Living in Color: What's Funny About Me: Stories from In Living Color, Pop Culture, and the Stand-Up Comedy Scene of the 80s & 90s

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Introduction

People ask me all the time about race in America: Is Trump a racist? Is America becoming more racist? They want to know what I have to say about race today.

What I tell them is: Why you asking me? Ask yourself.

What I’ve learned is that most white people only see me as black. They can’t see that a white family raised me; they don’t know the story of my mother, my grandparents, my father, brother, and sister. With them, I saw the world that white people see.

When I am performing in a club where the audience is mostly African-American, they see me as black and I can push the black gas pedal down hard, if I choose to, because I understand their sensibility. It is my understanding of both black and white audiences that makes my act.

Seeing the world through the prism of black and white is a talent I have—but it is not how I experience the world. I am part of the family of man. Just one member of the human family. When I’m with friends, family, other people in recovery, and when I’m onstage or performing, then I’m just me. I’m not a color. How I was raised and how I tried to raise my children—in a loving, compassionate, kind, and virtuous home—these traits have no color. Truth, ethics, morals, these are not white or black traits.

To me, black is not a color. It’s a cultural phenomenon. I have deep respect for all that African Americans have contributed to this country, and to the world.

Onstage I talk honestly about the way white people behave—like what it’s like to be standing on a line, waiting at an IHOP, that’s when white women take charge. White women speak up for the group. White women are like human rights advocates. White women aren’t racist. I’ll tell you why I say that: They are experts at defending young black mothers. They want justice. They’ll go crazy if there’s a pregnant black woman with a toddler waiting too long on line. They’ll start talking out loud, saying, We are waiting here! Is anyone here? She’ll say, That baby’s about to pop. Get this kid some pancakes. That’s white women to the rescue!

Everyone will nod and laugh because I’m talking about our common humanity. These are the things I’ve noticed and that we all know, but until I’ve pointed them out, you never put it together. In my act, I talk about how when black men fight with their friends, they are angry. But when white men fight with their friends, it’s as if they like them even more. White men, I like to say, are emotionally ambidextrous. They can be friends and angry all at the same time.

Like the way frat boys talk to each other, making criticisms seem like terms of affection: Dude! What the fuck! You are a fucking cretin, man. You are the worst! For them, that’s a term of endearment. They’re best friends after that.

But if one black dude says any of that to another brother, he better start running. It gets real dark with us, real fast. We don’t like getting mad. But if I say, I told you, stop that bullshit, Andre. I ain’t going to tell you no motherfuckin’ mo’, there’d be nothing funny about that.

For me, my comedy, my art, my life, is not about putting people down, it’s about bringing people together. Finding what we all know, but don’t always say.

* * *

What was so special about In Living Color was that when people saw that the majority of the cast was African-American, they thought it was going to be a black show. But it wasn’t. It was about the human family.

In Living Color was the first show of a postracial hip-hop nation. And I’m not sure if there’s been another one since.

If you take the long view of history, the story of the human family is not a white story, or a black story, or a yellow story, or a red story, or whatever skin tone you want to talk about. There were African kings, civilizations, and empires long before Anglo-Saxons became civilized.

I’m very proud of my heritage and feel fortunate to be part African in every respect of its amazing, magnificent history and culture.

It was only the institution of slavery as practiced by Europeans that sought to put blacks outside the circle of humanity. And for a few hundred years in the United States, they convinced themselves they succeeded. But history and human experience tell us different.

What we all know is that in exploring the particular, we touch on the universal. Whether it’s Nia Vardalos’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, or a film by Akira Kurosawa about samurai in ancient Japan, or a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer set in an Orthodox Jewish community in Poland, we relate to it because those stories are expressions of our humanity.

Take some of the most popular TV comedies of the last decades: Seinfeld took place in New York, Cheers in Boston, Everybody Loves Raymond on Long Island. Does anyone refer to these as white shows? Their casts and most, if not all, of the actors were white. And these comedies took place in cities where many African Americans live.

I believe that when Keenen Ivory Wayans created a hip-hop sketch comedy show, he was not making a black show, or a show for white people. He knew he was making something that the world had never seen, but that spoke to the human family.

Our performing cast included a gaggle of Wayanses (Keenen, Damon, Kim, Shawn, Marlon) and, among others, Jim Carrey, T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh, Kelly Coffield Park, Steve Park, Kim Coles, Jamie Foxx, Chris Rock, and Alexandra Wentworth. Carrie Ann Inaba and Jennifer Lopez were there as dancers and Rosie Perez as choreographer. The point was that they were the same as Keenen or me: We were part of In Living Color and we were living a life that wasn’t black or white—just talented and funny.

Chapter 1

White Woman to the Rescue

My story is my own and it’s unique, but it’s also part of a larger story of my times, very much influenced by social and political currents and events. No one who went through those times came out unchanged.

I was born in Greenville, Mississippi. The woman who gave birth to me, Tommie Gene Reed, was an African-American single mother. When I was an infant, she could not care for herself, much less me. When I was around two years old, she abandoned me. She left me in a pile of garbage. That’s the truth.

I know this because my mother, Barbara Jean Davidson, who is white, saw my foot sticking out from behind a tire in that pile of garbage and she rescued me. She took me to the hospital, and then decided to adopt me into her family. On the surface, that’s dramatic, somewhat tragic, and redemptive.

However, there’s more to the story.

* * *

When it comes to my family history, I have two different family histories. The first is a family I never knew. Growing up, I did not know my birth mother, nor, having been abandoned by her, did I seek her out. I had no idea if she was even alive, until I was nearly thirty-three. I was in New York, on the set of Woo, a film I was starring in with Jada Pinkett Smith, when my mom, of all people, called to say she had found my birth mother. This happened without my ever asking her to do so, or even wanting her to do it.

When I did finally meet my birth mother, Tommie Gene, face-to-face, I learned much from her that I am proud to know and that I would have never known otherwise, including that she was part Choctaw Indian and that my biological father was black and also had Native American ancestry.

My biological family, I learned, was made up of blacks and Native Americans, ex-slaves who were in Mississippi. Many of them took part in the great northern migration and settled, eventually, in Milwaukee. But learning that would come later.

When my birth mother abandoned me, she was at her lowest point. She was 100 percent defeated by her addictions, behaviors, and by her circumstances. You don’t have to be a religious person or believe in a higher power to understand that there was some kind of powerful intervention that made it so my birth mom, who couldn’t take care of me, abandoned me in a way that my mom could find me, adopt me, and raise me. There is redemption in that.

Now, as to why my mom, Barbara Jean Davidson, was in Greenville, Mississippi, when she found me. . . .

* * *

My parents, Larry and Barbara, were teachers living in Fort Collins, Colorado, when they listened to President John F. Kennedy’s televised speech, Report to the American People on Civil Rights, on June 11, 1963.

It is worth quoting that speech, in part, because the words ring as true today as they did when JFK said:

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?

Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or State or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.

The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.

We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is time to act in the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.

It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the fact that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.

Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality....

But legislation, I repeat, cannot solve this problem alone. It must be solved in the homes of every American in every community across our country.

In this respect I want to pay tribute to those citizens North and South who have been working in their communities to make life better for all. They are acting not out of a sense of legal duty but out of a sense of human decency.

Like our soldiers and sailors in all parts of the world they are meeting freedom’s challenge on the firing line, and I salute them for their honor and their courage....

That speech inspired my parents, so they became part of the volunteers who went to the South to Greenville, Mississippi, to register African-American voters and immunize children. While they were down there, they met my birth mother and got to know her.

When they came back to Greenville a couple years later, they wanted to follow up and see my biological mother. But she was gone. They heard that she left her youngest, a child, at a house where she had been living.

Being the curious person she is, my mom went to that address hoping to find out more about my birth mother and where she’d gone. She arrived at a raggedy old house that was full of people doing drugs. No one knew anything about my birth mom, nor did anyone say anything about a child.

As she was leaving, she noticed a pile of trash at the side of the house. Something made her look at that pile. And when she did, she saw a tire, and behind it a baby foot was sticking out. And that foot was mine.

She uncovered the trash. There I was, starved, and abused physically. There were bruises on my skull and a dent on the side of my head. Barely two years old, I had been left for dead, and I was already half-dead. But my mom took me into her arms and rushed me to a hospital, where I spent a couple weeks healing. By the time I returned to health, she had decided to adopt me.

My mom actually had to go through hell and high water to sign papers petitioning for custody, so that if the biological parent doesn’t show up, she can take the child with her. So my mom did it all legally. She had temporary custody of me, and then after a certain amount of time, with adequate attempts to contact the biological parents and no protest from them, she could file for a legal adoption. When that day came to take me, she took me back to Fort Collins, Colorado, where I was raised.

My birth mom’s name is Tommie Gene, so I was renamed Tommy. Originally I was named Anthony Reed by my birth mother, but my adoptive mom did not know that when she arranged for my birth certificate to be transferred to her family. She named me Tommy. Tommy Davidson.

* * *

My mom Barbara’s family has an interesting history. Her dad, Gerald G. M. Spence, Grandpa, as we called him, was a cowboy from Wyoming. Grandpa was a chemist and worked for the coal companies. He spent a significant amount of his career in Bolivia, where my mother spent much of her childhood.

Barbara’s older brother is the famous trial attorney Gerry Spence, who was the attorney in the Karen Silkwood case and in many, many other cases. (Wikipedia says he never lost a criminal case as a prosecutor or defense attorney, and hasn’t lost a civil case since 1969.) Her younger brother, Tom, was an artist and a political activist who lived for many years in New York City, and now has his own diner in Buffalo, Wyoming. The family has a big ranch in Laramie, Wyoming, which we visited often when I was a child.

Grandpa Spence was really a significant person in my life. One of the first things that I remember was when I was just four years old and playing cowboys and Indians, and my grandfather told me, I want to make sure that you’re the Indians, because the Indians are the good guys. He said, Tommy—very distinctly—I want you to know this. There were white people that didn’t kill the Indians, and that was our family. He instilled that in me real early.

I was like the spoiled brat of the family. He took me fishing and gave me my first camera. He and his wife, May, spent their twilight years in Gold Hill, Oregon, and Medford, Oregon, where I spent a lot of time during holidays and vacations.

I’d go there every Thanksgiving. We would watch the football games. And he had a contest with me to name what country the players’ families were from. I learned that, if it ended with ski that was Polish. Brown and Wilson, those were Irish or Anglo-Saxon. I could tell you if a last name was Greek, German, Armenian, Italian, or Russian. I learned a lot about where the names came from. He was a believer in equality, and a believer in people, and he instilled that in me real early.

He’d take me fishing by himself in lakes in Oregon. We’d stay there all day, just talking about the world. He was getting me ready for a world of discrimination and challenges that I didn’t yet know existed.

I didn’t know my father Larry’s parents too well. But I did spend a lot of time in Colorado with his parents and my cousins there. They were basically homesteaders and were among the first settlers of what became Colorado.

At family events, even as a child, I was the entertainer. I sang since I was a little kid. There was no church. It wasn’t a spiritual family. My father was part of the counterculture. He was of a post–World War II generation that rejected their parents’ conformity and their values. He was questioning everything. He rejected traditional religion. He rejected capitalism. Society was changing and he wanted to be part of that. Our home was a kind of hip, atheist, and agnostic family.

In 1968, when I was around five, my parents got divorced. Fort Collins was becoming more and more of a hippie town and my father joined a commune. That did not interest my mother.

She considered moving to Oregon or Wyoming, where we had spent time, but decided that she could best find work and continue to fight for social justice in Washington, D.C.

She was right, in the long run. At first, she was a secretary, but then she landed a job at Housing and Urban Development (HUD). She eventually became the union leader there for years.

* * *

In the short run, and as far as my life was concerned, her timing was not great. We moved to Washington, D.C., the week Martin Luther King Jr. got shot. We moved into what was then one of the worst black cities. There was a riot going on with tear gas, tanks, and federal troops. My sister, my brother, and I were lying on the floor in the car, wondering what the hell was going on.

Here’s the other thing: Until we arrived in D.C., I didn’t know I was black. I thought of myself as brown, like a brown Crayola crayon, and my sister, my mother, and my brother as peach crayons. When a cat has a litter, some of its kittens can be white and some black; it’s the same for horses and dogs. I just assumed it was the same for humans, and that I was just the brown one of the litter.

When I found that wasn’t true for humans, it just broke my heart.

We went to a swimming pool, me and my brother and my sister. My sister looks like Cindy Brady. My brother looked like David Cassidy. And all the black kids kicked our ass all the way home. My ass, too, because I was called a white-cracker lover. When I got home, I went to my mom, saying, I don’t understand what just happened, because all those kids kicked my ass and were calling me ‘white-cracker lover,’ and I don’t like white crackers. I like graham crackers.

Grown white men would chase me home from school. I barely made it in the door. My mom used to have us on the floor picking peas with the lights out. I didn’t know then, but she had us ducking. This was too rough for us.

We moved to Wheaton, Maryland, an all-white suburb of D.C. It was also where I first heard the word nigger, and I heard it all the time. I heard people calling my family nigger lovers all the time. It happened so much, I finally came to my mom and I was like, Mom, who are these ‘niggers’? They seemed to be pretty bad people. We need to stay away from them. What’s going on?

She said, That’s what people our color, when they don’t like people your color, call them. Again, my head just split in half. The whole world was changed for me at five. I’m like, What is this world we’re living in?

That shock doesn’t go away. Telling you about it, almost fifty years later, I still feel its sting, how it burned into my soul and turned my whole world upside down.

Still, the love I felt at home from my mother and my siblings had no color. My mom was a very involved, very nurturing mom, very I love you, very touchy. We would watch movies together. We were constantly touching each other, kissing each other, saying, Love you. Love you. We always did things together. Their love was what would give me a strong enough sense of self to survive the challenges I have faced in life. But Wheaton wasn’t for us either.

We moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, to an integrated housing development called Rosemary Hills which, to me, was paradise.

Our little housing development had a little backyard where I played with other kids, who came from all over the world. There, I was just a good kid from Colorado. Nuncie and Tuery were Vietnamese; Kwaku and Anana were from Africa; Nigel and Ricky were from Africa as well; Melander was from India; Lucy and Linda were from Guatemala; Mark Vitek was Italian; Graham was American. And we were all one. Just kids.

Our local school, the Rosemary Hills Elementary School, had its own song. We’d sing, We’re a rainbow made of children. We’re an army standing strong. I believe they had borrowed one of the songs from the movie Billy Jack and changed the words. (The original lyrics are We’re a rainbow made of children. We’re an army singing a song.) We used to sing it every day, and all the neighborhood kids were my classmates. At some point in the 1970s, Rosemary Hills was deemed too black, and kids would be bused to other schools in the surrounding Maryland suburbs. (It’s worth noting that they didn’t decide to bus white kids to Rosemary Hills, just black kids out.)

* * *

That backyard was my cocoon. In the backyard,