Channing Tatum confirms that he still supports Dave Chappelle, despite controversy over his Netflix special. The Closer. A few days before the protesters gathered at the streaming site and demanded that it stop supporting Chappelle and his deemed racist content, Magic Mike star shared an Instagram message about Chappelle along with a video showing one of his special moments. “I understand that Dave is a very dangerous person to talk about at the moment,” Tatum took over the post. “I understand and hate that he has hurt so many people with things he has said.”
“Any human can hurt someone (usually cause they’re hurt) but any human can heal and heal others just the same,” He went on.”This little piece healed me back in the day. I can’t forget that,” Tatum added the following, before stressing “This does not excuse anything hurtful tho to be clear.”
The video featured a clip of Chappelle’s acceptance speech to the 2019 Mark Twain Prize in American Humor. “I was a soft kid. I was sensitive, I’d cry easy and I would be scared to a fistfight,” Chappelle said during his speech. “My mother used to tell me this thing… ‘Son, sometimes you have to be a lion so you can be the lamb you really are.’ I talk this s–– like a lion. I’m not afraid of any of you. When it comes word to word, I will gab with the best of them, just so I can chill and be me.”
“And that’s why I love my art form because I understand every practitioner of it. Whether I agree with them or not, I know where they’re coming from,” Chappelle added. “They want to be heard. They’ve got something to say. There’s something they noticed. They just want to be understood. I loved this genre. It saved my life.”
Despite many complaints from LGBTQ organizations, Chappelle has not been hurt by the controversy. Ted Sarandos (CEO of Netflix) has not changed his stance regarding supporting the comedian through this whole ordeal. Variety according to reports, Sarandos issued a memo as a response to protests. He reiterated his belief that specials featuring views like Chappelle’s contribute to the streamer’s overall diversity. “We are working hard to ensure marginalized communities aren’t defined by a single-story,”He wrote the following in his memo. “So we have Sex Education, Orange is the New Black, Control Z, Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chappelle all on Netflix. Key to this is increasing diversity on the content team itself.”