Ziwe Fumudoh Asks: ‘How Many Black People Do You Know?’

In their interviews, Ms. Calloway and Ms. Roman appear candid with their responses and comfortable with the line of questioning — save for the moment when Ms. Roman’s face flushes after being asked how many Black friends she has. The entire interview feels like an intimate conversation between two people that we are allowed to listen in on. Ms. Fumudoh comes off as inviting, funny, honest and warm and also smart and no-nonsense.

When Ms. Calloway requests an “ally cookie” for buying books from a Black-owned bookstore, Ms. Fumudoh is stern and sincere when she responds: “There are no cookies in this game.”

“Ultimately I’m not trying to make any of my guests look bad,” Ms. Fumudoh said. “I’m just trying to start a really productive and healthy conversation that promotes healing with the trauma that is our racist history of this country.”

The point of the show is not to chastise people that have been publicly canceled, Ms. Fumudoh said. For her, the most interesting thing about the show is the comments she gets, particularly people saying, “I listened to those Ziwe questions and I’ve thought about how I would answer them.”

One thing Ms. Fumudoh, who studied African-American studies, film and poetry at Northwestern University, wants to be clear about is that she is not calling anyone racist or demonizing them. She finds racism against Black women to be the biggest obstacle in her life and wants to contribute toward positive change and healing.

“I don’t want to position myself as a racial authority because that’s not who I am,” she said. “I am just a Black woman who is an artist in 2020 during one of the biggest civil rights fights of a generation.”

Larry Wilmore, a comedian with deep credentials doing difficult work about race (he was the “senior Black correspondent” on “The Daily Show” and helped create “Insecure” with Issa Rae), said that Ms. Fumudoh has mastered awkwardness in conversations about race in a way he hasn’t seen before.