suicide – Fluid Imagination

You’ve seen the headlines, maybe read the articles, and (hopefully, if you have an opinion on it) watched the special itself.

You know Dave Chappelle admits to being transphobic, gleefully spits in the eye of those fueling “cancel culture,” and has always been willfully and aggressively provocative in his comedy.

You also know that he proudly claims to be “Team TERF,” i.e., a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which means he denies that trans women are women. He argues, “Gender is a fact. Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth. That is a fact.”

You also know that, after joking about his problems with LGBTQ+ activists for roughly 30 minutes straight, he ends with a long story about his relationship with a transgender comedian, Daphne Dorman. Despite Dorman’s status as a fledgling comedian, Chappelle invited her to be his opening act whenever he played in her hometown of San Francisco.

After Dorman used Twitter to defend the transphobic jokes in Chappelle’s last special — “He isn’t punching up or punching down. He’s punching lines. That’s his job and he’s a master of his craft” — trans activists “dragged her on Twitter.” Dorman suffered from severe PTSD, but Chappelle and Dorman’s family members believe the trans community’s overwhelmingly negative responses to her tweets contributed to her suicide. Chappelle set up a trust fund for his friend’s child, which the boy will receive when he turns 21.

Despite Chappelle’s heartbreaking and anger-fueled reveal of Dorman‘s suicide, the epiphanic moment of his story comes earlier. The first night Dorman opened (and bombed) for him, Chappelle invited her onto the stage with him, where she allowed him to ask virtually every question he could think of about the trans experience. The show became “a conversation between a black man and a trans woman.” At the end of it, Chappelle made an off-hand remark about how the conversation was fun, but “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

While the whole crowd laughed, Daphne responded as seriously as possible, passionately urging him, “I don’t need you to understand me…I just need you to believe that I’m having a human experience.”

In his special, Chappelle continues, “She didn’t say anything about pronouns. She didn’t say anything about being in trouble. She said, ‘Just believe I’m a person, and I’m going through it.’”

“I know,” Chappelle continues, “I believe you. Because it takes one to know one.”

Now, it’s easy for a critic to argue that Chappelle tells this story in a cynical attempt to cover his ass. As if he’s saying, “Despite all my jokes, how can I be transphobic if I became close friends with this trans woman, tried to help her career, and now that she’s taken her life (partially due to the hateful words of trans activists on Twitter), I continue to support her son?”

It is also easy for a critic to argue that Chappelle is tone-deaf. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “transgender adolescents disproportionately report higher suicide attempts” than their cisgender counterparts.

Over 50% of female-to-male trans adolescents attempt to kill themselves, while 41% of non-binary adolescents and nearly 30% of male-to-female adolescents attempt suicide.

It’s not just kids. Roughly 40% of trans adults report attempting suicide at some point in their lifetimes.

Dorman’s suicide personally affected Chappelle, but his insight – “Just believe I’m a person, and I’m going through it” – fails to see the forest for the trees.

Regardless of whether his jokes are funny, this man — who is, arguably, the Greatest comedian Of All Time — has continued to target a population that struggles perhaps more than any other.

He’s not shy about the oppression Olympics that fuels his transphobic comedy. He says it flat out:

We Blacks, we look at the gay community, and we go … ‘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 … are you making that kind of progress?’ I can’t help but feel like if slaves had baby oil and booty shorts, we might have been free a hundred years sooner.

The joke is funny. But Chappelle seems to forget that gender-nonconforming individuals have been a part of society for longer than the gay and trans rights political movements have been around. Like Black Americans, LGBTQ+ Americans have been trapped in their predicaments for hundreds if not thousands of years. Like Black Americans, they continue to suffer from prejudice and discrimination.

Chappelle’s perspective (not his jokes, per se, but the perspective they reveal) suggests social progress is a zero-sum game. LGBTQ+ rights only come at the expense of other oppressed groups.

{At this point, I must note the insidious concept of “social progress,” as if it is the obligation of oppressed peoples to throw off their oppressors and not the obligation of oppressors to stop oppressing!}

Simply put, Chappelle fails to engage in intersectional thinking. He conflates gay and trans political activists with white people, a conflation he admits to in his special.

Any of you who have ever watched me know I have never had a problem with transgender people. If you listen to what I’m saying, clearly, my problem has always been…with white people.

A fair critic can only agree, but his conflation neglects to acknowledge there may be no more oppressed person than (to paraphrase Jon Fishman) “a fat, black, poor, and handicapped, old, single-mother” trans woman atheist with a low IQ.

For this hypothetical woman to achieve her full complement of rights and privileges as an American, we would need to “make progress” on Black rights, trans rights, poor rights, disability rights, elderly rights, religious rights, etc.

Chappelle does not acknowledge the existence of this person, nor the existence of people like her throughout history.

“Just believe I’m a person, and I’m going through it.”

I recently asked several students to consider whether they would have joined the American Revolution if they had been of the proper age in 1776. The question came from a YouTube video produced by PBS examining the different reactions of Black Americans, Native Americans, Women, Poor Whites, and Landowning Whites to the colonists’ call to arms.

One of the students was a 19-year-old trans man. He responded that in 1776, he would have been fighting too hard to justify his daily existence to care about geopolitics.

His answer led us to research the history of gender nonconforming individuals in the colonial period. Among other examples, we learned of a new question around the sex of General Casimir Pulaski, the father of America’s first cavalry, one of George Washington’s most beloved officers, and one of the country’s most celebrated Polish Americans.

A 2019 study of Pulaski’s remains by the Smithsonian Institution found he had both male and female bone characteristics. This suggests the general may have been female or intersex.

Being intersex is not the same as being trans or gay. Still, General Pulaski’s existence points to the reality that individuals with atypical sexes and/or genders have been a part of this country’s story from its founding moments.

This is not a new thought, though it may be one for Chappelle. The comedian’s knowledge and understanding of the history of white oppression against Black bodies runs deep, as revealed in all of his previous Netflix specials, but his knowledge of LGBTQ+ history seems to stop at Stonewall.

The jokes have never been and never will be the problem with this master of his craft. The problem, in this instance, is his willingness to understand.

Thankfully, Chappelle said at the end of his special he wouldn’t make another joke about the LGBTQ+ community “until we are both sure we’re laughing together.”

And with thanks to Dorman, in his personal interactions, Chappelle confesses to understand that every individual he meets is “a person, and [they’re] going through it.”

He claims to know. Because he claims to be one too.

One of my students, a young African-American woman, is fired up about the new Black Panther movie, but not in the way you might think. Unlike Shaun King, a well-known activist and African-American writer who “sincerely place[s] it on the level of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the birth of hip-hop, and the election of Barack Obama,” my young African-American student thinks Black Panther is trash.

I don’t want to white-mansplain her particular argument, so I’ll leave the details to her.

Instead, what I want to talk about is her existence and its relationship to Shaun King’s.

First, some context for this post.

I have another student, a young white male, who believes he is the only truly conservative person at our school. He calls us “a school full of liberals,” and he basically disdains everything we say, discounting our knowledge and our advice because we are, as he says, “liberals.”

His attitude is familiar, I’m sure. It’s the attitude that sneers the word “liberal.” It’s also (in a different way) the attitude that sneers the word “redneck.”

This attitude is born from a mindset that feels too comfortable with labels, so comfortable, in fact, that the person is not even aware they’re using them. Unfortunately, a label doesn’t do anything except provide us with permission to stop thinking.

By labeling all of his teachers as “liberals,” my “only truly conservative” student gives himself permission to not be challenged by the ideas he encounters in school. Instead of allowing new ideas to enter into his mind, he erects a barrier — a wall, if you will — to prevent all our “liberal” ideas from getting in. As you might imagine, such a strategy does not a great student make.

By any measure, my white male student would call both my African-American student and Shaun King, the African-American writer, liberals. Both argue that society has a role to play when it comes to fighting injustice, and they both prefer using progressive, radical, or even revolutionary means if necessary. In short, they are both activist soldiers in the war against oppression.

But by labeling them both as “liberals,” my white male student remains blind to the areas in which they differ, their feelings about Black Panther being just one of them.

When we paint over people with such a wide brush, we smear away everything that makes us individuals, and because of that, we lose the opportunity to engage with each other’s truly unique minds.

This is part of what the kids in Florida, and some of the kids in my own school, are trying to get across when they talk to us adults. The kids are dying, and they’re telling us, finally and firmly, to put down our labels, stop being so petty, and start actually listening to one another.

The Parkland shooting reminded us that we are living through another 9/11. And like 9/11, now is not the time to be divided.

—

But unlike 9/11, this wound is self-inflicted.

According to the CDC, the suicide rate among teenage girls doubled between 2005 and 2015, while the suicide rate for boys increased 30 percent over the same period (and is roughly three times higher than girls in the first place). Suicides across the whole population, meanwhile, increased 24-percent over a 15 year period (the rate of suicide is highest among middle-aged white men, by the way).

School shootings, we must remember, are often just another form of teen suicide.

In all the conversations about guns and security, we’re missing the bigger picture.

It’s not mental health. “Mental health” is just a red herring that will distract us from committing our resources in the right locations. Black women suffer from depression far greater than any other group in our population, and they are the least likely to seek professional help for it, yet black women are not committing these crimes against our schools, nor are they committing suicide at rates greater than the rest of the population. If “mental health” was the culprit, we’d see a lot less angry white boys on our screens and a lot more depressed black girls.

The culprit is whatever is causing the increase in suicides among teens. We could argue about its identity all day, but doing so would again stop us from seeing the bigger picture.

It’s time to talk to your kids, people. Time to look them in the eye, ask them how they are, and then listen.

And if you know a kid whose parents definitely won’t be doing that, then know that the rest of us are counting on you. You are the representative of the rest of us. Help us by helping that young, emotionally abandoned kid.

And then, after you’ve done it once, do it again, and again, and again, and don’t stop doing it until you know the kid is going to be okay. Because more than guns, more than “mental health,” it will be the helping, caring adult who will stop this.

If we can’t come together on gun control, can we at least come together on that?

And hey, if you don’t quite feel up to it, then at least take the kid to go see Black Panther. Because unlike my student, I thought it was a kick ass movie.