(NOTE LANGUAGE) Channing Tatum has waded into the Dave Chappelle Netflix/trans comments controversy, saying that while he does “understand” and “hate” that the comedian hurt so many people with his problematic comments about the trans and LGBTQ+ communities, he can’t turn his back on the man whose words comforted him in the past.
“Any human can hurt someone (usually cause they’re hurt) but any human can heal and heal others just the same,” Channing wrote on his Instagram Stories, according to Buzzfeed, saying Chappelle’s 2019 speech while accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center “healed” him.
“I can’t forget that,” he insisted.
Dave noted in the speech how his personality differs from the one he presents to the public, and how comedy saved his life. “I was a soft kid. I was sensitive, I’d cry easy and I would be scared to fistfigh,” said Chappelle at the time. “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,” Chappelle continued. “Whether I agree with them or not, I know where they’re coming from. 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.”
While the speech was meaningful to Channing, he noted that it “does not excuse anything hurtful tho to be clear.”
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