Julianne Hing

Ending Racism in an Hour: Kamau Bell in Oakland This Weekend [VIDEO]

East Bay! If you don’t have plans this weekend, I suggest you schedule in a night at W. Kamau Bell’s show at the La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley.

We profiled Kamau in an Artist Spotlight for ColorLines earlier this year (just before he was named Best Comedian of 2008 by SF Weekly) and I caught one of his shows in San Francisco, in a tiny theater south of Market. The second floor theater was packed, in part because Kamau offers a discount deal for all of his shows. Bring a friend of a different race and you get half-price admission. It’s a smart move. He gets the conversation started even before the lights go down…

And once he got on stage, he talked about it all: interracial relationships, racial profiling, sweet potato pie, OJ Simpson, Prop 8, imperialism. He relayed his voting experience from November 4, 2008—which he refers to as Black President Day—when a white guy in line at his polling place yelled at him for wearing what he thought was Barack Obama propaganda. It turned out to be a Richard Pryor shirt.

When we talked later about race and comedy, Bell reflected on people’s appetite for frank conversation about race:

One time I did a show in Chicago, in the suburbs. It’s an all-white room, which is what you get when you go way out of any major city. It’s almost like you’re going back in time. I thought I was in the mid-60s, and I stepped onstage and the tension was palpable. I don’t know how I thought to say this. I said, “Don’t worry. I’m not moving in.” And the room exploded. And the fact that they laughed so hard… Race was on people’s minds. People want to talk about it.

Posted at 11:33 AM, Jul 29, 2009 in Featured | Upcoming Events | Permalink | View Comments