom and a passageway for staff to move around guests without disrupting conversation. On those nights I slept in the spare bed in my sister’s room upstairs between my parents and brother’s rooms until the guests left and I would be awakened to return to my vestibule reeking of cigarettes, booze, many overlaid luxury-brand perfumes, and lingering understated American power. I didn’t mind being woken and shifted; I was back in my safe-space pen, by myself.
Sense-memory of my frame of mind as I bounded up the school steps with my duffle bag — yup, L.L. Bean, large — causes my shoulder to hunch over my laptop. The hubbub of morning recess reverberated off the walls of the central courtyard, evaporating my monthslong shroud of gloom with excitement with each step. I shoved open the heavy front door and strode into my own private Narnia, where I was greeted with a surprised, generous affection: “Jamie! Ma do’ cazzo sei stato? We thought you weren’t coming back!”
When I greet the girls, our right cheeks kiss, then left cheeks kiss; every morning in greeting, every evening in parting, always, without fail; otherwise, porta sfiga, sai, horn hand sign to ward off evil omens, everywhere, like bats dipping, darting in-around-throughout our lives; quanto mi sei mancato, always and forever, Amore! A shower of kiss-kisses and missed-you hugs pouring from all directions, even more the life-renewing monsoon soaking my parched heart than I’d imagined on the flight back from that brutish, affection-less, culturally sterile, unstylish land of tasteless food and dull-brown-colored tepid water that they dared call “coffee” — his country, not mine.
Here I belong; here they see me. Here I am loved; here I am me.
I immediately bummed a cigarette; we were allowed to smoke in the Bar, the student-teacher café lounge off the central courtyard of the former convent near the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus that was now a school for a hundred and twenty blessed teens and their insanely hip teachers. It was still the seventies; it was forbidden to forbid. “We were sick of catching you smoking and punishing you. As long as you’re going to it anyway, might as well have one with us over a coffee and a cornetto.”
Forensically scrutinizing fragments of memory, it might well be that she sensed the perfect time to make an entrance, after my welcome-home-to-school had died down and I was finishing my second bummed cigarette. I turned around from the fevered bilingual teen chatter and there she was, a few feet from the entrance, chin cocked, her hair up in one of the dozens of hairstyles she rotated daily.
Another student introduced us, “This is Vanessa. She’s from New York,” and then stepped back to watch what would happen as two forces of nature collided. Vanessa read me: her laser focus snapped from my eyes, to my shoes and up again.
“Cool! So am I!”
“Oh, yeah? Where?”
“Manhattan.” I knew that much; I knew it wasn’t enough, and now I was on my back foot. Everyone listening, everyone watching.
I was technically a native, a mark of distinction that I milked for all it was worth with other kids who didn’t know any better. But I knew little about the City itself, despite returning every June to our cottage in a Gilded Age summer colony overlooking the Hudson Valley with a “Members Only” sign under a shield of the Episcopal Church at the entrance, a subtle warning of what you could expect if you tried to cross the stone bridge over Haines Falls unaccompanied. Every year in June, Mum and our houseman Dominic would pack us up, crate and sedate the dogs, and we boarded a flight to JFK, where we were met by a driver from the Mountain Top car dealership with our station wagon and hurried away Upstate, completely avoiding the City. In early September, the process back to Rome was reversed. I’d maybe spent a combined two weeks of my childhood in Manhattan since we moved to Rome when I was five, mostly Midtown at the Harvard Club and a five-block radius around it.
“Where in Manhattan?”
“Um…” Svelto, quickly, what street? When Mum talks about where we lived she says… “Eighty-fourth Street.”
“And what?”
“And what… what?”
“East or West?”
“Just Eighty-fourth Street.”
Vanessa read me again and huffed, “Honey, you are no New Yorker.”
Half Jewish, half Black, Vanessa was the ultimate representation of the City’s final golden age, dawning with the Grand Coming Out of Gay heralded by the orchestral diva-ness of disco. These days the best way for me to reference what the Capital of the World had become in the late 70s — in its glorious decline before its rebirth as a prim necropolis of skyscrapers in the 90s — is to ask, “Have you seen Joker? That’s what it was like.” It was grimy, graffitied, drug-and-sex addled; insanely rude, aggressive and dangerous; a cultural orgy churning under a cacophonic vortex, never sleeping, always dreaming.
A member of the original cast of children of Sesame Street, trained in classical dance in the youth program at Alvin Ailey, Vanessa had been booted out of the High School for Performing Arts, the setting for Fame, which was about to start production, for generally being too badass even for the City. She was now deeply in love with a Blatino gang member from the Projects. That’s how she found herself in boarding at St. Stephen’s, an exile from her family, just like me.
My recollection is I was saved from being further exposed as a fraud by a disco hit kicking off on the pirate channel Capodistria, beamed from communist Yugoslavia, playing on the café’s TV. I would learn that Vanessa was perpetually wired into everything aural and visual in her atmosphere: “Honey, you gotta have eyes in the back of your head, and on the top, and on the sides, even under your chin, or the City will crush you like a bug. Serious! Never lower your guard. You never know what’s coming at you.”
No more than a couple of beats into the song, Vanessa responded with her street pantheress growl of medium-high approval: “Aaaooow! I love this! Turn it up!” She began dancing like nothing I’d ever experienced — not within the force field of my own being, only on stage or screen — utterly unaware, completely present with who was looking, the same way I navigated life’s currents.
I swayed, bopped my head, signaling a willingness to take this from verbal to physical. Vanessa took my left hand in her right as if it were her own and I’d been borrowing it for too long, pulling me out of myself into the orbit of her supernova whirlpool. Raising her left arm, she snapped her fingers in a single “crack!” that silenced the room. She dipped back, a bungee cord reaching its limit, and ricocheted back toward me.
I fumbled my next moves, struggling to interpret what was expected of me. She was inviting me to do the hustle — the real one, salsa/merengue to a disco beat, nothing like the White line dance from Saturday Night Fever — but thanks to my ignorance we collided and fell apart. Topping off my delighted humiliation — there is no such thing as embarrassment for natural performers — Vanessa deployed her nuclear laugh, beginning as a guttural chuckle in the back of her throat that rushed out her mouth like an operatic air-raid siren, scaling the volume up and up, till the smokey air in the Bar swirled with everyone’s mirth. She twisted 180 degrees and stumbled back two steps, as if the joke were so intense it knocked her sideways.
Over the next weeks, no longer myself but Vanessa’s moon, I learned to hustle as well as a White kid not raised in the complex rhythms of Black American and Island Latin music could. “Honey,” she’d say, “you need to see the Puerto Rican queens at Paradise Garage when they hustle! Like, don’t you dare go on the dancefloor.” Then, snapping her fingers in a question mark over my head and torso, “Aaaoooow. That shit’s fierce!”
The following summer, Mum and Dominic packed up the entire house and shipped it to a storage unit in New York while she and Dad bought a new place. For one last time, the dogs were crated and sedated, and the Expat Shuttle repatriated us to the hometown I didn’t know.
During my first semester at Trinity, lovesick for Oliver, homesick for Rome, I spent lunchtimes and many afternoons after school with Vanessa’s mother, Deloise — a fifties Beat poet and muse, shaved head, blue fingernail polish, lustrous ebony skin, stop-sign-red lipstick — who lived two blocks west of Trinity. She carried on my instruction in New York Blackness immersively: “Go on, child. Make yourself useful and hail us a cab.”
HE WHO LAUGHS LOUDEST MAKES OTHERS LAUGH, TOO.
What does that story have to do with victimhood? Am I hiding behind Vanessa’s skirts by using a version of “some of my best friends are Blacks” before I take apart Black racism, the same way Dave Chappelle begins his homophobic segments by mentioning his many gay friends — in other words, his house homos: personal shopper, publicists, interior designer, personal chef, hair and makeup team, and his agent’s second assistant, “what’s his name again, funny little bitch-assed faggot…” — and how he appreciates our horror stories, how much he envies our gloryholes, our baby oil, before stomping “the Alphabet People” down to the bottom of the social ladder with some nasty, illogical screed?
I don’t do hiding, much less skirts, unless they’re kilts.
The reason I began with Vanessa is because of that laugh of hers, a mix of genuine mirth and performative exaggeration. It had the power to turn a humiliating moment — when I fumbled what, in fairness to me, turned out to be a complex form of partner dancing that wasn’t just salsa and merengue, but also a brutalist tango with a smattering of early voguing — into a joke that everyone laughed along with, including me. Vanessa could make the phone book the funniest comic strip in the world with that laugh; she kicked it along a spectrum from appreciative smile to maximum guffaw with an expertise honed on the streets of New York. Everyone in that café laughed, no one harder than me, the humiliated one.
Watching Dave Chappelle’s Sticks & Stones for the first time, I was so appreciative of the fact that someone with a conversation-changing megaphone as loud and powerful as America’s well-intentioned, misguided mainstream media was breaking open the conversation about the tsunami of problems caused by gender-queer activists that were overwhelming the broader gay, lesbian, and legit transsexual community that I overlooked what else he was saying about us.
I re-watched the Alphabet People-related segments in both Sticks & Stones and his follow-up show The Closer a few times, as well as some random YouTube clips from other stand-up shows over the years. Much of Chappelle’s funniness — he’s never made me laugh — relies on his delivery and timing, and the fact he does a version of Vanessa’s laugh that transforms jokes that are particularly offensive into being funny. His entirely performative laugh — he cannot possibly find his own jokes funny enough to laugh at them after hundreds of rehearsals — likewise begins as a deeply guttural chuckle that reminds me of the cartoon dog Muttley’s snicker. And he pivots and falls away from the audience as if blown away by how funny it is, just like Vanessa.
Even though Chappelle is from Detroit, which is more of a porch culture, I’ve named that style of provoking contagious laughter the ‘stoop guffaw’; I associate it with long, sweltering summers in the City, when people socialized on stoops, many thousands of mini theaters with the audience on the steps watching rotating performers on the sidewalk, break dancing, rapping, gossiping, snap-dueling.
Anyone from a large metropolis with a healthy representation of Blacks recognizes the stoop guffaw and its variants as part of what Vanessa used to call “snapping,” best known in broader American culture as “Yo mama’s so (fat/ugly/slutty)…” jokes. Snapping is a duel using a mix of verbal, nonverbal vocal expressions and physical gestures.
We know from the earliest days of sitcoms that even canned laughter makes shows funnier to most people. A study by Current Biology put it this way:
The funniness of jokes is thus influenced by laughter. … What remains unclear is the underlying mechanism: are there effects of behavioral contagion, or of the perceived ‘approval’ which another’s laughter may signify? Laughter and humor are distinctly different phenomena, though the perception of both is influenced socially. The funniness of a joke can be affected by who tells it and by the cultural origins of the joke.
I’m particularly immune to behavioral contagion and groupthink because of a silver-lining benefit that probably comes from being raised as Piggy the Scapegoated Black Sheep living in the vestibule opposite the staircase on a separate floor from the rest of my family, which is every child’s first social group; how we learn to interact within that first group determines how we’ll handle broader society, starting with school.
I have such a revulsion of being part of a group, of participating in groupthink, that it affects me physically. It pushes me outside my comfort zone of being the emotionally self-sufficient loner who is safer outside the group than in it. Groups make me jittery; I have to fight the need to flee. If threatened, nine times out of ten my fight-or-flight instincts will make me stand my ground and fight, unless death or physical injury is a likely outcome of the conflict. However, if forced to socialize or normalize, my participate-or-evacuate instincts will have me heading for the nearest exit at the first opportunity. Oddly, I prefer living with other self-sufficient loners than alone, though, and with dogs — who doesn’t want to be surrounded by unconditional love?
I never want to fix that: I wouldn’t be able to scribble the sort of observational critique of society and culture that I aspire to, which strives for objectivity, fairness, honesty, and insightfulness, if I’m trapped by a group’s social religion. That means I’m not as susceptible as most to behavioral contagions like laughter. As a result, wannabe subversive comedians like Chappelle had better have something to say that I consider objective, fair, honest and insightful — I’m unlikely to be distracted by borrowed mirth.
In my view, Chappelle’s work rarely exhibits those qualities. There’s a distinct difference between being subversive and being a willfully offensive, aging bad boy reinforcing Black and straight prejudices and turning them into victimhood.
NO NARCISSIST QUITE LIKE THE MARTYRED BULLY
When I was writing the first of this group of Establishing Shot essays I looked up transcripts for both of Chappelle’s needlessly controversial Netflix shows. Stripped of his stoop guffaw and percussive delivery of words and punchlines, the transcripts read like the ravings of a man trapped by victimhood, resentment, cognitive dissonance, and paranoid delusions of persecution.
He begins his famously homomisiac segment in Stick and Stones — it’s not a phobia, a mental state involuntarily seized by fear; it’s a loathing of us, a ‘-misia’ — by defending Kevin Hart’s joke about how he would smash his son’s head with a dollhouse if he exhibited any signs of “homosexual behavior,” a.k.a. feminine behavior:
Ooh, the gay community was furious. And I don’t blame ’em. I got a lot of gay friends. And all of them, 100% of them, all have told me fuckin’ horror stories about the shit they had to go through just to be themselves. Crazy, crazy stories. And in all those stories, I gotta say, not one of them has ever mentioned anything like… their father smashing a fucking dollhouse over their head. ‘Cause, clearly, Kevin was joking. Think about it. You would have to buy this nigga a dollhouse to break it over his head in the first place. Does that sound right? Is anybody gonna do that?
Yes. First of all, the dollhouse is a metaphor representing a negative stereotype about gays being feminine boys who play with girls, therefore not real boys. Secondly, it’s expressing the rage and urge for violence that way too many fathers feel when they realize their sons will grow up to love other men, and likely not have much regard for gender norms. It’s personal for me: in addition to exiling me within the family and a litany of other abuses, my father almost killed me on two occasions. But don’t take that to mean I’m triggered by douchey crap like that; we’re all too accustomed to it to even blink.
Still, Chappelle succeeds in spinning Hart into being the victim by abusing his star power and the trust his audience places in his judgments. And down, down, down the social ladder we Alphabet People tumble.
My observation over years of trying to make the connection between the Black American and the LGBT experience is that Black victimhood addicts like Chappelle cannot accept that there is a group that is even more oppressed than Blacks. I know that feeling well. When I was still in the cocoon of my victimhood, as far as I was concerned nobody’s suffering was quite like mine, nobody’s childhood was as miserable.
Yet even Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panthers, acknowledged that gays are the most oppressed group:
We have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society.
After having transformed an oppressive, homomisiac parent like Kevin Hart into a victim, Chappelle turns his wand on himself with this story about being asked by a woman in a network’s Standards & Practices department to stop being so overtly homophobic:
She said, “Because, David, there’s no way… that you can ever say the word… ‘faggot’ on our network.”
I didn’t know I did anything wrong. I didn’t try to defend myself. I said, “All right. Fuck it, I’ll take it out. Have a good afternoon.”
And as I was leaving, it occurred to me. “Hey. Hey, Renée, quick question. It’s just a question. Seriously, I wanna know. Like, wh-why is it… why is it that… that I can say the word “nigger” with impunity… but I can’t say the word “faggot”?”
And she said, “Because, David, you are not gay.”
I said, “Well, Renée… I’m not a nigger either.”
This is considered the most explosive punchline in the show; it makes absolutely no sense. I’m not interested in arguments about “nuance,” about what the N-word symbolizes that I can’t possibly understand as a White man, despite being the only one in the conversation who is a member of the only community in America that is still oppressed, objectively speaking.
I understand the argument that using a pejorative represents ongoing oppression; ‘queer’ used to be a pejorative, too, but now it’s a whole theory you can major in at a $65,000-per-year liberal arts college in shitty Northeastern weather. I think the reasoning of gender-queer activists is as ridiculous as Chappelle’s, which is why I never tack the Q onto the end of LGBT, and never call another gay man '“queer,” no matter how he identifies — our greater good is greater than he is.
All using the N-word is doing is supporting Chappelle’s unjustified vision of himself as oppressed. Judging by the reaction of the audience — a Black man actually rose to his feet after “I’m not a nigger either” and ran toward the stage with his arms wide, as if to embrace the Holy Spirit — he deftly jiujitsued his homomisia into structural Black victimhood, and magicked Renée into being an un-Woke racist at the same time. The status quo must be maintained at all costs, no matter how illogical, or the fictions that support a social group’s martyrdom collapse.
The vast majority of Whites wince when they hear the N-word, especially those who can afford theater tickets and Netflix subscriptions. We don’t like it; we don’t understand why Blacks like Chappelle insist on using it; and we wish they would stop. No amount of convoluted explanation will vest it with mystical meaning — I’ve heard it all, it doesn't stick, so please stop.
There’s no mystery: using the N-word on purpose is to keep the stigmata inflicted by the fraught-beyond-fraught concept of universal White racism and supremacy alive in the present, to keep Blacks cozy in that safety blanket of victimhood. The reality of the White gaze is we that perceive people like Chappelle as infantilizing and diminishing Blacks unfairly, unnecessarily.
Chappelle is clearly caught in a cognitive-dissonant trap, which is apparent not from any convoluted critical race theory nuance about the N-word, but from the subtext of segments like this one from his even more homomisiac follow-up Netflix special, The Closer:
You think I hate gay people and what you’re really seeing is that I’m jealous of gay people. I’m jealous, I’m not the only Black person, that feels this way.
There are few more manipulative lies that straight men tell to justify their revulsion for homosexuality than “I’m jealous of gay people.” Nobody is jealous of gay people; revolted by their attraction to us and latent homosexual tendencies, maybe. But we know where we stand, especially with Blacks.
Charles Blow, the gay/bisexual New York Times Opinion columnist and Robespierre of Wokeism, successfully shut down the investigation into what exactly Pete Buttigieg’s “Black problem” was during the 2020 Democratic primary in one of his more shameful pieces, entitled Stop Blaming Black Homophobia for Pete Buttigieg’s Problems! — yes, with an exclamation point. That’s how real Black homophobia was for Mayor Pete: he was fucked over by a giant exclamation mark shoved up him without even spit for lube by another gay man more intent on preserving the supremacy of Black victimhood than trying to break a concrete ceiling a mile thick with a viable gay presidential candidate.
What else could his “Black problem” have been? He’s the nicest, most decent man in politics anywhere in the world, so nice and decent that gender-queer-activist victimhood addicts added to the pile-on, claiming he wasn’t a real gay, but rather a homonormative Eagle Scout who only wanted to assimilate. Oh, those Qs: so edgy, so avant-garde. Am I right?
Don’t take it from me about Black homophobia. This is Human Rights Watch’s map of countries that still outlaw homosexuality:
Lest we dismiss Africa for whatever reason — despite Black Americans using ‘African’/’Afro’ all the time — bear in mind that the dots around the Caribbean represent Jamaica and other former slave island states with Black majorities, with the exception of Guayana, which has slightly more South Asians than Blacks.
They still lynch us from cranes in Iran. They throw us off buildings all over the Middle East. Fathers and brothers kill sons and siblings for dishonoring the family. We’re hunted down for sport in countries like Tanzania, where someone like Dave Chappelle is carried around on shoulders, goats slaughtered in his honor.
After being kneecapped by BLM in South Bend for “not doing enough” — whatever that means — following a Black man’s murder by the police, Buttigieg was finally taken out of the race by Black church mamas in South Carolina, who admitted they couldn’t vote for a gay man, much as they liked and admired him.
Where there are Bibles, there is systemic discrimination against homosexuals. Everyone knows that, especially a gay man like Blow, so shackled by Black homophobia that he married a woman and had children. Nevertheless, as he has done way too many times by now, Blow abused his bully pulpit at the most powerful and influential media outlet in the world because, in the interest of preserving the my-suffering-is-worse-yours illusion, Blackness must cancel gayness, especially if the victim in question is White.
DRIVING MISS DAVE
The next thing Chappelle says in that Closer segment — before he goes on to twist himself into a victim of Whiteness after he threatened to assault a White gay man in a restaurant in Texas, whom he provoked into calling the cops, which is apparently a “bitch-assed” thing to do if you’re threatened by a furious superstar in a public space when you should know to take it outside and duke it out like a man — reveals his genuine puzzlement at something that proves my point about remaining attached to victimhood:
We Blacks, we look at the gay community and we go “God damn it! Look how well that movement is going.” Look how well you are doing. And we’ve been trapped in this predicament for hundreds of years. How the fuck are you making that kind of progress?
I very much doubt that’s what Blacks think when they look at the gay community; it’s clearly a question that Chappelle is asking himself, even as he adds another frayed square to his victimhood’s safety quilt, and subtextually reinforces his homomisia in the same thought.
The reason gays have been so successful at moving on is something neither he nor the vast majority of modern American Blacks seem to be able to comprehend: Nobody wants to be a victim if they don’t have to be. Real systemic oppression at the level that we have suffered is an almost intolerable burden. We still are still shackled to mental slavery, as Bob Marley called it; every time I say “I’m gay” or something else that marks me by my shameful sexuality, my fight-or-flight instincts yank me away from saying it, or chastises me after the fact, What have you done? What will they think?
I’m deliberately quoting a Jamaican with “mental slavery”; it’s one of the most aggressively homophobic Black cultures in the Americas. And the real, real truth is that the only Blacks still alive who truly, experientially know what that mental slavery is like are those who lived under Jim Crow laws in the former Slave States in the South. Chappelle is from Detroit.
We gays of a certain age used to call each other “fag” and “faggot” all the time. When you or someone you’re talking about did a “bitch-assed” thing, you were a “queen,” a term that RuPaul has kept alive. Now it specifically refers to a fem-presenting man or a female impersonator.
But something happened in the mid-aughts as we gained more acceptance, as the fear of being who we are, of being beaten to death while we were having sex in the bushes slipped away. There wasn’t a campaign from HRC/GLAAD along the lines of “Gurl, show some self-respect! Stop using the F-word!” or any kind of group consensus. We simply stopped, en masse.
I’ve never heard any Black I know use the N-word; I can’t imagine Vanessa even thinking it about herself, her brother, or her son. But I only know Blacks who share my social rank. Having written that, I remember that I did date a GenZ Brazilian American a couple of years ago, during the monthslong BLM unrest, who said, “I use it all the time. I’m always nigger this, nigger that.” I shut that down by the authority vested in me as a daddy: “Not around me you won’t.”
Chappelle yearns for “the old-school gays,” the ones he could call “faggot” and they would laugh with him, especially with that contagious, performative stoop guffaw. He misses a time when no amount of straight homophobia/misia could match our own self-loathing, when we weren’t as “brittle” as we are now, to use his word. I’m calling projection on that one; we’re still plenty tough, it’s just that we’ve finally found self-respect to replace the archetypal “self-hating gay,” and enough empowerment from social acceptance to break the manacles of gay shame.
It’s Chappelle and those keeping the Black victimhood narrative alive who are the brittle ones. Shame: old-school Blacks used to be so cool.
Let me borrow Chappelle’s own car metaphor, with which he framed his first “transphobic” remarks in Sticks & Stones, an animated version of which is embedded at the end of the post, and use it to describe how I see American Black grievance versus the reality of the White gaze, and where Blacks really are in this country, not where too many of them imagine themselves to be; otherwise, the other ~43% surveyed by Rasmussen Reports in February would also think it’s okay to be White.
FADE IN:
INT. MERCEDES MAYBACH — DAY — TRAVELING
TA-NEHISI COATES is in the back next to COLIN KAEPERNICK, both focused intently on their phones, texting. CHARLES BLOW is in the passenger seat, enraged, tearing up pages of classic children’s picture books after scrawling big Xs on them in a Sharpie. DAVE CHAPPELLE is driving while wearing augmented-reality goggles, which make it seem as if he’s sniffing the air around him, like Stevie Wonder at the piano.
KAEP (reacting to phone): Motherfucker!
COATES (not looking up): What now?
KAEP (tapping furiously): Nike won’t change the swoosh logo. I expressly told them it was triggering for me: reminds me of all the answers I didn’t get right on racially biased quizzes in school. Now my underwear collab with Victoria’s Secret drop is totally ruined!
He throws the phone against the back of the driver’s seat, puts his head in his hands and sobs.
BLOW: Rapist!
COATES/CHAPPELLE (together): It was consensual!
BLOW: Not you! It’s Jack! He’s clearly taking Jill up the hill to rape her! Everyone knows that “fetch a pale of water” is a metonym for White rape culture and forced pregnancy! She’s even barefoot!
CHAPPELLE: Why you such a bitch-assed faggot?
BLOW: Homophobic trope!
COATES: How can you see where you’re going with those goggles?
CHAPPELLE: They let me see things as they really are.
KAEP (wiping tears): We there yet? I have to pee.
COATES: Use an empty from the minibar.
Kaepernick reaches for a HALF-EMPTY BOTTLE of premium cognac and downs the remainder in one swig.
COATES: No! No-no-no-no-no!
KAEP: What now?
COATES: I’m going over casting ideas with J.J. for ‘Black Braveheart.’ He wants Will Smith. He’s already calling it the Smithessaince. N-word, please.
KAEP (unzipping, whipping it out): Sounds solid to me.
COATES (looking up, to Kaep) What? Ew! Just no. (re: Kaep’s dick) Dude, you sure you’re Black?
BLOW: Racist trope!
KAEP: Fuck you! And stop looking at my dick. I’m pee shy.
COATES: You put the black-eyed pea back in penis, huh?
BLOW: Oh, snap!
Kaepernick starts to sob again.
CHAPPELLE: Like you can talk, Coates, kneeling and shining Jew Jew Abram’s shoes so they all nice and shiny when he walks all over you.
KAEP: What’s wrong with kneeling?
COATES: You sure you’re Black?
As the bickering continues, we pull up and out of the car to reveal:
EXT. MANSION IN BEL AIR. CIRCULAR DRIVEWAY
The Maybach endlessly circles a joyously splashing fountain. As we pull away, we see a MASSIVE PARTY in progress — people of all races, creeds, genders, sexuality, ages, clothing styles — stretching from the mansion to the horizon and beyond.
BLOW (V.O.): White supremacy!
CHAPPELLE (V.O.): Blow Job, how you get to be such a bitch-assed faggot?
COATES (V.O.): Word.
P.O.V. OUTER SPACE — AMERICA
continues to bop and cheer to HIP-HOP BEATS as the party spreads across the entire nation and the rest of the world.
KAEP (V.O.): We there yet?
As the BEAT DROPS we
FADE TO BLACK.
THE THIRD SLAP
In Sticks & Stones Chappelle says, “the only difference between a poor Black person and a poor White person is that a poor White person feels like it’s not supposed to be happening to them.” This would be mildly funny if it were coming from someone else, but from Chappelle it’s a reinforcement of specious Woke doctrines of White supremacy and privilege.
As someone whose opinions are so highly regarded that he’s paid obscene amounts of money for them, despite the fact they’re not particularly insightful, much less subversive, Chappelle recertifies Black views forged in the South and applied to all Whites, and keeps us on the back foot, unable to speak for the Black experience.
My observation is that paranoid Black racists like Charles Blow have little to no contact with Whites growing up; Blow was born and raised in a small town in Northern Louisiana that is ~98% Black, and went to an HBCU half an hour down the road. My estimation is he didn’t have any meaningful experience of Whites until he was in his early to mid-twenties, after his neural pathways were set, and his mind’s operating system was written with buggy coding corrupted by rural Southern narratives about all Whites being the same. We’re oppressors and slavers so evil we can’t accept the “real truth” about ourselves, who James Baldwin deemed “insane” because we didn’t kneel to his interpretation of us. That corrupted, hopelessly biased operating system acts as Blow’s interface with reality, and determines the way he interprets information and events.
We’re paying a heavy price for Blow’s cognitive dissonance, and BLM’s, and Roxane Gay’s, and Dave Chappelle’s, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’, and…
Rather than being called out for being the unworldly, bigoted hick that he is, Blow’s views are validated and promoted by the New York Times, the clarion of Anglo-American Yankeedom, my natal culture, which also incubated and nourished Wokeism at our top-tier schools under the aegis of our cultural abhorrence for inherited privilege, casteism and tyranny. “Don’t tread on me” is from a Revolutionary War flag, not Das Capital. The Woke only think they’re radical “trained Marxists,” when they’re merely being good ol’ Yankees, like everyone else in this country. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
The only true oppression is the religions — spiritual, social, and systemic — that we are both raised with and later adopt as adults, which include Wokeism and its three heads. As the old religions die out, suffocated by their own nonsense and immorality, they’re replaced by new fictions that help natural-born group-thinkers make sense of a world that they’re convinced is more mysterious, dangerous and unknowable than it really is; they need those augmented-reality goggles running simulations created by other people to make sense of it for them.
The third slap that knocked me out of my addiction to victimhood, and built a new comfort zone for me free of the shackles of mental slavery to historical abuse, was Wokeism’s own cult of victimhood. Piggy the Scapegoated Black Sheep is allergic to groupthink; to being like anyone else; to anything that compromises my outsiderness.
The very real abuse and oppression that I struggled under for half a century, and the very real PTSD that resulted from it, has been so cheapened by the Woke Cerberus ravaging America — tearing apart careers and opposing viewpoints; eating logic and reason, science, races, childhoods; canceling artworks, ethnicities and cultures — that I couldn’t live with the chronic-victim aspect of myself anymore.
Just as ‘faggot’ dropped away from gay culture without fanfare or discussion when gays achieved a measure of emancipation, my new sense of self — the adult version of the original luminous child I was born as — booted Piggy the Scapegoated Black Sheep out in disgust, like an outdated suit that no longer fit. What was I thinking when I wore it, again and again, year after year for half a century? I love getting to that point with every unhealthy relationship; that’s the moment you know it’s finally over. Case closed.
I’m still aware of my victimhood; I wouldn’t be writing this if it weren’t still in the archives, far from being dusty and cobwebbed quite yet, but I’m using it for purposes other than ruling my emotions and social interactions, namely as references for this new branch of my work. I use Piggy, he doesn’t use me.
I break my own glasses now, or lose them. But I’m well prepared: I keep half a dozen spares on my desk. I simply reach for a new pair, and move on.
DAVE CHAPPELLE’S LGBT CAR RIDE
STATEMENT OF IDEOLOGICAL ALIGNMENT
I usually write something about my ultra-liberal apartisan political leanings at the end of a post like this one that challenges social narratives that are embraced in completely natural groupthink. Rather than explain myself subjectively, this is where Pew Research’s Political Topology Quiz places me: