W. Kamau Bell Confronts the Klan on His New CNN Show
Also read our interview with W. Kamau Bell on three things he learned about the Klan while making United Shades of America.
Early in the first episode of United Shades of America, comedian W. Kamau Bell, who is black, heads down a dark back road at night to meet with a representative from the Ku Klux Klan. It’s as tense as you’d probably imagine, with Bell and a CNN camera crew on the outskirts of a small, remote town in the South, waiting for a signal from a full-fledged member of the most notorious hate group in American history. The Klansmen exit their car in full Klan regalia, icily greeting the comic with a threatening tone on the verge of outright hostility. Bell, visibly shaken but clear-headed, talks with them briefly, and although the suspense never fully goes away, Bell’s able to deflate some of the fear and mystery through conversation. We quickly remember that inside those fearful robes and pointed hoods stand a group of small, ignorant, frightened men, blaming their own failure and confusion on the world around them. They’re still dangerous—Bell never lets his guard down, and seems relieved to get back in his car when the chat is done—but some of the power of their symbolism is drained away by Bell’s comedy. The entire first episode of Bell’s hour-long documentary comedy series, which premieres on CNN this Sunday night, is about the modern-day Klan; it’s funny and meaningful work, and unfortunately as timely today as it ever would have been.
You might remember Bell from Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, his smart topical comedy show that ran on FX and FXX for a little over a year in 2012 and 2013. Totally Biased generally followed the expected rhythms of a late-night comedy show, but United Shades of America, Bell’s first show for CNN, is something very different. It’s essentially a travel show focused on injustice, with Bell journeying throughout America to examine racism, institutional bias and other issues plaguing society, shining a spotlight on the worst parts of American culture and doing so with comedy and grace. He’s like Anthony Bourdain, only instead of food he’s looking for hate, so that he can demystify it through humor.
In Sunday’s premiere, Bell travels to Arkansas and Kentucky to meet with three different Klan groups. He even attends a cross-burning, which the Klan repeatedly reminds him should be called a cross-lighting. Two of the groups wear the full Klan kit, hiding their faces while explaining what they believe and why to a bemused Bell, who admirably is able to hide the contempt he must be feeling when talking to these racists.
Most strikingly, Bell visits the compound of Thomas Robb, a white supremacist who runs a Klan group and multimedia operation on the outskirts of Harrison, Arkansas. Robb’s followers don’t wear robes, preferring suits, khakis and polo shirts. They look like any crowd of people leaving a church on a Sunday morning, only Robb regularly preaches about a so-called “white genocide” and how whites and Christians are the most persecuted class in America. One of his assistants, who runs the youth program for Robb’s church and looks like an assistant manager at a car rental agency, is shown openly calling for the deaths of non-whites in home-recorded footage from a past white supremacy rally. These banal, smiling frauds, with their poorly produced online TV shows and hate-filled perversion of Christianity, are far more frightening than the robed Klansmen who light a cross with Bell at a trailer park in Kentucky.
Thankfully Robb isn’t entirely welcome in his own community. Bell meets with a task force in Harrison committed to countering Robb’s influence and defending the name and reputation of the town. The group’s almost entirely white and angrily denounces the hate preached by Robb. Bell also walks around Harrison’s small downtown, and his interactions with the people he meets are sympathetic, understanding and, at times, poignant.