Five years ago, when then-President Barack Obama spoke at the LBJ Presidential Library's Civil Rights Summit, he cautioned his audience, "History travels not only forwards. History can travel backwards; history can travel sideways."
Yes, it can, and so it made sense for the LBJ Library to select a panel of folks whose job it is to see the humor and irony in things to cap the afternoon program of the second day of the library's three-day Summit on Race in America, to contemplate the state of race a little more than two years Obama's successor took office and history perhaps went a little sideways.
And so it was that 90 years after Martin Luther King Jr. was born, and 400 years after the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown, Va., it fell to comedian Dulcé Sloan, a correspondent on "The Daily Show," to explain that the genius of King's breakthrough Birmingham bus boycott was getting between white men and their money.
"That's why the Birmingham bus boycott worked. Because black women didn't get on the bus for 381 days," Sloan said. "That's how they got that to work. But it wasn't two months. It wasn't three months. It was over a year because you messed the white man's money up, and as much as people want to get upset, my mother told me from the very beginning, if you want to change anything in America, you got to ... up a white man's money."
Sloan said she and the other three comedians she shared the stage with — Sasheer Zamata, George Lopez and Aparna Nancherla — were doing well because "it got to the point where America went, 'we want to see people of color in our comedy,' and the money started to reflect that."
"That's the point," Sloan said. "We have these conferences, and everybody's supposed to act like this is some huggy and touchy-feely. ... It's not. Black people wake up every morning, and they don't want us in this country, and we built this. ... So it's about the money.
"We've been funny the whole time. We've been talented the whole time," Sloan said. "All of the music in America comes from us."
"You turn on your television set, and Monday night it's all black people. Tuesday night it's kind of mixed. Wednesday night it's 'Empire,'" Young said. "You know I can't root for Virginia here in Texas, but I like to see white boys playing basketball. They shouldn't give up."
None of the four comedians Tuesday said they were particularly political. They were just talking about their own lives.
After Zamata introduced herself as black but, per a DNA test, 20 percent white, Sloan said, "I, too, am black" and 20 percent white.
"If you want to know how we're 20 percent white" — Sloan said, and clapped her hands — "slavery. We didn't choose it. It chose us."
Sloan said people see her as black, female and plus-sized, "and that's before I open my mouth. " Stacey Abrams, who came close to winning the governorship in Georgia and is now contemplating a run for U.S.Senate or president, has made the same observation, that she has to overcome the phenotypical obstacle, for many people, of being a black woman of a "sturdy build."
Before the session ended, Cappy McGarr, co-creator of the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for Humor and a LBJ Foundation Board trustee, asked the comedians to tell a favorite race-related joke.
"I was playing golf when this guy said, `Did you hear the one about the two wetbacks?"' Lopez said. "And, I'm like, `Hey, hey, hey.' And he stops and goes, `You've heard it?'"
Nancherla told a joke she said was borrowed from a friend, Chicago comic Dwyane Kennedy: "To solve racism in this country. we need to start a dialogue. We need to start talking with each other. For example, `Hey, White Man, why are you so tense and afraid?' And he just goes,`Hey, Mr. Black Man, how'd you get in my house?"
Zamata recalled an Iranain Lyft driver telling her a joke that "he said really kills with black people. He goes,`Do you know how to save a white man from drowning?'" The LBJ audience answered, "No."
And Sloan's joke was from a redneck friend who said he couldn't be racist because "I've got five TVs in my house, and all of them is colored."
"It's stupid," she said, "but I like it."