City Arts & Lectures

This year, journalists were out in the streets, covering racial reckoning and protest. Inside newsrooms, which are overwhelmingly white, media organizations are beginning to confront inequity in their own ranks. When the country’s newsrooms are mostly led by a privileged class of white men, what does that mean for the kinds of stories that get covered, missed, undervalued? In a first time co-presentation with UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, cultural critic, comedian, and CNN docu-series host W. Kamau Bell joins graduate student Chan’Cellore Makanjuola for a lunchtime conversation about race, storytelling, identity and the future of journalism.

Sociopolitical comedian W. Kamau Bell is the host and executive producer of the CNN docu-series United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell and author of The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6′ 4″, African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama’s Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian.

Chan’Cellore Makanjuola is an award-winning filmmaker from Plano, Texas. She is a second-year graduate student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, with her concentration in documentary filmmaking, and she is the co-chair of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) UC Berkeley Chapter.