Comedian W. Kamau Bell recently sat down with Terry Gross from NPR’s “Fresh Air” to discuss his latest Netflix special, Private School Negro, along with Finding Kamau, a three-part docuseries that reflects upon Bell’s ancestry.
In his new comedy special, Bell ruminates on being black in America and expresses his concerns about raising his biracial children in the age of Trump.
Finding Kamau allowed the United Shades of America host to trace his ancestry, and the DNA results revealed that he is “73 percent from Africa,” which is two percent less than the 75 percent results that he noticed from other African-Americans.
Humorously, he tells Gross, “All my life I have felt like I wasn’t ‘black enough’ and have been told by other people that I wasn’t ‘black enough.’ I’m literally not black enough!”
Later, Bell speculates on #MeToo and responds to men who are quick to call the movement a witch hunt. “I think that there’s going to be a generation of men who are properly taken down by this and … men who are sort of caught up in the shrapnel by this … and hopefully it will mean we will raise the next generation of [boys in to men] in a different way,” he says.
Listen to the conversation in full below:
