Nicholas Rashell

I’ll start with the good. I thought she had decent stage presence for her first show, being in front of a live audience with so much on the line is nerve wracking I’m sure, but she had more confidence then I’ve seen from other hosts on their first night. I thought her interview felt natural and there weren’t lulls where she didn’t know what to ask or do next, and she kept the conversation moving. I came out of it thinking that she was capable of hosting a show like this. On the flip side she used her race and sexuality as a crutch to galvanize herself with the audience. She alienated white people to try to get some laughs, but the jokes weren’t funny, they didn’t land and you can tell by the audience’s polite yet subdued reactions. I’m not against clowning on white people, Dave Chapelle and Kevin Hart do it for example and it’s funny, because they make it feel like they are messing with their little brother or something. Lilly just made it seem like she was ganging up on someone she doesn’t like. As if it would be better that white people weren’t there at all. I, as a white man, felt like she didn’t want me watching her show, while at the same time she kept insisting it was a show for everyone. The segment “white people noise” was a good concept but I felt the joke about “this is a white girl getting her hair braided as soon as she gets off the boat in X foreign country” was actually pretty racist. Like “stupid basic cultural appropriating white girls, amirite?” The rest were alright, the police siren was pretty funny and an example of a joke that makes fun of race but doesn’t feel racist. It’s getting old hearing about how white people are the only ones excluding others, and it is simply not true. She’s of Indian descent, why not call out Bollywood for inclusion too? It’s this type of rhetoric that is cementing racism and sexism not fixing it. I mean now after watching this first episode I feel like I’m on the defensive and need to point out things about other races to defend myself. I know I’m not the only one, and I know black people, and brown people, and so on feel the same way when a white person makes racist remarks and the cycle continues. I wish she could’ve gone on and just hosted and presented herself as a person like everyone else watching, but she made sure to point out her race, my race, and magnify that she doesn’t care for my kind. But it’s fine, not everyone is like that. I wish her luck regardless.