Wanda Sykes is tired—as a black woman, she's been fighting for acknowledgement of her humanity for as long as she can remember—but the overwhelming support for the Black Lives Matter movement has brought her a little glimmer of hope this time around. Speaking to Jimmy Kimmel on June 4, she told the late night host that though she's seen movements thrive and then lose momentum before, the energy of the current one has a totally different feeling that she thinks may last."This is different. You can feel it," she told Jimmy when he asked if she's worried people will get distracted by "the next thing." She continued: "You're seeing white people out there. I guess we just had to tell y'all, 'Hey, it's okay, you can march. Just because it's Black Lives Matter doesn't mean we don't want you involved. We need you involved.'"
A few days earlier, Sykes posted
an IGTV video (after some George Clooney-made tequila) in which she made the appeal to white people to step up. In the nearly 14-minute video, the comedian announced she's exhausted but she doesn't need sympathy from her white friends, she needs them to mobilize. She elaborated on that with Kimmel."We can't do it alone," she said. "If we're out there marching and asking for change, we need white people to do it. We need white people to tell white people to stop being racist because when we do it obviously it's not working. It's like the person that's kicking your butt: you can't ask us, ‘Hey why can't you make them stop kicking your butt?’ it doesn't work like that.”It's inevitable that some trolls are going to pop out when anyone takes a stand (especially when you're a woman of colour) and Wanda is no stranger to that. She also recounted to Jimmy the Twitter exchange she had with former
Happy Days teen heartthrob and current cranky man Scott Baio last week when he decided to come for her in an unprovoked Twitter attack. Wanda Sykes has been a comedian for so long, it takes a brave person to try and out-wit her and she, of course, clapped back in epic fashion.[video_embed id='1970253']RELATED: Keke Palmer’s empowering talk with National Guard goes viral [/video_embed]It all started when Wanda, who used to be a writer on the
Roseanne reboot,
tweeted out support for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden after he said, what Jimmy called, “that dopey thing” (aka that a
black person who votes for Trump "ain't black"). Baio decided
to come for her, calling Wanda a “full of s**t, hack liberal” and comparing Biden's comment to the infamously
racist tweet Roseanne Barr posted about former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, a black woman, that got Roseanne fired from her own show. For the record:
Wanda quit the show the same day Roseanne posted her racist tweet and
Joe Biden has walked back his remarks, which he called “cavalier.”Wanda, being a busy woman, didn’t even see his tweet for days, but when she got around to it, she
replied, “Oh hey Chachi! Apologies I didn’t see you there. I’ll keep it short," she said, referring to his
Happy Days character. She then educated him that there’s no comparison between what Biden and Roseanne said, before hoping Baio enjoys doing “whatever it is that you do.” He’s gonna need some aloe for that one.[video_embed id='1970265']BEFORE YOU GO: Should Justin Trudeau have called out Donald Trump by name? [/video_embed]
