BRUNSWICK, Maine — Hari Kondabolu, a 2004 Bowdoin College graduate, has built a career on the punchlines he has used in standup comedy routines around the world, but he pulls no punches when talking about race relations in the U.S.
“I don’t understand people saying this isn’t a civil rights movement when people are being murdered, when police are openly murdering black people on camera and getting away with it,” Kondabolu said Tuesday by phone from Los Angeles.
Kondabolu joins DeRay Mckesson, who graduated from the Brunswick college in 2007, as a Bowdoin graduate giving worldwide voice to the experiences of people of color in 21st century America. That voice is powerful, insightful and often angry.
The 32-year-old son of Indian immigrants — “one of the most exciting political comics in stand-up today,” the New York Times said — has shared his sharp, intelligent humor on Late Night with David Letterman and Conan O’Brien. In 2014, he released an album, “Waiting for 2042,” a reference to the year the U.S. Census Bureau predicts whites will become a minority in the United States.
Kondabolu is quick to distinguish his comedy from Mckesson’s work “in the trenches, documenting things with risk to his body” and being arrested Monday during a peaceful protest in St. Louis.
“DeRay’s on a mission to expose truth, to save his and so many people’s lives,” Kondabolu said. “My intent is to be an entertainer. I’m speaking my truth. My mission is to create the best possible art that’s honest with myself.”
That art regularly includes biting, satirical takes on current political — Kondabolu majored in comparative politics — and cultural differences that fuel racial tensions in the U.S.
‘Outnumbered’ in Maine
Kondabolu’s years at Bowdoin figure prominently in his act and largely shaped his outlook on the world, he said Tuesday.
“My experience in Maine, my time at Bowdoin, are probably the biggest reason I am the way I am with regard to my career and the way I talk about race,” he said. “I knew what I was up against at that point. Before, I thought [Queens] was like the whole country. Then you go to Maine and you see how outnumbered you are.”
As a college freshman, he came to Maine from Queens, “arguably the most diverse place in the world,” he said Tuesday.
“I remember the admissions office telling me, ‘Don’t worry, Hari, there will be a surge of diversity when you get to campus this year,’” Kondabolu said in a performance recorded in May for The Moth Radio Hour podcast. “I didn’t know I was the surge they were talking about.”
He spent four years at the college as “one of the few people with pigment on campus,” answering questions about where he was from — Queens — and marveling at the “privilege” of the nearly all-white student body.
“The things people would say in and out of class — racist, homophobic, sexist things — and not feel any responsibility,” he said. “There was this idea that everything was given to you, you don’t have to work hard.”
Kondalobu said he’d think to himself, “I can’t wait to graduate” — he went on to earn a master’s degree in human rights from the London School of Economics.
“But then I realized that is the world — that is power,” he said. “That reality taught me what things were going to be like. It prepared me for the future more than [a more diverse college] would have.”
Double standard
He found that white students were defensive when he talked about race but would be open to the same idea when a white student raised it. He attributes this to guilt.
“I think people intrinsically have a sense of what’s fair or not fair,” he said. “You got something easier [than someone else], and you feel bad this is happening. … It’s not just about race; it’s about everything. I’m a man, I’m heterosexual, I’m cisgendered — I’m privileged. I didn’t earn that privilege — I was born with it.”
During his senior year, Kondabolu was attacked as he walked home along Maine Street in downtown Brunswick. “Three white dudes I’d never seen before chased me down a street and cornered me,” he told The Moth. “And one guy put his arms around my throat, and they asked me what I was doing here: ‘What are you doing here, why are you here, what are you doing here?’ Over and over for 10 minutes. They they finally let me go and started laughing.
“They didn’t go for my wallet until it was like five minutes in,” he said. “They just wanted to see the look on my face and see where this would go … they had this idea of, ‘We can get away with this and there’s nothing anyone can do.’”
What was almost worse, he said, was telling his white friends the next day.
“I said, ‘I can’t believe after all this time in town I was a victim of a hate crime,’” he said. “My friends said if they didn’t use slurs, it wasn’t a hate crime.
“The racial element was obvious,” he said Tuesday. “But, ‘Why are you here’ is vague enough that you could argue it wasn’t [a hate crime]. But when you are the one being oppressed, you have to make a case — you can’t just deal with your trauma. You’re always testifying about your experience.”
Kondabolu didn’t report the incident for nearly a week, and after all that time, the police said they couldn’t do anything, he said. Bowdoin set him up with “someone very sweet in the diversity office,” but, he said, “she didn’t quite get my experience.”
The college “did the best they could with what they had for resources,” he said, but he wishes they offered more.
“If you’re going to bring all these kids of color who don’t have any money to campus, you have to make sure you give them the resources they need,” he said.
On Wednesday, Bowdoin College spokesman Doug Cook said students of color comprise more than 30 percent of the student body, and the college has made many changes to support those students, including the addition of an associate dean for diversity and inclusion and a director of the Center of Multicultural Life, as well as an “Intergroup Dialog,” in which 15 students are trained to meet with campus groups to hold workshops on race and “difference.”
Honest dialogue is uncomfortable
Kondabolu also shares his humor and insight off the stage, with a devoted Twitter following of nearly 56,000 fans.
Of the civil rights movement that has grown in the past year following the death of Michael Brown Jr. and deadly police actions against other unarmed black men around the country, Kondabolu said, “it’s not new. The only thing that’s new is videos get passed about quickly. For years, we’ve had our black friends tell us, ‘this is our experience, this is happening.’ We said, ‘you’re making it up, the police are there to serve you.’ And now all of a sudden we’re confronted with the truth, ‘Oh my god, they were right all the time and I didn’t listen’ … So many people are like, ‘I can’t believe this is the country I was living in.’”
Kondabolu suggests those who are watching the new civil rights movement from afar learn as much as they can by reading — he pointed to Bell Hooks, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates — and “listening more than you talk. Sometimes you don’t need to have an opinion on something. When people of color say something, you don’t need to talk about your experience. Maybe sometimes you’re not the expert.”
He also suggested people “drop their guard” and “be willing to listen to stories that make you uncomfortable. Even if they don’t seem logical to you, listen to where that person is coming from. There are key pieces of information you don’t have because you don’t have that certain lived experience.”