Hari Kondabolu on Confronting Racism, Rage, and Solidarity

I was performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2011, and I was one of the few people of color in that city for that month—because the rumors were, in fact, true that it stopped this very well.

And so I was performing every night, very late at night. One night I was doing my show, and I thought I heard a racist heckle. And I just imploded—just exploded with anger. I don’t remember everything I said, but I do remember discovering that when a comedian threatens members of the audience with violence, it really kills the mood.

I was just going off on what had just been said to me. Then all of a sudden, audience members started yelling out like, “That’s not what she said!” First, I didn’t even know it was a she. I didn’t know who it was. I just heard something that had set me off. They told me what had been said, and it wasn’t particularly useful—but it wasn’t racist.

And I was horrified, right? So I tried to explain to the audience why that happened and how I had been used to this. It was 2011—it had been a decade at that point performing—and I had gotten used to audience members, often white, yelling racist things at me, especially in the years after 9/11.

I’m a brown person on stage talking about race, and I got so used to that. Sometimes they would yell, sometimes they would sit close to the stage and say things softly—but loud enough for me to hear. And I had to choose whether or not to confront them in that moment and stop the show, or whether to just swallow it.

And I often swallowed it.

In that moment, I couldn’t swallow it anymore. I exploded. And it might not have been appropriate, but what I was feeling—I gave them that moment, and I told them that. And all of a sudden, somebody in the audience shouted, “Too sensitive!”

And I responded, “Not too sensitive—just sensitive.”

Somehow I got through the set, and I got a few more laughs out of them. I walked off stage just humiliated by that moment.

There were four of us doing the show in Edinburgh. Another comic—he came up, his name is Paul Curry—and he gave me a hug immediately. He said that what I did was brave. And I was like, “What are you talking about? I just screamed at people in front of me. That was brave?”

And he said, “Because that audience needs to understand what you, as a person of color, go through every time you go on that stage. I needed to hear that. They needed to hear that. And even though you were wrong, it doesn’t mean in the grand scheme you were wrong. They needed an honest moment from you. They needed that. They might not know they needed that, but they needed that.”

And he said I did the right thing.

I was struck by a couple of things. One—that I, as an Indian person, was helped by a white man whose last name was Curry.

That’s why I think the future is a story in my head.

And the second thing—I just thought about the number of times I have been either a victim of racism, or seen somebody else experience racism, or been in racially awkward situations. And the number of times that the white people in that space did nothing. Not that they didn’t feel it—they just couldn’t say anything.

And how many times I had to feel that.

In this moment, I saw this person step up. And it wasn’t in a public way—it didn’t need to be—but in a way where he made eye contact with me, where he hugged me, where he knew exactly what I needed to hear in that moment.

And I think it gave me a level of faith that I think, perhaps, I could have hardened—and didn’t feel was possible. It gave me a moment of faith in my fellow performers and white people.