How to Be Black

by Baratunde Thurston

  They’re angry that “just because I’m white doesn’t mean I can’t like this.” I’m not saying that, I’m saying you do like it. And so they sort of contradict themselves a little bit. But they get angry and say that pointing out that race even exists IS racist. That’s their theory.

  I don’t even know how to react to how angry they are about saying that recognizing that we’re different is racist. No, judging based on the differences is racist, but recognizing the difference is there is not racist at all.

  Continuing on the theme of people’s reactions to SWPL, I wondered if he had heard from non-whites who identified heavily with the site’s listing of all things white. Indeed he had.

  People who aren’t white come to me all the time after [completing the test in the back of the Stuff White People Like book], and they’ll go, “Oh, my God, I’m white. I can’t believe this!”

  Humor was the top priority [ for Stuff White People Like], and I never denied that, but there was a message behind it: all of the things in the list, aside from having black friends and stuff like that, for the most part (Whole Foods and living by the water, and all this sort of stuff ) they’re just things, and anybody can participate in it.

  These things are definitely class-based more than anything else, and it’s a class that’s overwhelmingly white, no matter how much we don’t want to recognize it. We want to believe that the middle class is perfectly balanced. It’s the perfect mix. No, it’s disproportionately white. Absolutely, without question.

  Because Christian’s work is explicitly comedic and particularly satirical, I asked him how important satire was to his message.

  The role of satire in talking about race is essential. I can’t stress enough how important it is. I spent a lot of time in graduate school, and what I found so much in an academic setting is that people are petrified to say the wrong thing.

  At the end, nothing emerges, no progress has been made. If people aren’t talking, there’s no progress.

  So if you’re talking about any sort of racial issue—it doesn’t matter what it is—and you’re so scared that you’re going to offend the entire room with what you actually believe, you won’t say it.

  And you won’t see that “wait, you’re not completely wrong, or you are completely wrong,” and you bottle it up and you won’t say it.

  When you set the room for satire, and you set the room for humor and sort of that ability to say kind of whatever you want, people feel much more comfortable talking about it. I think that that just puts everyone so much more at ease, to actually talk about this idea of cultural difference. And the idea of race and class still being fundamentally tied together.

  I know from teaching in grad school for four years that a lot of undergrads are still kind of figuring out things and some of them are very angry at race. They still really see affirmative action as a huge injustice against them, and they have all this pent-up rage that they won’t talk about, because they’re petrified of being seen as racist.

  So when you bring this up in a context of humor, there’s so much more comfort, on their side, to talk about it, and to let it out. And then as they’re doing that, you can kind of point out:

  “Why do you think this list of stuff counts as white?”

  “Because most people who consume it are white.”

  “Well, what do you need to consume it?”

  “Well, money.”

  “There you go!”

  And so you lead the horse to water and you let it drink.

  I think humor is absolutely essential. When you come at somebody to talk about race, especially if you have an ax to grind as a white person who is angry, or as someone who is not white who is angry, the audience you’re speaking to will be petrified. They’ll be petrified to say anything. They will agree with whatever you say and nothing has gone forward.

  Finally, I wondered what Christian thought of truly hateful people who utter some nonsense but then try to cover it up by saying, “I was only joking! I kid! I kid!”

  People trying to hide behind the shield of satire are interesting. For me, who makes a living making fun of race, making fun of white people, it’s hard to say what exactly is acceptable and what works and what doesn’t. It’s like the old ruling on pornography where the judge says I can’t define it but I know what it is when I see it.

  You don’t really have to be that smart to tell when someone’s satire is coming from a place of intelligence and not a place of hate. It is so hard to disguise the hate that comes out of people who try to call it funny.

  When I started SWPL with my friend Miles, we always thought it would be funny if people took the idea and went in the right direction with it. So there’re sites like Stuff Black People Like, written by black people; Stuff Asians Like, written by Asians; Stuff Black People Hate, which is hilarious. It’s sort of done in this way. It’s done from the inside, it’s done with love, it’s not done with hate.

  But people have done all these horrible sites where they’ll do Stuff Black People Like with all the old, horrible stereotypes: watermelon, fried chicken, crime, all that sort of stuff. And it’s awful.

  But there’s the difference, right? You see it. I think it’s really easy to tell when it’s coming from hate and when it’s coming from satire.

  W. KAMAU BELL

  I had heard about Kamau years before I finally met him. People on the West Coast said things like, “He’s like the you of the West Coast!” which is actually an odd thing to hear, but I know folks meant it as a compliment. When I finally saw him do his one-man show at the New York Fringe Festival, I was hooked.

  When Kamau, Elon James White, and I had brunch together the following day, it was an official bromance. Kamau has been doing stand-up the longest among members of The Black Panel. I wanted to know how he started, and what role race played in his performance.

  I feel like the same thing that is in black comedy is in black radio. We call it black radio, but what we really mean is hip-hop and R&B radio, because black radio does not encompass all of black music. I feel the same way about black comedy. That’s like R&B and hip-hop comedy, and it’s just like a stylistic thing that I don’t do.

  I can play there but sometimes it’s like when they play Lenny Kravitz on a hip-hop station. Sometimes it’s, “That’s a refreshing change!” Sometimes it’s, “Get this bullshit out of here!”

  [I did an audition stand-up set] for Comedy Central. It was a mostly black audience, all black performers, and I went up first or second and I did a joke that referenced Gandhi and everybody just [went silent].

  I hate when audiences are purposefully dumb, because I know everybody in the room knows who Gandhi is. And if you don’t, that’s you. That’s not me. That’s you. And I hate when audiences do that thing when they come to comedy clubs and they turn their brains off. This is black audiences, white audiences, Latino audiences . . .

  There’s a thing where audiences just leave their brains outside. So when you say something like Gandhi—I’m not doing anything eloquent about Gandhi; I’m just referencing him as a cultural reference that we all know—you could just see them go, “Nah, we don’t do that. We left that outside.” And so I got off stage . . . and the MC said, “Give it up for Kamau. You can tell that he reads!”

  And he followed it up with, “But I don’t!”

  And the crowd went, “Ahhhh!!”

  I talk about race in my comedy a lot because it was the subject that when I started doing comedy was the most verboten. Especially in Chicago and performing in white rooms, I could talk about anything, but if I talked about race they would tighten up.

  I think it was because of the way I talked about race. I wasn’t doing it from a “Kings of Comedy” perspective. I’ve never been a big proponent of “black people do stuff like this, and white people do stuff like this.” It usually ends up that the black people do things poorer than white people.

  He started really committing to discussing race in his comedy when he consider
ed how much time he is actually on stage.

  You only get to be on stage for a very short percentage of your life. If you think about it as far as a job that is being done, people work eight and ten hours a day on their job. If you’re on stage an hour, five times a week or seven times a week, you’re one of the best in the country at it if you have that much stage time, and that’s seven hours a week.

  So I feel like you’re only on stage a short period of time, you might as well talk about something you care about and you might as well talk about things that you feel you bring something to that nobody else does.

  I also asked him about the history of his show.

  I have a one-man show called The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour. If you bring a friend of a different race, you get in two for one. It started as a response to the fact that I would go to comedy clubs and talk about race and racism a lot, and I felt like after about twenty minutes people go, “Next subject!” It’s not that they even mind the jokes necessarily all the time. But they just sort of, they get fatigued by the subject, which I think is bullshit.

  Especially in this era, I think that’s bullshit because you can Google every comedy club you go to before you go there, and look up every performer, and go to their YouTube page and find out if that’s the place you need to be.

  So I decided I’m going to write the show that I thought I was going to have to wait to be famous to do, and that became The W. Kamau Bell Curve, and the whole idea was that I’m going to make sure everybody knows it’s about race and racism.

  The title was a joke, obviously, but it would also be great to be able to do. And at the time I thought, “Ending racism in about an hour?” I thought, “Hopefully I’ll have an hour of race and racism stuff to discuss.”

  [The show started out as my] proving to the audience that racism still existed, because this was in October of 2007, when we were, “You know, that Barack Obama guy could be vice president one day if he’s lucky, if he’s real lucky.” It was also on the heels of Michael Richards having the explosion in the comedy club, and Dog the Bounty Hunter, and James Watson, the DNA guy. There were all these, as I call it, “Nigger Tourette’s Moments.”

  Then around the time of Barack starting to run for president, racism sort of came back. It came back like skinny jeans and high-fat ice cream. It became like a thing again.

  CHERYL CONTEE

  It’s taken me years to realize how close Cheryl and I actually are. I first met her via e-mail in the summer of 2006. She had started Jack & Jill Politics and was blogging under the name Jill Tubman. A mutual friend had suggested I join as a partner in the role of Jack.

  We met in person a few weeks later at a progressive blogger conference now known as Netroots Nation. I decided on the name Jack Turner for my JJP persona, and we’ve been helping drive the JJP ship since. It wasn’t until a few years later that we realized we had both attended Sidwell Friends, though we just missed being there at the same time.

  The incredible ride we experienced on JJP, especially during 2008, wasn’t anything either of us could anticipate. We started the blog initially as a personal outlet to get tension and thoughts off our chests and minds.

  At the time, black people and blogging was kind of a new thing. And if you look at the political blogs in particular from that period, almost all of them were started anonymously or pseudonymously.

  In fact, during that time, people would say to me things like, “Gosh, you seem less angry.” And it’s because all of that fury was channeled to a certain extent [into] the Jill persona.

  One of the premises of sites like Jack & Jill Politics is to give voice to a new generation of political thought, and criticism of existing black leadership was a big part of what drove Cheryl’s blogging in the beginning. I asked her what she thought about black leadership today.

  In terms of black leadership today, I think there’s also a transition. There’s the Civil Rights generation that is starting to age out, frankly. And they are very reluctant to go.

  That’s part of what Jack & Jill Politics was all about, was actually pushing back and providing that voice of the hip-hop generation, and talking back to the Civil Rights generation, to the baby boomers, and saying, “Look, we’re here. Our opinions matter. And frankly, we’ve had a different American experience than you. You worked so hard to create that, but now, let us articulate what that actually looks like and how we can build a future based on those experiences.”

  Cheryl’s vision of a “Second Harlem Renaissance” is one I find to be so powerful. She spoke of it primarily in terms of art and culture, but given her political activities, I also asked if she saw a similar renaissance in black political involvement.

  I think where that translates into the political realm is that now if you saw during the Barack Obama candidacy this amazing outpouring of African-Americans who hadn’t ever voted before, discovering their political power, again, we’re just at the root of that.

  The tree has yet to grow in terms of African-American political power in this country and the ability for our ideas and for our values to impact in a positive way the national dialogue on where we want to go as a country.

  ELON JAMES WHITE

  Elon and I are constantly mistaken for each other within certain left-wing blogger circles, and we love to joke about it because we are, in fact, so very different. We generally acknowledge that he’s the angry progressive black comedian, and I’m the happy one.

  I first came across Elon after I moved to New York from Boston. He was producing black comedy shows called “Four Shades of Black” that felt nothing like traditional “black comedy shows.” There were no jokes about women’s feet or black people’s credit ratings. Instead, people talked about college, iPods, relationships, and even pterodactyls.* It was a refreshing alternative image.

  Now Elon is known primarily for his award-winning Web series, This Week in Blackness, and the regular Web radio show that accompanies it, Blacking It Up.

  I asked Elon about the origins of This Week in Blackness.

  I started This Week in Blackness in September 2008. Initially, it was a project that was commissioned by VH1. They wanted a black Best Week Ever. And so, I had done something [proving] that my blackness quota was high. So, they were like, “Yeah, could you come up with this idea?”

  Being black in 2008 meant you were probably very political. It’s not even that you really wanted to be like, “I want to talk about policy.” It was because it was 2008, Barack Obama was running for president, and everyone also already knew who you were voting for, no matter what happened.

  WHITE PEOPLE: Oh, so what happened at that debate last night with Obama?

  ELON: I don’t . . . Why are you asking me? I didn’t volunteer that I knew that.

  But they would just assume. So, then I started This Week in Blackness.

  In all honesty, it was a screen test for this black Best Week Ever, and I just wanted to put it out there, see what the response was.

  Given the title of this book, and Elon’s track record of putting out shows that challenge the prevailing image of blackness, I asked him how people reacted to the title of his show.

  The criticism that I receive from having a show titled This Week in Blackness is, “How dare you? You decide that you’re going to speak for black people and you’re race-baiting. You’re causing division.”

  I laugh at these things because one of the few things that I really put forth first within writing and all this stuff is that no one can define blackness. Not one person, not one entity. So the idea of calling it This Week in Blackness was always a gag.

  There are episodes where it has nothing to do with black people. I argued the Citizens United [Supreme Court] verdict.* That’s not a black verdict. That was an American verdict and guess what? Black people are American. I know! It’s weird.

  I probably skewed it in a way that people that are familiar with black culture would be more comfortable with or they might understand the refere
nces more. But that was it.

  But I get that, “Oh, you’re speaking for black people.” And I go, “No I don’t.” I did a video called 13 Black Truths and one was: “No one can speak for black people.” And the video clip that was right next to me, it was a sign that popped up that says, “Not even the dude who hosts This Week in Blackness.”

  On the question of how he started dealing with race in his stand-up comedy, Elon says:

  When I first started stand-up I thought I was going to be that special Negro. You know, the one that was like, “I’m never going to mention race ever. I’m just gonna talk about what I find funny.” Then I’d get on stage, and I’d do my set, and people would come [up to me after] and they’re like, “Man, do you know you’re black? You don’t even act like you know you’re black. That’s amazing.” And I took offense to it.

  So, I ended up having to deal with it, and going head-on with the whole idea of blackness, and what people perceived of me. People would come to the show and go, “I didn’t know black people could say this.” And at first I’d be like, “Thank you,” and then, “Fuck you.”

  Finally, I know that Elon has a special place in his heart for BET. I asked him what he thought of the network.

  BET can go suck a dick, flat-out. Literally, they’re my archnemesis. If I saw Debra Lee in the street we would fight. Actually we wouldn’t fight, I would just throw things and then run, because I believe she has the force of darkness behind her, and she would just float and knives would fly at me.

  Blackness is very widespread. So all of these things have a role to play, even Black Entertainment Television. Saying that, I feel that when you decide to label yourself as a black entity you then carry a certain responsibility.

  When you put out really dumb, ignorant shit and you’re labeled [Black Entertainment Television], then you bring down a certain amount of criticism upon yourself. And you can’t be surprised.

  [Their defense is often,] “Well, it’s about money.” Then don’t call yourself Black Entertainment Television. Call yourself We Like Dumb Shit. Or Ignant TV. I’ll accept it. If Ignant TV was nothing but black people I’d be upset, but I’d probably not have the hatred that I have for BET. It’s because they try to have this weird, “Oh, we’re so positive for the black community” idea. You know what? You can go fuck yourself. You’re not positive for the black community. You were trying to make a dollar by using blackness as a label for your dollar. And I don’t like you for it.