Phoebe Robinson, comedian and author of Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes, knows it’s not easy to make serious topics funny, but she does it anyway.
The actress, known for her roles on 2 Dope Queens and Broad City, has an HBO Max stand-up special coming out in October called Sorry, Harriet Tubman. “Harriet Tubman, you worked so hard, and here I am making jokes about my boyfriend’s penis. All the apologies. I’m so sorry Harriet,” she tells Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal.
But Robinson knows when it’s time to get serious about issues in the country today, especially those facing Black people and people of color.
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She launched her own imprint called Tiny Reparations Imprint, which aims to shed light on serious topics through underrepresented writers and genres. She is personally passionate about advocating against “white saviors” in her own writing. They’re the people who even think they’re helping out when they’re not, she tells Molly.
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Case in point: The aftermath of the George Floyd protests in 2020.
“Some white people sort of then finally understood that racism exists and were like ‘move out of the way y’all I’m about to solve it all.’ And then they solved nothing, and just caused a lot of chaos,” she says.
She adds: “The way to go about solving things is not to take the fact that you looked up some infographics on Instagram and then decide that you’re going to fix everything. It’s really about listening, learning, and then doing the things that are not glamorous, that you can’t post on Instagram, but they’re really actually beneficial to the lives of Black people.”
An example of actually helping, she explains, is getting involved in local politics. She says joining a school board is one way: “If you have kids and you want to be more involved with the curriculum in school, [make sure] literature classes [are] not just the ‘classics,’ which are just mostly dead white guys.”
Definitely a good idea, since the right is already doing it, Molly points out.
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