Status Updates From Everybody Loves Kamau! (The...

He watched me speak to Muslims, refugees, transgender folk, and Puerto Ricans in ways he was absolutely never gonna see on Fox News (you know, like human beings rather than problems ...)

despite my low self-esteem that causes me to want to be a stand-up comedian, I actually like me.

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usually one of us would leave the room if the other came into it. We often passed each other like two ghosts who were running late to haunt different houses.

he was like many first-generation Americans he knew, who "like Black people" but just don't especially like "Black people and white people dating."

Maybe he just had the thing that most families have and didn't think I was good enough for his family member and wanted me to earn it. Maybe he just took one look at me and saw a dude who was 7 years older than his granddaughter, had no immediate prospects for his future, and (horror of all horrors) wasn't Catholic. When you are a person of color, sometimes you don't want to think the color is affecting your life.

Grading their fine on a curve, I felt like their fine equaled a solid good ... make even a good plus.

I would love to know what he would have thought about the country coming apart at the seams and the president pulling on those seams.

white people in America are endowed with the privilege of picking which branch of their family tree they want to be from.

Black people have no idea what part of Africa we come from, it doesn't matter if you are even half-Italian. Just ask the actor Giancarlo Esposito. If you look Black, then you are Black.

Her grandfather, Tom, was Sicilian, 100% Sicilian, which made him 400% Italian.

When my mom asked me if I felt scared walking around the streets of Chicago at night, I responded, "No, Ma. I'm the one who people are afraid of." Somehow over the years I had forgotten that my lens on the world was not everybody's.

I just sat in my embarrassment and took that L as a moment to learn.

Melissa described herself as a Feminist the same way I described myself as Black. It was her identity, and it informed all her conversations.

Most knives that are in your kitchen just push their way through tomatoes like President Trump through a crowd of world leaders, both leaving a confused mess in their wake.

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He is the alpha and the omega and all the other Greek letters that nobody mentions.

a good knife is the kind of knife that you only use for one specific task, like cutting expensive cheese or boning a fish. A bad knife is an old butter knife that you keep so your kids can cut their own pancakes. A bad knife is like the knife that killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and then disappeared forever.

I imagine that one sign of a dysfunctional household might be that the knives are kept in places other than the kitchen.

And no, being a Fox News watcher doesn’t automatically mean that you are a racist. But it can be a slippery slope, from wanting a smaller government to thinking that America’s first Black president was born in Kenya to not trusting any Black people whose names cause Tucker Carlson’s face to twist into the disgusted and confused rictus that has made him a millionaire.

Exactly!

When you are a person of color, sometimes you don’t want to think the color is affecting your life. Sometimes you want to hope that people are more focused on the person part of “person of color.” You want to believe, even though you know deep within your bones that you are without a doubt experiencing racism, that maybe you are just jumping to hysterical, historical conclusions.

In that way, racism is not like a post-9/11 abandoned backpack. Because if you point out that you see a backpack sitting by itself in a subway train, and the authorities find out there was a bomb in that backpack, then you may end up a hero. But in America, if you say that you see racism, more often than not, it is only going to make your individual situation worse. Much, much worse.