Last Updated on June 14, 2025 by BVN
Mocking the great abolitionist and slavery wasn’t just ignorant. It was a display of privilege, entitlement, and the ease with which white men rewrite Black pain as punchlines.
Kenneth B. Morris, Jr.
On a recent episode of the podcast This Past Weekend, “comedian” Theo Von made an incredibly tone-deaf joke about Frederick Douglass and slavery. He claimed he’d heard Douglass was gay, then suggested that Douglass’s abolitionist efforts were motivated by his personal life, saying, “He wanted to free all of those men because he was having trouble meeting anybody . . . because everybody was at work . . . he seemed awfully particular about getting those fellows off work early.”
Sitting across from him was JD Vance, awkwardly taking up space and sporting more eyeliner than brain cells. Vance thinks he’s funny—he isn’t—but instead of letting the ignorant quip die the quiet death it deserved, he chimed in, “We’re going to talk to the Smithsonian about putting up an exhibit on that, and Theo Von, you can be the narrator for this new understanding of the history of Frederick Douglass.”
The exchange went out to millions of listeners. It wasn’t satire. It wasn’t clever. It was a disgraceful moment that made light of slavery and demeaned a towering figure who risked everything to fight and abolish it.
These two mediocre men reduced Frederick Douglass and the centuries of resistance he embodies to a flippant joke, their ignorance and privilege insulating them from the gravity of Black history and liberation.
For me, this isn’t about whether Theo Von claimed someone told him Frederick Douglass was gay. I couldn’t care less what they think his orientation was. What matters is the callousness of turning slavery into a punchline and using one of the most courageous lives in American history as the setup.
When a joke punches down on Black struggle, turning history into cheap entertainment, it stops being humor. It serves only to diminish the pain, erase the truth, and signal that Black suffering is still up for ridicule. And when two men this unimpressive try to laugh off centuries of struggle, all they really do is expose how little they understand about the weight of the history they’re mocking.
You don’t joke about slavery. You don’t joke about one of the greatest heroes ever to rise from it. Frederick Douglass wasn’t some abstract historical figure. He was born into bondage, beaten, exploited, and denied his humanity. He taught himself to read, self-emancipated, and became one of the most uncompromising moral voices this country has ever produced.
He shattered white supremacist lies with clarity, force, and fearless conviction. He was a founding father of America’s second republic, a man who rebuilt this nation’s conscience after it had sold its soul to slavery.
This kind of disregard is what happens when Black history is erased and when privileged white men, blind to its brutality and sacrifice, feel entitled to belittle a legacy built on blood and resolve. They don’t carry the burden of history; they mock it. And apparently, they believe they’ve earned the right to laugh at those who built this nation from the ground up and gave of their lives demanding that America live up to its founding ideals.
My frustration isn’t theoretical. It comes from watching undeserving white men fail upward while others are made to fight for their dignity in a nation that still questions their worth. Men like these two will never grasp the generational weight of surviving slavery, of carrying the memory of stolen ancestors and stolen futures.
This moment on Theo Von’s podcast was a symptom of a broader movement to erase, distort, and mock Black history under the guise of comedy and cultural backlash. We’ve seen it in book bans, whitewashed curricula, and the ongoing war on equity. And now we’re witnessing it in real time: the Vice President of the United States laughing as one of our greatest American heroes is misrepresented with a thoughtless joke, and slavery is reduced to cheap entertainment.
Frederick Douglass once said, “A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.” Douglass warned of the peril in not knowing our past. In this moment, we’re not just confronting ignorance, we’re reckoning with a public disregard for the sacrifices that shaped our freedom and the memory of those who paid the price.
It’s easy to laugh at history when you’ve only stood on its neck, not beneath its boot.
In freedom,
Ken
