Navigating Hollywood's Creative Police State

Black Lives Matter protests are moving from the streets to the executive suites. This is the story of trying to make my film hashtag—and why I abandoned it in the end.

- By Mamoudou N’Diaye

I’VE BEEN PERFORMING live comedy since 2010. I’m a comedian, TV and film writer, Sundance Fellow, DJ, Mauritanian, and Muslim. I have a bachelor’s in behavioral neuroscience because I was interested in prejudice, how it manifested physiologically and psychologically in the brain, and keeping my African parents happy. Here’s one of the first jokes I ever wrote:

“I have a Black friend who had sex with a white woman and she started saying ‘yo’ and ‘dope.’ Yes, he sexually transmitted Ebonics to her. At first I was mad! I was going to hop online where, you know, where justice happens. Then, I was like, ‘You know what, what if it happened the other way around? What if I had sex with a white woman and could finally say, ‘Hello, officer’?”

I began to notice that when police brutality wasn’t in the news, that punch line was super hot fire for alabaster audiences. But when a Sandra Bland, Mike Brown, or Walter Scott was in the headlines, for white audiences, it was all “Hey bro, too soon.” We all live on a Race-Time Continuum: Black people perceive racism as barely decreasing over time, where white people dip in and out of traumatic events in the Black community in waves.