How to Be Black (19 page)

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.
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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.
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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 references 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.

DAMALI AYO

Thanks to the fact that I attended Sidwell Friends, I've been on the Internet since 1993, before there was even a graphical Web browser. For all my tech heads reading this, I rocked the Lynx browser and Pine for e-mail. UNIX text interface, represent!

Anyway, I spent a lot of time online in the decade that followed, and I always prided myself on knowing the latest trends in technology as well as Web culture. In the mid 2000s, I was living in Boston and was two years into my stand-up career. I had just begun to think about how to merge my comedy with my love of the Internet when I found Rent-A-Negro.com.

I was immediately excited and angry. “Why didn't I think of that?” I thought. The idea resonated with me at the deepest level. I knew what it was like to be the black person explaining all things black to white people, and I loved the idea of getting paid for it even more. I even briefly contemplated the idea of doing a companion site, Rent-A-Whitey.com, which would be for black people who needed fair housing loans, taxi-hailing services, and job interview surrogates.

damali also went to Sidwell (conspiracy?), but again, I didn't find that out until later.
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We were introduced in April 2010 by my college classmate and friend Lucia Brawley. (Lucia is Derrick Ashong's partner.) I had to make sure to get one of my Web satire heroes into this book, and the timing was perfect.

I met with damali in her LA apartment and asked her how Rent-A-Negro.com came to be.

Rent-A-Negro.com actually hit the Web in 2003, which is crazy because that was early, early, early Web art days. There was no such thing as a blog even then. There were very few websites just kind of starting to mess around with the Web as a medium. There was a great website about man-meat, where you could buy human meat. It was amazing. It was one of the best pieces of satire I've ever seen. So I was looking at that, and Keith Obadike
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had done his selling-his-blackness-on-eBay piece.

So there were a couple of tiny little pieces of race on the Web. Blackpeopleloveus.com was just barely out, and I was really, really stressed out.

I was living in a very white community with a lot of white people who were treating me very much like a professional black person. And I was burned to a crisp.

I was on the phone with my mom and I was telling her all this, and she said, “Well, damali, you can't just be everybody's Rent-a-Negro,” and I thought, “But if I charged them, I could.”

So I decided, what the hell? Let's see if it actually will work. I made this piece and I wanted it to seem as real as possible. And with my artistic intention I had every intention of going out on these performative rentals and taking whatever documentary [footage] I could take and then having it be really a performance piece.

I had like a white escort picked out, this big guy named Chuck. I had the whole thing. But then, I started getting rental requests that were really hateful: people who wanted to gang-rape me, people who wanted to hang me, lynch me. And those came from, from what I could tell, black and white people equally. Then I got one that was very threatening, that had . . . I don't know who would put their phone number on a threatening e-mail, but the phone number was my same area code. And I realized that shit was right around the corner, and I wasn't going anywhere.

So I got all these rental requests for me, and then I got a lot of requests from black people wanting to work for Rent-A-Negro.com, serious requests, and résumés and whatnot. Like serious . . .