“We Don’t Have to Pretend Like We’re Not Racist Anymore!” Aziz Ansari Talks Racism, Trump Inauguration on SNL
Aziz Ansari hosted Saturday Night Live (SNL) yesterday, and he devoted his opening monologue to the post-Trump rise in racism, news coverage of minorities, and Islamophobia.
Ansari started off on a conciliatory note. “You can’t demonize everyone that voted for Trump,” he began, “We’re talking about 63 million people.”
“But the problem,” he continued, “is there’s a new group. I’m talking about this tiny slice of people that have gotten way too fired up about the Trump thing for the wrong reasons. I’m talking about these people that, as soon as Trump won, they’re like ‘We don’t have to pretend like we’re not racist anymore! We don’t have to pretend anymore! We can be racist again! Woohoo!'”
“Woah, woah, woah, woah. No. No. If you’re one of these people, please go back to pretending. You gotta go back to pretending. I’m so sorry we never thanked you for your service, we never realized how much effort you were putting into the pretending, but you gotta go back to pretending.”
Ansari also skewered the logistics of “Trump won! Go back to where you came from!” shouts. “Is that the plan, by the way?” he said, “We’re all going to move? All the minorities? 40-something percent of the country? Every minority’s going to move? Beyoncé’s going to move? Beyoncé ain’t moving. I ain’t moving.”
Ansari closed by with a message of hope. “If you’re scared about Trump, if you’re very worried, you’re going to be okay, too. Because if you look at our country’s history, change doesn’t come from Presidents. Change comes from large groups of angry people–and if Day 1 is any indication, you are part of the largest group of angry people I have ever seen.”
(Via The Hollywood Reporter, image via screengrab from SNL‘s YouTube channel)
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