W. Kamau Bell
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.'Collection: Relationship
I've turned the annoying questions that white people ask into a career, so I understand that's where I live.
Atheism is like the highest level of white privilege. It's like having a black belt in white privilege.
That's how to make a stand-up comedian: You take a person who is uncomfortable and try to squirrel their way out of it through humor.
I am a comedian: that means I laugh at things other people don't laugh at and also annoys my wife sometimes.
I can't imagine what it must be like to be one of the indigenous people of the United States of America. I can't imagine watching the news every day - as people debate whose country this is and who should be in charge of it and how to make it great again - and hardly ever see your people brought into the discussion.
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.
People always want narratives to be clean and easy.
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.
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.'
I grew up in a household where we talked about race all the time, and that's sort of in me. So if I become the Anthony Bourdain of race and culture, then great!
Comedy can be very deep sometimes.
I am proud to be black man.
Women don't get the benefits of America the way men do.
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.
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.
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'm happy that I know how to speak 'Southern.' I spent a lot of time in Alabama throughout my life. I even lived there for part of junior high and high school, so I learned the true beauty and mastery of the Southern dialect. 'Y'all' is one of the greatest and most useful words ever invented.
The Olympics are great, but they only truly mean something when the moments that come out of them are bigger than the individual sports.
The alt-right is the Tea Party's younger, cooler, meaner brother. Like if the movie 'Back to The Future' was just about Biff.
We all need to make sure that we fully understand our country.
The alt-right is working hard to cloak its desire to create chaos in the streets as free speech. They say they want to air their views, but it's about provoking violent reactions. We all can easily see that this is not about free speech.
Puerto Rico is complicated. The people are complicated. The history is complicated. The story of the United States' relationship to Puerto Rico is complicated.
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.
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.
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.'
Chicago is a world-class city filled with amazing people with big ideas.
Knowing that more people associate Chicago with street violence than generosity is difficult for me because, despite all my proclamations of being from the Bay Area, I have spent much of my life in Chicago. So I have a deep love and a pretty good understanding of the city.
One thing that people outside Chicago need to understand is that the city is not just one thing. It is one city, but it is huge and sprawling. And historically, it has been one of America's most segregated cities.
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.
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.
Even if the KKK isn't the outsized presence it once was in this country, many of its principles and ideas are alive and well.
The day-to-day discomforts of prison life, combined with the big-picture realities of mass incarceration, do not add up to a party.
America, the self-described greatest nation on Earth, has the highest incarceration rate on the planet.
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.
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?
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.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger was pronouncing it 'Cal-LEE-fornia,' he was right - he just didn't realize he was accidentally speaking Spanish.
There's no religion in this country that is more misunderstood, mis-categorized, and misidentified than Islam.
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.
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.
As a black person in this country, I am always frustrated by the lack of attention my people's issues get. But at least the news and politicians are talking about not talking about our issues. Native issues are basically ignored.
I'm just another non-native whose mom told him we were part-Cherokee.
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.
If we go the direction that many of the leaders of this country want and close the borders and discourage new immigrants, then we are ruining the possibility of new ideas and new experiences.
The downside to defining everything Chinese as different than American is that all things Chinese then become exotic.
For some people, the definition of who is and who isn't an American defies logic, historical accuracy, common sense, decency, good manners, the milk of human kindness, enjoyment in the good things in life, and love of good food.
When we let cops talk about themselves as a separate community, then we are letting cops wall themselves off from the rest of us. We don't generally do that with any other jobs. We don't talk about the barista community or the Wal-Mart greeter community.
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.
In communities of color, such as Ferguson, it often feels like the police are protecting the white community from us instead of protecting our communities from the criminal element.