Dave Chappelle s Lutheran stand against cancel culture – spiked
Chappelle s comedy has an increasingly Lutheran vibe. Here I stand; I can do no other. He mocks the fact that Caitlyn Jenner was given a Woman of the Year award Her first year as a woman& Never even had a period. Ain t that something? not to stoke a Twitter fire or to upset the Jenners, but because he truly is amazed that a biological male beat every bitch in Detroit, she s better than all of you . He rails against cancel culture not because he wants your sympathy or because he s worried about losing his platforms here he is on Netflix, after all, his sixth special for the streaming giant but because he has to. It s the truth as he understands it forcing its way from his soul into his routine. On rapper DaBaby, who survived the controversy of shooting a black man in 2018 but was cancelled for making homophobic comments in 2021, Chappelle said: In our country, you can shoot and kill a nigga, but you better not hurt a gay person s feelings.
That line contains more insight into the moral perversions of cancel culture than anything I ve read in a thousand thinkpieces. It nails the hierarchical politics of identitarianism, in which the emotions of very-online upper middle-class queers count for more than the literal life of a young black man shot in a Walmart. It captures the madness of elevating pricked feelings above all else, where the cult of self-esteem leads to a situation in which being wounded by words is considered a graver sufferance than being wounded by weapons. And it speaks to Chappelle s implacable anger that for all their anti-racist posturing, the white, liberal virtue warriors of the 21st century still take a cavalier view of black life.