A rally by employees at the Netflix headquarters in Los Angeles was called for Wednesday after Chappelle’s comments about transgender people had caused increasing waves in the past few days.
The protesters now want to hand over a list of demands to program director Ted Sarandos. Ashlee Marie Preston, one of the organizers of the protests, said the rally had been moved to a larger area because of the “overwhelming” number of participants. It is about “the security and dignity of all marginalized communities,” said Preston.
Dave Chappelle compares transgender women to blackfacing
The protest sparked on Chappelle’s show “The Closer”. Among other things, Chappelle had spoken about a US rapper who had “hit the LGBTQ community straight into AIDS,” apparently intended to be a pun on the English word “ass”, the common crude word for butt. He also compared trans women with blackfacing, a method of representation that is frowned upon as racist.
Netflix employees have been laid off
Three Netflix employees have since been suspended for disrupting a boardroom meeting on the matter. One of them was Terra Field, herself transgender, who advocates giving “The Closer” a warning and also promoting more “homosexual and transgender comedians and talent” on Netflix. A Netflix employee was fired for having passed on internal information about the cost of the offending “The Closer” episode.
“An immoral algorithm cult”
In the dispute, several artists sided with the transgender activists. The lesbian comedian Hannah Gadsby, who makes programs for Netflix herself, called the streaming service an “immoral algorithm cult”.
Chappelle dismissed criticism of his statements about transgender people with the remark that “gender is a fact”. At the same time, he accused sexual minorities of reacting “too sensitively”. For sexual minorities there have been improvements within a few years that black people would not have achieved in decades, said the comedian. In addition, white homosexuals would only present themselves as “minorities until they need to be white again”.
Netflix program director does not anticipate any harmful effects
Organizations advocating for the rights of gay, bisexual and transsexuals point to studies showing that stereotypes about minorities have harmful effects in real life. Netflix program director Sarandos contradicted this in a letter to the workforce last week. Content on the screen “is not directly translated into disadvantages in the real world,” he wrote, emphasizing the importance of “artistic freedom”.