Who's Afraid of Ziwe Fumudoh?

For guests who dare to appear on the comedian’s Instagram Live show, the question is not if you are racist, but how.

- By E. Alex Jung

"I GET WILD DMS,” Ziwe Fumudoh tells me as she scrolls through her phone. There are suggestions for guests on her Instagram Live show, where she asks subjects discomfiting questions about race: Candace Owens (“I could see it working in studio”), Rachel Dolezal (“The time to talk to her was 2015!”), or some random racist person (“My audience would be confused”). There are those who ask her to do emotional or intellectual labor for them when Google is just a click away. Then there’s a certain flavor of kink, where “men specifically ask me to dominate them in this raceway,” she says. “There is a humiliation fetish.”

She has dressed the part: an all-black outfit (tube top and bike shorts), cowboy hat, and, for the pièce de résistance, latex gloves that stretch to her elbows. We’re sitting across from each other at a picnic table in Brooklyn’s Herbert Von King Park. She peers at me over a black face mask fringed with lace, her eyelids lined with white and pink. It is, I point out, a very “comedy’s dom” look, which is what her friend and fellow comedian Alex English calls her. It was accidental, she swears! She’s just attracted to texture!