W. Kamau Bell on being called out on prejudices he didn’t realize he had:

When I started doing my solo show, one of my good friends, Martha, said to me, she’s like, ‘Kamau, you can’t end racism and make sexism worse.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean by that?’ And she went through my solo show and pointed out all the different parts of it that she felt were sexist. And that’s a good friend, a friend who will tell you that in a way that you can hear. And that was a real revelation for me, is that you can’t sort of pick your issue over other people’s issue — that if you want to end the ignorance of something, you have to end all the ignorances or at least not make some of the ignorances worse.

Nobody considered my act political until America got a black president. I talked about race a lot. It just became that once Barack started running for president, I started to care a lot about the presidency in a way that I hadn’t care before. Because everyday on TV, I saw this black guy who was under a microscope and I felt like there was some percentage of me in that guy that I didn’t see in say George W. Bush or even Bill Clinton…and so my act really, I got labeled a political comedian, that wasn’t the thing I was trying to do.

—  W. Kamau Bell on being labeled a political comedian

“When I started doing my solo show one of my good friends, Martha, said to me, she’s like, ‘Kamau, you can’t end racism and make sexism worse.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean by that?’ And she went through my solo show and pointed out all the different parts of it that she felt were sexist. And that’s a good friend, a friend who will tell you that in a way that you can hear. And that was a real revelation for me is that you can’t sort of pick your issue over other people’s issue — that if you want to end the ignorance of something, you have to end all the ignorances or at least not make some of the ignorances worse.”

- W. Kamau Bell on being called out on prejudices he didn’t realize he had