I was in a bad state for about a week after The Closer. Pissed, disappointed, confused, watching how many Black folks, including some I know and love deeply, puffed their chests out alongside comedian Dave Chappelle and echoed his conviction that “the alphabet people” were being given something—kindness? Civil rights?—that “the Blacks” were not receiving with the same ease.

Where did the belief that queerness or trans identity makes someone any less of a n-gger—or a n-gga, for that matter—originate? That Black LGBTQ+ people don’t experience racism and the phobias aligned with other parts of their identities?

See, my people are sensitive, and rightfully so. We’ve been bruised and battered from every angle. Racism has rubbed us so raw that a symbol of progress for “other” marginalized groups can easily feel like an affront.

It’s one thing to, say, challenge immigration policies that make it so that white folks can safely and legally seek asylum here, while people from Black nations are deported and worse. But you cannot pit “the Blacks” against “the alphabet people,” nor can you separate “the Blacks” from “women”—or “the bitches,” as Chappelle calls us. Many of us are both, or more, and when you try to separate us, sort us, you feed “the Black ass lie.”

Black Americans are not solidly unified around many things aside from the desire to be free—and we don’t all agree on what freedom looks like. We don’t have a singular political agenda, nor a governing document that lines up our shared values. Even within the massive force that we call “the Black church” there are strikingly different directives about how we do, and should, live.

However, I will argue—as I have for the last 20 years and will until my last breath—that aside from craving liberation, Black folks are only single-minded in believing strongly that Black men are disenfranchised by the proverbial system and that our people have an obligation to care for them. Black conservatives, Black feminists, and nearly everyone in between speak seriously of the plight of the Black man; we may not all agree on how to address said plight, but we agree that it exists.

But “the Black man” is too often coded language for “the cishet Black man” and the degree to which any and all other groups of Black people are suffering—that is up for debate. This could just be chalked up to sexism and various other-phobias, but I think it’s deeper than that. Many of us hold the biggest space for our men (and sometimes our boys, but rarely at the expense of the men) in our collective hearts because we feel like they need it more than anyone else.

Black America’s version of “the big lie”—“the Black ass lie”—is that Black men have it worse than any other group of Black people. In her best-selling Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, scholar and Crunk Feminist Collective cofounder Brittney Cooper writes, “Black men grow up believing and moving through the world politically as though they have it the toughest, as though their pain matters most, as though Black women cannot possibly be feeling anything similar to the dehumanization and disrespect they have felt.” There is little to no consideration of what those of us who are harmed by misogyny, and maybe hurt even worse, might endure. “That it might, in many cases, be worse for us,” laments Cooper, “seems to many men a preposterous supposition.”

I.

“Anyone see that Ray Rice tape? I can’t stop watching it. It’s fucking awful. It’s the most violent thing I’ve seen happen to a woman that was shot in color. Really fucking bad. If I could’ve froze time at that moment and gave Ray Rice some advice, I don’t think there’s any way possible I’d be like, ‘You should punch her in the face.’ That’s a fucking terrible idea. At the same time, I also believe she shouldn’t have rushed him. What the fuck? You can’t beat him. Don’t rush a motherfucker that’s trained to stiff-arm people in the clutch. He’s gonna get the upper hand.” —Deep in the Heart of Texas: Dave Chappelle Live at Austin City Limits (2017)

Black people are not wrong to want to love our men and love them hard. Black men and boys are uniquely disenfranchised on account of their identities—but they are not alone in having such an experience. Furthermore, their oppression does not absolve the men themselves of the power of patriarchy, and it does not prevent them from exerting that power over women and LGBTQ+ people, particularly Black ones.

Black women’s lives are largely colored by these lopsided loyalties. From girlhood, we see Black men as our greatest hope in this world, as both fierce kings for us to serve and vulnerable princes for us to protect. As the old saying goes, many of us love our sons, and raise our daughters, and we often raise them to think twice before ever dropping a dime on one, even if he’s harmed us greatly. We are encouraged to accept the bare minimum in our romances and express gratitude to be able to love a brother at all—and, somehow, this is supposed to be in the service of a greater Black good.

But our thing with Black men is not a reciprocal arrangement, and some of them will be quick to tell you that they never asked for this. The average Black man was not raised to see himself as obligated to the women of our race, certainly not to queer people or the other bitches; his obligation is to himself, to get as free as he can be. Over time, we ended up committed to supporting him and his freedom, not ours.

As a result of “the Black ass lie,” identifying as a Black feminist is akin to identifying as a hater of Black men in the eyes of many, and disloyalty to Black men is one of the greatest crimes a Black woman can commit. It doesn’t matter what a Black male comedian, rapper, politician, or scholar says about Black women, his love for his people is unlikely to be challenged. But to be a Black woman who is for the women? Expect to have your politics weaponized against you, to be told that you are what holds us back, you are what divides us as a people.

Yet, even the most radical Black feminists have typically made plain their commitment to standing in solidarity with our brothers, while challenging the power that patriarchy affords them over us. In the Combahee River Collective Statement—the 1977 manifesto written by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier—the importance of building community alongside Black men is underscored early within the pages of the grounding document. “Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course don’t need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors.” While the statement’s authors were lesbians, they spoke plainly to the complicated relationship between Black feminists who love Black men, romantically or otherwise: “We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.”

Black women have not been particularly outspoken about Chappelle’s treatment of us in his work. Before daring to wade into this mess of a media cycle, I had been too badly burned by reactions to my criticism of actual sex offenders like Bill Cosby (whose conviction for aggravated indecent sexual assault was overturned on a technicality) and R. Kelly to risk what would come of triggering Chappelle’s sensitive audience. I suspect part of that has to do with the ways we’re socialized to make space for our men to speak, particularly through art. In the 1990s, civil rights activist (and elder) C. Delores Tucker was made the scourge of young Black people everywhere for daring to stand up to hip-hop, setting the tone for what Black women who dared to critique “the culture” could expect. While the advent of social media has given us outspoken Black bitches more of a platform than we could have ever hoped for in the past, it’s also made it easier than ever to harass and demean us.

“We don’t even have to ask Black women to sacrifice for our survival,” the author Mychal Denzel Smith wrote in Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education. “They do so without formal request. In turn, we dismiss the concerns of Black womanhood as trivial or divisive, failing to see Black women’s pain as real or in need of our attention.”

Smith acknowledges what is accomplished with the failure to see Black women as victims of nearly any sort, regardless of all that we’re up against—which includes devastating rates of rape and domestic abuse, topics that Chappelle has often mined for laughs: “We haven’t been neglecting Black women as substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and minds—through some collective Black male brain fart. We’ve done so because we have come to believe in patriarchy and male dominance as the realization of freedom.”

II.

“Hollywood is no place for moral absolutism. You know what I mean? We must never forget that R. Kelly peed on a 15-year-old girl. [laughing] And he also wrote ‘I Believe I Can Fly.’ [laughing] Same guy, same lifetime. [laughing] If I showed you that video of him peeing on that girl, and scored it to ‘I Believe I Can Fly,’ you’d be torn.” —The Bird Revelation (2017)

A famous Chappelle’s Show sketch mocks the infamous tape of R. Kelly urinating on an underage Black girl that first circulated in Black barbershops, over bootleg tables, and on porn sites in 2002. In a “video” for a song called “(I Wanna) Pee on You,” Chappelle instead casts adult women; instead of satirizing Kelly as an alleged predator—we already knew he’d married Aaliyah when she was 15—he’s merely mocked for an unhygienic kink. (R. Kelly was acquitted of child pornography charges in 2008, but this September he was convicted of sexual exploitation of a child and sex trafficking, among other crimes (and whose victims include Aaliyah) and faces more child pornography charges related to the 2008 case. He has maintained his innocence.)

It is hard for me, as a woman in her 30s, to think about the reactions I saw adult Black men, and women, have to the Kelly tape back then and for many years after. To me, it seems that the bit and the positive reception to it spoke volumes about the inability of Chappelle, and most people, to have empathy for Black girls and women. We wouldn’t laugh—side by side with white folks—about any of the instances of Black men or boys being harmed by state violence. How could Black women be asked to laugh at rape jokes alongside, essentially, the same folks who’d be allowed to rape us with impunity? It’s “the Black ass lie.”

Scholar and sister-friend Brittany Brathwaite dropped a gem in a recent conversation: “There is this communal grief over the death of Black men, but not over the rape of Black women. People get so upset that they have to miss work, because they read about a man they never met getting killed in a city they’ve never been to.” But when it comes to crimes against Black women’s bodies, she says, “the cognitive dissonance is astounding.” The airing of a two-part, 10-hour docuseries dedicated to decades of his sexual violence should have had the nation in a choke hold à la Roots.

If Black women and girls cannot summon the enthusiastic support of our own folks, you can easily guess what sort of solidarity we enjoy from white folks and non-Black people of color, many of whom gladly benefit from the fact that at least they aren’t Black and female, but also from the amount of labor Black women perform on behalf of “diversity” causes. 8:46, the acclaimed short special from Chappelle released during the “racial reckoning” of summer 2020, was recorded during the season of protests inspired by the death of Breonna Taylor (beginning in May; note that Taylor was killed back in March) but he managed to talk about police violence for nearly half an hour without naming a single Black woman who’d fallen victim to it. He did make time to drag a right-wing darling who shall not be named (stop platforming these people!) and rapper Azealia Banks, nodding to when the latter made blog headlines in 2020 after claiming she and Chappelle had sex (“I’ll tell like Azealia Banks, I’ll tell,” he vows as a punch line).

Cooper suggests that “among Black men and Black women, perhaps there is a gender empathy gap.” She cites research that finds that women in general receive “inadequate” treatment for various forms of pain and theorizes that the ramifications are broader-reaching for Black women: “Black men frequently don’t acknowledge our vulnerability, don’t seem to think we need defending, and don’t feel a political responsibility to hold Black women (who aren’t their mothers or sisters or daughters) up and honor them.”

The erasure of Black bitches murdered by the state reminded me of the polarizing efforts to center us in the anti-police-violence movement sparked by the death of Missouri teen Michael “Mike” Brown in 2014. Though many of the most visible young organizers were Black women and/or LGBTQ+ people, there were others who felt that acknowledging how these populations fare at the hands of the police distracted from “the bigger picture.” I took many trips to Ferguson to cover the protests, and I was always struck by the presence of Black trans women. I knew, and I knew they knew, that the community would never have shown up for them in the same numbers. Indeed, some of the people marching for Mike Brown would have gladly participated in violence against those bitches. And until the deaths of Taylor and Sandra Bland, it would have been easy for many to believe that Black women aren’t victims of police violence at all. “The Black ass lie” finds us able to focus only on one target.

Despite Chappelle’s shortcomings with regard to understanding and reflecting the experiences of Black women and LGBTQ+ people, those of all races consider him to be an important Black voice. Watching Chappelle’s Show is essentially as close to reading critical race theory as the average American white boy will likely ever get. People go to him for profound racial insights; sometimes he delivers, other times he is weighed down by how little he seems to think of Black people who aren’t what he’d consider men. If we can’t challenge him to think a bit more deeply about certain urgent issues, that has profound ramifications. And, at least for some of us bitches, it hurts like shit. Who doesn’t want to laugh at a Dave Chappelle joke?

But until he started making the trans community his favorite punching bag, we didn’t talk much about Chappelle’s misogyny and homophobia. When critics spoke of the comic, it was typically just to gush over how brilliant he is, how absolutely sharp the racial lens of the guy behind “3rd World Girls Gone Wild.”

In the gorgeous “If He Hollers, Let Him Go,” a National Magazine award finalist essay, the writer Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is among the chorus: “Dave Chappelle is without a doubt his generation’s smartest comic.” Citing his upbringing around “Jewish kids, Black kids, and Vietnamese immigrants,” she credits the comic with using “these experiences to become America’s consul and translator for all things racial. More than any comic of his generation, he lanced the boil of how race works and also prodded at how nuanced race had become.”

It might be incredible that someone could compel such praise as a racial translator, a spokesperson for his people while having such a shitty lens on gender and sexuality. Alas, what more can you expect when the Black man’s needs are Black needs, the Black man’s plight is the Black plight, but when it comes to the Black bitches? We’re on our own. We have ourselves and sometimes some of the other bitches to call upon. That’s due in part to “the Black ass lie.”

Chappelle both feeds the myth and uses it to protect himself. In 2017’s The Age of Spin: Dave Chappelle Live at the Hollywood Palladium, he tells of a young white woman confronting him about the way he leverages his racial identity to wave off accusations of misogyny: “Bitch, how the fuck are you going to yell at a Black man about discrimination?” His great intellect does not lead him down a road in which he considers how a young Black woman who shares his heckler’s views might experience being a both/and; instead, he again uses it to trick audiences out of thinking Black men can participate in patriarchy. This is a cruel, cruel joke on the bitches, particularly the Black bitches: all of us Negroes who aren’t Black cishet men.

Many things can be true at once, and we struggle to recognize that. That Black men have always been and continue to be profiled, stereotyped, and mistreated based on pervasive mythology and that there are Black men among us—not the majority, of course not—who are abusive and violent and that sometimes those men are ones we really love and that, because the majority of the violence committed by those individuals will be inflicted on other Black people, it is a Black concern. “Men have always been violent” and “men of all races rape” are not reasons for us to ignore that Black women face higher rates of sexual assault, domestic violence, and murder than most other groups of women in this country.

Chappelle uses the fact that he’s a Black guy, a King of Oppression, to escape criticism for his jokes that harm groups to which he does not belong. In the process, he both emphasizes his own identity as the most marginalized of them all and pretends that Black women and LGBTQ+ folks don’t get their asses kicked from every angle. Yet, a good number of us are inclined to go give him cover. “We won’t let you cancel Dave Chappelle” seemed like the rallying cry of a movement for about two weeks—I fully expected T-shirts.

Part of the reason that so-called cancel culture is upsetting to Black folks is that we are used to having things—and people—taken away from us under unreasonable circumstances. When Chappelle dangles the idea that someone is trying to silence him, which he’s been doing consistently since at least 2017, he’s toying with one of the most sensitive ancestral memories: that a Black man is being snatched away from us. We don’t take kindly to that shit at all because we love our men and boys, and we will not lose them if we can help it. Chappelle doesn’t simply suggest that this movement to silence the outspoken will do him in; in 2017’s Equanimity, he threatens to quit comedy over it. Shut the fuck up or we’re gonna lose a good Black man is what many of us heard.

Yet famous Black men are rarely canceled. That’s because they benefit more than any other group of Black men from “the Black ass lie”; when we see one of them being in any sort of trouble, Black folks swoop in to protect them regardless of the circumstances, because we are thinking of all the Black men and boys that have been snatched from us for no reason.

When a beloved brother faces allegations of violence, particularly against women, we are reminded of the Black men and boys who were taken away from us forever because of false accusations of inappropriate behavior, and we think of the racist propaganda designed to cast Black men as brutes and sexual terrorists. We’re thinking of Emmett Till, of Trayvon Martin, of Ahmaud Arbery; of so many men and boys murdered because they represented a dangerous threat to white womanhood.

III.

“You see that shit on rush hour traffic? They beat a Black woman’s ass. This woman didn’t even do anything wrong. It’s fucked up. It was so fucked up, it didn’t even go to court. The city of L.A. just gave that woman $1.5 million for her pain and suffering. That is not bad, considering that’s the same amount of money that Marcos Maidana made to fight Floyd Mayweather the second time. And this woman obviously hasn’t trained a day in her life. You can see it on the tape. She didn’t come to fight. Her guards were low. She was taking a lot of shots.” —The Age of Spin (2017)

Just as Chappelle admits in The Age of Spin to admiring O.J. Simpson as well as to believing that Simpson murdered two people, O.J. Simpson did not have Black America’s support because people believed he was innocent; it was a combination of apathy for the victims (hey, we’ve got centuries of history being maimed and murdered by a group of people that never faces consequences, what do you expect to happen to our hearts over time?) and the instinctive refusal to let go of a beloved Black man. It’s the same lack of empathy—though under very different circumstances, that allows Chappelle and others to lament not the harm that Kevin Hart’s history of homophobia might have caused—to Black gay boys in particular!—but, instead, to grieve his fellow comedian’s loss of the opportunity to host the 2019 Oscars.

Not only do we not cancel famous Black men, many of us seem incapable of or unwilling to truly deal with what they have done to beg the conversation about supposed cancellation in the first place. Refusing to believe what “they” (read: the system, white folks) say about our men also leaves us refusing to hear what victims are saying, or to think of their humanity with the same weight we give that of the accused.

The Black reaction to O.J. Simpson was the perfect storm of a lot of things, including our many issues around white women and Black men (the history of lies, violence, and racial terror on white women’s part, the boundary crossed by the men). But when the alleged victim is Black, the calls for racial solidarity on behalf of the accused are still clearly heard, and heeded.

Chris Brown’s abuse of Rihanna spurned countless debates among us over whether the assault that became public was an attack or a fight between two people; once the image of the Barbadian singer’s brutalized face halted that route of defense (though some said she simply lost the fight), Brown was cast as a troubled young man in need of our sympathy, not criticism. A subsequent girlfriend would also allege domestic violence, pictures of him physically intimidating her would become a meme. Brown has never become the level of mainstream star he was once poised to be, but he has remained successful on the R&B charts.

Kanye West said slavery was a choice, wore blue contacts as a grown-ass adult Black man and once rapped, “My bitch make your bitch look like Precious,” using the title character from the heartbreaking 2009 film to imply that his (white) woman was so fine, she makes (Black) bitches look fat, Black(er), (and thus) ugly by comparison. As long as he can find his way to a gospel choir, any real meaningful reckoning with his actions will remain elusive, even if the critique might have made him grow.

When Tory Lanez allegedly shot Megan Thee Stallion’s feet as she walked away from him, scores of young Black people took to social media to defend him; completely absent from most of the talk over DaBaby’s controversial behavior last summer was the fact that he also brought Lanez out as a surprise guest during his Rolling Loud Miami set in July, seemingly to troll the “WAP” rapper (the appearance violated the restraining order obtained by Megan against Lanez, who was charged with assault and weapons possession following the July 2020 incident; Lanez, who awaits trial, has pleaded not guilty). Need I mention the Black public’s support of Bill Cosby and R. Kelly? All the bitches within me are tired.

We lose so much when we silence valid critiques of art, and especially when that art has the potential to do harm. Despite the protestations of generations of artists who have argued against the possibility of such a thing, art can hurt. Would Chappelle’s most fervent supporters, particularly the ones flying the “free speech” banner, be comfortable if Netflix started streaming The Birth of a Nation (the original racist one) or signed a big deal with a white comedian who shared Chappelle’s love for the N-word? And how should people who feel targeted by a piece of art respond if not by saying, “I don’t like this shit”?

IV.

“Sometimes, the funniest thing to say is mean. You know what I mean? It’s a tough position to be in. So I say a lot of mean things, but you guys got to remember. I’m not saying it to be mean. I’m saying it because it’s funny.” —The Bird Revelation (2017)

That isn’t to say that Chappelle isn’t scraping up against some important truths. When he asks why is it that DaBaby faced more severe consequences for using homophobic language than he did for a shooting incident in a North Carolina Walmart that left a 19-year-old Black man dead, he’s almost on to something: “You can shoot and kill a n-gga but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings.” (Charges against DaBaby related to the shooting were dropped.)

Put that way, it sounds like a reasonably maddening dilemma. But one that implies that there are usually such consequences for Black men’s homophobia—or anyone else’s, for that matter. If it were the case that the average person could be held accountable for antigay rhetoric or behavior, then it wouldn’t remain so present in the lives of queer people. There wouldn’t be kids and adults killing themselves because it’s too often socially permissible—in chuches, in schools, on the internet, in workplaces, in comedy clubs—to make gay people feel like shit for being gay.

According to filmmaker and humorist Amber Phillips, the stakes are just too high for someone like Chappelle (“with that much spotlight and notoriety”) erasing the existence of Black queer and trans people: “When Dave Chappelle releases something, I find myself in conversation about it with my family.” Because Black folks revere him, his thoughts on our most vulnerable brothers and sisters are taken seriously. “If Dave Chappelle can ignore us, they can too.”

That is also not to say that there is no racial element at play when it comes to the case of DaBaby. When one makes a blanket statement about LGBTQ+ people, they are making a statement about a group that includes white folks, specifically white men, some of whom are quite powerful. (Every marginalized group has people in power; it does not solve much for the rest of us, which is why the Obama presidency didn’t fix Black America anymore than Chappelle’s multimillion-dollar Netflix check reflects a path upward for anyone outside of his household and off his payroll.) Offending white folks is a clear path to trouble for Black people; the power their feelings about us have over the trajectory of our lives is never to be underestimated.

DaBaby pissed off some white folks thus he had to pay. But that does not mean that Black gay people also have power over DaBaby, nor that the balance of power has shifted in our community to favor them. In fact, there is something heartbreaking about the fact that while white money can challenge Black homophobia in a profound, public way, pleas for respect from Black gay people asking to be treated like our brothers and sisters are not answered in kind.

“Gay people are minorities until they need to be white again,” Chappelle complains in The Closer, disappearing Black gays, trans folks, and women into whiteness in a way that is not at all unique to him. “Somewhere, buried in the nonsense, is an interesting and accurate observation about the white gay community conveniently being able to claim whiteness at will,” Roxane Gay wrote for The New York Times. “There’s a compelling observation about the relatively significant progress the L.G.B.T.Q. community has made, while progress toward racial equity has been much slower. But in these formulations, there are no gay Black people.”

Phillips says Chappelle’s erasure speaks to how many Black LGBTQ+ people are forced to contort in order to exist among their own people, including loved ones. “There’s tons of jokes and memes about how Black queer people have to hide themselves when they’re in community with their Black families”—she cites an example “auntie and her little friend,” which pokes fun at the tradition of queer women introducing intimate partners to the family as platonic companions. When comics like Chappelle make Blackness a cishet exclusive experience, “It helps my family pretend the levels of my existence aren’t real either.”

The work of calling out Chappelle is made all the more difficult because “Black men have positioned themselves in society as the epitome of Blackness,” according to Phillips. “So to critique them feels like you’re critiquing Black people; meanwhile, you’re just trying to get us free. Yes, there’s policy and politics but I want to be safe at home, at church, at the grocery store, and I’m not going to get there by not naming the harm.”

In The Closer, Chappelle admits to resenting the place where he seems to think Black queer folk exist in society, while at the same time erasing them: “I am jealous of gay people, oh, I’m jealous; I’m not the only Black person that feels that way…how are you making that kind of progress so quickly?”

Writer Raquel Willis, in a Twitter thread, notes that it’s “convenient” for male comics like Chappelle to describe the LGBTQ+ community as white: “With that frame, they don’t have to contend with how Black cishet folks often enact (physical and psychological) violence on Black LGBTQ+ folks.” She describes how Black cishet men struggle to locate their own identity in relation to Black people of other genders who do not see men as the pinnacle. Furthermore, she writes, “They feel owed the power that white cishet men have historically had, and they haven’t gotten it. They think we’ve jumped a few steps in the March toward equity any time they’re held accountable for their transphobia and queerphobia.”

In a world where “being seen” can be a matter of life or death, when it comes to the experiences of Black women and LGBTQ+ people, Chappelle simply chooses to look elsewhere and invites his audiences to do the same (unless, of course, there’s a joke to be made at our expense). It’s “the Black ass lie” that says we should, and must, support the right of our beloved brother to make us invisible, though he regularly claims to be speaking on behalf of Black people.

V.

“I am not indifferent to the suffering of someone else.” —The Closer (2021)

In 2017’s The Age of Spin, Chappelle took aim at the charges of misogyny leveled against him in the past while racking up new ones. In an alleged encounter with a young white woman who challenges Chappelle for his soft approach to Bill Cosby, Chappelle turns the tables, accusing her of being insensitive for failing to consider how hard it is for him as a then “42-year-old Black comedian” losing his “hero” for doing “something so heinous.” Chappelle, as a very grown adult, told someone he described as “young,” who may have been a rape victim herself, that it was very painful for him to be the fan of a rapist. If this is how the great ones think of such a damning volume of rape allegations, what can we expect of those who aren’t so wise? And/or those who look to him for his wisdom?

In the exchange, he reminds his detractor that “we [meaning men who are called misogynists, perhaps] all have wives,” and thus can’t really hate women. He then leverages his oppression against hers and decides that there is nothing she can tell him that he doesn’t know: “How are you as a young white woman gonna yell at a Black man?…You suffer, but not like us.”

But what about the “us” who do suffer like him and otherwise? “The Black ass lie” renders Black women’s unique suffering at the intersection of racial and gender-based oppressions somehow invisible.

It’s a motherfucker of a lie, literally.

An oft repeated line from that special acknowledges how white women have benefitted from their whiteness, and how white womanhood is positioned in society, while taking this seemingly feminist woman to task for daring to complain: “You was in on the heist, you just don’t like your cut.” Chappelle is so right about a part of a complicated racial equation, but loses the thread with his inability to recognize that Black women are:

1. Black

2. people

3. matter.

We weren’t in on the heist, we were part of the theft—right alongside our men. We clung to life in the bowels of transatlantic wooden ships right alongside them, we toiled in the fields right alongside them. But when it was time for Massa, or whatever other white man wanted a piece of us, we were on our own, powerless and invaded.

It isn’t just rape’s role in my personal story that makes me hostile to rape jokes that target the victim, as opposed to addressing the responsible party. It’s the weight the rape holds in ancestral memory. The rape of Black women sustained an unpaid labor force in this country. The rape of Black women by white men has long been considered no crime at all. The rape of Black women by Black men is waved off because we can’t put “good Black men” in “the system,” and besides, unless there was a gun or a knife, how many people believe it was a rape in the first place? Rape as comedy? I’ll pass. As Chappelle said in The Bird Revelation, “Everything is funny until it happens to you.” It shouldn’t be that way. Especially not between so-called brothers and sisters.

When she was 19, the actor Gabrielle Union was preparing to close the retail store where she worked when she spotted a man who made her uncomfortable. She wanted to react, to protect herself somehow, she writes in her first memoir, but she instead thought about the sort of racial profiling her white colleagues routinely engaged in and didn’t want to make the brother feel bad. She performed what she described as “racial solidarity” out of a sense of obligation to this stranger, as well as her womanly duty to be “polite” and make others feel comfortable. The man raped her.

Weeks after I graduated from Howard, I was raped and robbed in a D.C. suburb. Convinced that the detectives weren’t going to look for the guy anyway (the disinterested white detective fell just short of accusing me of making the whole thing up), and afraid of what might happen to some random Black dude if they did—because I know how easily any Black man can “fit the profile” of a rapist in some people’s eyes—I lied and said my attacker was white. Somehow, this detail seemed to give my loved ones some comfort. Telling the story this way made it easier for me as well.

A young woman I met at a camp for survivors of violence once shared that her older brother had raped her repeatedly when she was a girl, but that she’d kept it a secret for fear that the police would get involved and kill him. Maya Angelou famously wrote of going silent for upward of five years as a child after learning that the man who raped her had been killed, believing her words—not his actions—were to blame for his death. If comics like Chappelle knew the bells that rape rings for Black women, would they ring them so freely? I hope not.

VI.

“My problem has never been with transgender people. My problem has always been with the dialogue about transgender people. I just feel like these things should not be discussed in front of the Blacks. It’s fucking insulting, all this talk about how these people feel inside. Since when has America given a fuck how any of us feel inside?” —Equanimity (2017)

What bothers me most about The Closer and much of Chappelle’s schtick in recent years is that he’s playing with our pain in the name of humor, and pretending to advance the Race Conversation while doing quite the opposite. We lose so much time and space having the same arguments repeatedly in these moments. Time that could be spent community building is lost to debating whether or not it’s okay for a wealthy, influential man to say horrible things about a marginalized group because he, too, is a member of a marginalized group. And for those of us who’ve spent a great deal of time considering what it means to live at the intersection (word to Kimberlé Crenshaw) of racism and sexism, and/or racism and homophobia, or transphobia, it can feel absolutely maddening to watch parts of your existence debated as though the world is unsure whether you’re even in it to begin with.

Speaking when Chappelle received the Mark Twain Prize for comedy in 2019, friend and former Comedy Central colleague Jon Stewart reflects what seems to be a common observation among Chappelle’s celebrity pals: “Things happen in ‘Dave World’ that just don’t happen anywhere else.” That begs a question about how hard it may be for a rich and famous Black man who lives a charmed life full of drugs, celebrity access, and white friends to broadly speak on behalf of “the Blacks.”

During an impromptu chat recently, author and columnist Damon Young, mused about Chappelle’s embrace of his own hype, pointing out that he wasn’t some “soothsayer truth teller comedian” for most of his career and that he’s popular with white people before Black folks fell in love with him, making his transformation into Big Brother Almighty somewhat remarkable. “He’s a suburban kid who lives with his Asian wife and his biracial children on a farm surrounded by white folks, but we’ve made him into Mufasa or Morpheus.” That’s not to say he can’t be that figure, but he’s not doing the work necessary if more than half the population of n-ggas ain’t even n-ggas to him in the first place.

Some of Chappelle’s celebrity pals have stood apart in the industry for raising their voices in support of the marginalized groups and causes he often mocks, including the survivor-led #MeToo movement. Founder Tarana Burke wishes they’d tap the comedian on the shoulder on behalf of her work which the comic has mocked on multiple occasions. She’s left on her own, despite the ways these very men have claimed to be down for the cause: “I’ve talked to you. I’ve kicked it with you, but y’all still would not pull his coat and be like…‘It’s not okay to diminish this work…. It’s not okay to malign this movement.’”

As the late Mother Angelou told Chappelle in their 2006 dialogue for Sundance Channel’s Iconoclasts series, “People live in direct relation to the heroes they have.” When a Black man is made a hero for speaking out about race, while speaking down on women and LGBTQ+ people, there is a clear message sent about the hierarchy of love and needs.

When Chappelle belittles the bitches, he leverages the disregard for us to his advantage, and considering how loyal the Black bitches have been to him, we don’t deserve that.

During a late-night feeding session for my then six-month-old daughter in August of 2013, I saw a series of tweets from a woman who had attended a Chappelle concert in Hartford, Connecticut. It seemed he’d been heckled onstage by a largely white audience at a comedy festival and had refused to tell any jokes in protest. The woman, Lesli-Ann Lewis, was defending Chappelle, as negative feedback and press began to surface. Working as a digital editor for Ebony, I immediately sprung into action, commissioning a story from Lewis and interviewing a Black woman whom Chappelle had engaged with from the stage. I knew it was my duty, as a Black woman and as a Black editor, to ensure that the story of that show was not told only by white folks who could never understand why yelling out catchphrases from a wildly popular sketch show could feel so hurtful to the brother who’d made them.

“There is a long history of asking African-Americans to endure racism silently,” Lewis wrote of the rowdy, drunken audience of the sort of fans that led the comic to leave Chappelle’s Show behind. “It’s characterized as grace, as strength.”

The Black bitches too, are expected to endure silently on a regular basis. Sometimes, the stakes are life and death; other times, it’s just a matter of getting through a comedy show.

I love Dave Chappelle because he’s my brother, but I don’t love him enough to pretend his words hurt like sticks and like stones, and that wouldn’t be any way to love on “one of our great ones anyway.” He closed The Closer again, vowing silence about LGBTQ+ people until “we are both sure we are laughing together.” I hope he holds to it, but I also hope he knows that might mean laughing at people that are close to home for him: white folks—specifically the ones who got us into all this shit. And that’s not to say the oppressor that we feel comfortable naming is the only group who can be targeted for jokes, but he’d do better starting there—and/or taking a season or two off and tapping the access he has to the greatest thinkers in the world, many of whom would gladly help him figure out a few things so he doesn’t have to “punch” down to laugh anymore.

The Black bitches are hurting at best, dying at worst. We are in need of full-throated declarations of love and acts of service in response to the organizing we’ve done, the care that we’ve given, the ways that we’ve suffered at home and beyond. We need our brothers to stop hurting us with impunity, then acting as if racism gave them the right to do such a thing. We need Dave Chappelle to learn the truth about us—and himself—instead of spreading lies and calling it the Black side of the story.

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