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" America loses so much of what defines it if you subtract the Chinese influence. I know this because I spent 12 years living in one of America's most popular tourist destinations: San Francisco. And it would not be one of America's top tourist destinations without Chinatown. "

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" Since its inception, the government has broken and coerced treaties with hundreds of Native American tribes. And this is even worse when you realize that the native peoples of this land are negotiating for land that is, by all common sense and elementary school logic, their land. "

W. Kamau Bell

Government

American

Broken

" My dad and stepmom live in Mobile, Ala., and spend their vacation time an hour's drive away in Orange Beach, Ala. This means that, throughout my life, I have regularly vacationed there as well. "

" I have an upfront, sort of in-the-trenches knowledge of white people's trying to avoid their whiteness and replace it with something else. When I met my wife, we went through the whole race-slash-ethnicity conversation, and she told me she was Italian. Later on, I find out she's a quarter Italian, at best. "

W. Kamau Bell

Knowledge

People

" If we're constantly giving every one of our allies the woke test instead of inviting them to be more woke, we're doomed. You can be the most woke person of all time and be alone. "

" The alt-right is the Tea Party's younger, cooler, meaner brother. Like if the movie 'Back to The Future' was just about Biff. "

W. Kamau Bell

Brother

Back

" When I stand up in front of groups of people who agree with me, I know I have to really step my game up because I can't just sort of meet them where they're at; I have to take them somewhere else. They want you to challenge them and have good ideas. "

W. Kamau Bell

Step

Ideas

" There's no religion in this country that is more misunderstood, mis-categorized, and misidentified than Islam. "

" When Arnold Schwarzenegger was pronouncing it 'Cal-LEE-fornia,' he was right - he just didn't realize he was accidentally speaking Spanish. "

W. Kamau Bell

Speaking

Just

" The size of the city and the nature of how independent the neighborhoods are means that not only do people who live outside Chicago not know what is going on there, Chicagoans often don't know what is going on there. "

" Stand-up comedians know how to walk into a room, even if you're not performing, just read the temperature of a room, and can easily sort of tell what's going on or what people are sort of feeling in the room, and it allows you to sort of approach people. "

" I feel like, as a black guy, I can't not believe in God... I'd wake up in the morning, 'I'm black, and there's no God? I'm going back to sleep.' "

" No state income tax, no snow, lots of golf courses, and ready-made gated communities make Florida an irresistible place for seniors - the ones who have the income level - to retire. "

" I keep trying to write the crowd-pleasing slavery joke and the crowd-pleasing reparations joke, but any time you mention slavery or reparations in any detail, it seems to bum lots of people out. That's a challenge I keep putting in front of myself. "

" I want to write the reparations joke that makes people go, 'Yay! I'm so happy!' It's easy to go onstage and just make fun of all the 'isms' instead, but we can't all be Jeff Dunham. Although that pays very well... it pays way better to be Jeff Dunham than it ever paid to be George Carlin or Lenny Bruce. "

" Over the years, I'd hear Jon Stewart disavow being a journalist and say, 'No, I'm a comedian.' I'd be like, 'Stop pretending. You know you're a journalist.' "

" I've been to the Bahamas. It's a beautiful country with truly excellent people. When I took a cruise that docked for a couple hours in Nassau, it mostly reminded me of a giant version of my grandmother's neighborhood in Mobile, Alabama... but with better accents. "

W. Kamau Bell

Beautiful

Better

" Whenever I tell people in Berkeley, Calif., where I live, that I'm headed to the beach in Alabama, they are shocked. Most people outside of the Gulf Coast have no idea that Alabama has beaches - even though if you look at a map of Alabama, there is a part of it that looks as if it should belong to Florida. "

" I have always had a strange relationship to Portland, Oregon. It's a great city. The people who live there love it openly and loudly, and it regularly appears on the lists of best American cities. But something has always felt weird to me about Portland. And not in the way Portlanders mean 'weird' in their slogan 'Keep Portland weird.' "

" People born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens - except for the teeny, tiny, mind-boggling fact that if you live in Puerto Rico, you are not allowed to cast a vote in the election for president. That tiny fact starts to get bigger when you realize that electing our own leaders is the whole reason that we have a country in the first place. "

" I'm just another non-native whose mom told him we were part-Cherokee. "

" I just want to make TV that I want to see. "

W. Kamau Bell

See

Make

" America, the self-described greatest nation on Earth, has the highest incarceration rate on the planet. "

" The citizens of Puerto Rico pay taxes with no representation every day, because Puerto Rico is not a state. And the rules only became more confusing the more I looked into them during my time there. "

" When things aren't going well for black people, they blame the government. When things aren't going well for white people, they can't blame the government because the government is supposed to be for them. So they blame black people. "

" You can be as exclusive as you want to in your house, but once you walk outside your house, you have to realize that it's not your world anymore: it's all of our world. "

" If I have any talent, I think I have an ability to listen to people and also just meet them on their level. "

" At worst, spring break in Daytona Beach feels feral - like everybody is trying to re-create scenes from the movie 'The Hangover.' "

W. Kamau Bell

Worst

Spring

" As much as some people like to put down 'political correctness,' if it wasn't for political correctness, I wouldn't be free right now. "

" We really suffer from a hot-take disease, wanting to be the first one who has the hottest take. "

" When we filmed the premiere episode of 'United Shades of America,' it was like we were turning over a rock in the woods. The KKK was not part of the national conversation. They were really just a punchline for comedians when you needed to let the audience know something was really, really, really racist. "