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" This is a country that was founded on racism. It was built on racism. It still continues to thrive through wealth disparity, and housing disparity is all built on the backs of racism. "

W. Kamau Bell

Racism

Housing

Country

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" Atheism is like the highest level of white privilege. It's like having a black belt in white privilege. "

W. Kamau Bell

White

Privilege

" I want President Obama to want to take your guns away. I don't trust you with your guns. I don't trust you to fire them safely. I don't trust you to store them safely. I don't trust your kids not to find them. I don't trust you not to get them stolen. "

" 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. "

" Usually, the news out of Florida makes me feel like being black in Florida can be a terminal condition. "

W. Kamau Bell

Feel

" I am a comedian: that means I laugh at things other people don't laugh at and also annoys my wife sometimes. "

" When I was starting out, I was just bringing a garbage bag of jokes onstage, pulling them out like, 'What about this? No? Alright.' I was just trying to be funny about anything. "

" Capitalism doesn't care about sentimentality. "

" I never wanted to be in the late-night talk show wars, and I think somehow with 'Totally Biased,' I got caught up in all that. Suddenly, there are articles about how we finally have a black voice in late-night. "

" People always want narratives to be clean and easy. "

" 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. "

" Most prisons in this country are in the middle of nowhere, which makes it much easier for us all to throw those people away. Out of sight, out of mind. "

" 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. "

" Shouldn't one of the goals of prison be getting as many of the inmates as possible back out into the world to be responsible citizens? Aren't we just wasting generations of human potential by keeping over two million people behind bars? "

" People live in their part of the Union, and if they don't travel a lot, then there is a tendency to believe that the other parts of America couldn't possibly be as American as their part. You can see it in the way people in the South scrunch up their faces when they hear words like 'New York,' 'Chicago,' and 'challah.' "

" I've always been a fan of these travel shows and documentary series. "

" I like living in Berkeley, but I know Berkeley's not the world. "

" In the deep corner of my heart, I'm a Chicagoan, but it's been covered over by 20 years of living in the Bay Area. "

" There's a lot of power in laughter. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" We should always be having a conversation about if we could make this country more inclusive and what we can do to do that. "

" Most people have the ability to turn their empathy engine back on, but there's such a seductive burn to not being empathetic. "

" I only halfway paid attention in high school Spanish class, and it may be too late now to catch up, no matter how many levels of Rosetta Stone I order. "

" Cops should not be separate from the black community or any community. Their salaries are paid for by the communities they police. They should be working for the communities they police. But as we saw in Ferguson, Missouri, they are not always doing that. "

" When 'Totally Biased' was canceled, I thought my career was over - but apparently it wasn't. "

" Donald Trump giving a speech on Islam is like me giving a speech titled, 'The Best Haircuts to Have If You Really Want to Succeed in Corporate America.' I could do it. But I'd mostly be making it up as I went along. "

W. Kamau Bell

Giving

Best

" The jokes I was always attracted to, and that I would tell for the longest, were jokes where I cared about the subject. Whenever I wrote a joke where I didn't care, even if it was really funny, the third time I told it, it would lose steam. "

" 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

" As a comedian, you see all parts of the country because you play there. "

" Growing up in the Midwest, Boston, and Alabama, I didn't know any Puerto Ricans... at least, I didn't know if I knew any Puerto Ricans. The only Puerto Rican that I had ever even heard of was Juan Epstein, one of the students from the classic 1970s sitcom 'Welcome Back, Kotter.' "