'People say I hate white people': comedian Ziwe on her provocative new show

How many Black friends do you have? Can you name five Asian people? Did your ancestors own slaves?

If you don’t have the answers to these questions, you might find a new live show by Ziwe Fumudoh, who goes by the stage name Ziwe, incredibly uncomfortable.

Then again, discomfort is the raison d’être of the show, which sees Ziwe grill her guests over 30 intense minutes on Instagram live, asking them awkward, difficult and sometimes seemingly impossible questions on race and sexism.

Her guests have included many a liberal white woman whom the internet loves to hate, such as the food columnist Alison Roman, the influencer Caroline Calloway and the actor Rose McGowan. But her guests recently have also included Jeremy O Harris, who wrote Slave Play, and the comedian Dana Donnelly.

The live, interactive nature of the show allows viewers to chip in, so as guests fumble over questions such as “Qualitatively, what do you like about Black people?” viewers can – and do – roast them in the comments section.

Roman apparently likes the way Black people dance and cook – but we’ll never know more because Ziwe stopped Roman short, simply saying: “I’m doing you a favor”. These moments – when Ziwe steps in to save her guests – are a brief reprieve for those who find the show lacking in generosity.

But her questioning does, at times, feel torturous. Asking Roman (who faced a backlash after she called Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo – two Asian women – sellouts) to name five Asian people was never going to go well, and even if Roman could name 10, it wouldn’t be particularly illuminating. So what, exactly, is Ziwe trying to achieve with this exercise?

Ziwe says she does not want her guests to fail, but she does believe in asking hard questions. “What comes out in my interview tactics is I’m actually trying to be nice, to be kind, to educate, not shame, necessarily,” she says. “Sure, I do it in a way that is really confrontational, but my goal is to help and heal people. I get comments like ‘Ziwe, you hate white people and you’re the devil.’ I don’t think those people necessarily understand the concept of my show or have watched a longer clip,” she tells me on an early morning phone call from her Brooklyn apartment.

There are moments when her frank questioning captures something that sensitive questioning cannot. After Caroline Calloway proudly exclaims that she is fed up with white people pretending they’re not racist, Ziwe’s sharp reply – “Oh, so you’re a proud racist?” – reminds us that bragging about doing the bare minimum shouldn’t be commended.

After Roman’s numerous defenses for her recipe for a bastardized curry (ingredients: chickpeas, coconut milk, turmeric) which she calls a “stew” – ignoring the recipe’s roots – it was refreshing to hear Ziwe ask: “Would you consider yourself the Christopher Columbus of food influencing?” “No, I wouldn’t,” said an irked Roman, who went on to define a curry as complex, while “a stew is a generic blanket term for like a thick soupy liquid dinner”.

Lest you think she is too harsh on her guests, there’s a method to this exchange, Ziwe argues. “Calling someone a proud racist, it’s radical – it seems very cruel and intense and violent but I am actually making the statement that like, ‘Hey, we need to name this thing that is sort of plaguing our nation or else we are doomed.”

Some argue that making people feel embarrassed is not a good way to tackle racism, but that often overlooks the other person in the debate: the person who is afflicted by a racist, sexist or homophobic comment, but has to prioritize the feelings of the offender above their own.

In other words: why are we more worried about being called a racist than being racist?

Considering she is a comedian, not an activist, to burden Ziwe with the far from enviable task of curing racist America with her show could be considered presumptuous. Why should her job be to change minds, rather than make people laugh? But she tells me it is supposed to be political during our interview, so I send her a text after our call and ask her whether the accusation is ever leveled at her:

“Ziwe, I’m wondering, do you ever get people saying things to you like: ‘If you really want to change minds this is not the way to go about it. You’re putting people off; you’re probably only talking to people who agree with you.”

“Nothing that literally, but here is a tweet I got tagged in,” she replies, sending me a screen-grab of a tweet, in which someone says: “I struggle to see how things like Ziwe’s ‘gotcha’ tactics are helping anything at all.”

“How did that make you feel? Do you buy it?” I ask.

“I disagree, but I encourage those who don’t approve of my tactics to join me in finding positive ways to effect change. I’m just doing my best like everyone else,” she says.

Ziwe argues there are no wrong or right answers on her show, just honest ones. “The questions are designed to be impossible because ultimately the way that we are dealing with race is impossible. To pretend that you don’t have a racist bone in your body, that’s a fallacy, that is not based in reality,” she says as she suppresses an exasperated laugh. “It’s not an impossible question if you just say what you think,” she says.

There are, obviously, incorrect answers. The internet has a furious appetite for wrongdoing: people are swallowed whole for making mistakes, and people often love to pile on, to admonish the wrongdoer. When this happens, there is no compassion, no context, just right and wrong – only, right and wrong constantly changes, and people’s moral compasses expand, shift and change overtime. At least her guests are showing they want to learn.

But Ziwe doesn’t really believe in cancel culture. “People who get ‘cancelled’ never really get cancelled, right? They get a lot of press and they are trending on Twitter but I don’t know if we see legitimate repercussions in their lives,” she says. “I think if you say racist, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist stuff then yeah, people are gonna be mad at you, and you shouldn’t be surprised or go home like a boo-hoo baby and cry. You deserve everything that comes to you, right?”

This is a confusing set of statements, and relate to the main criticism that can be made of the show. If cancel culture is not real – with its victims suffering no concrete consequences outside of having their profiles elevated as the internet obsesses over them for weeks – it would be fair to ask whether Ziwe’s show feeds that publicity machine. Some will say there are impacts (Roman’s New York Times column was suspended after her comments about Teigen and Kondo).

Still, to describe the show as simple “gotcha” comedy or a show based on the celebrity status of the formerly “cancelled” misses the mark. Ziwe’s former show, Baited, also used reductive questioning to remind us of our racial biases. In it, Ziwe deliberately race-baits her guests as a device to make people think about the way that we discuss race.

In one episode, the tables are turned: Ziwe is interviewed by the completely un-baitable comedian Aparna Nancherla, who tries to get Ziwe to do something racist. They play a game where Ziwe has to help Nancherla guess the name of a celebrity – normally an ethnic minority with an accent. Ziwe seems uncomfortable, but she won’t bite.

“I want the audience to see these excruciating, hard questions and say, ‘Hey, how would I answer that question?’ I want to point out my guests’ racial biases, the audience’s racial biases and my own racial biases. I am constantly trying to critique culture. So if you’re asking me who am I laughing at? Everyone! Including myself, always!”

It might be cringe-making to watch, but Ziwe warns that she doesn’t want you to just feel angry at Caroline Calloway when you watch her interview – she wants you to think about how Calloway is a product of the world we live in.

She wants people to come away from the show equipped to have these conversations – something she could not do when she was younger.

“I remember going to prep school, going to university, and I didn’t have the vocabulary where I could have these really tough conversations to really confront racism. I didn’t have the vocabulary to defend myself,” she says.

For her, the show is not just radical, it’s a kind of therapy: “I am trying to think about my younger self. How would I want to defend that version of myself? I hope I am doing that for my audience too.”