I went to the Improv Olympic on Friday with my girlfriend and a few friends to see their free show The Jam, a show where members of the audience get on stage and play some improv games. I was pretty impressed with people's talent, although I heard that a some of them were professional improv actors at the iO or other places around Chicago. In my (admittedly limited) experience with improv shows (read: improv at various clubs and shows in Chicago and on college campuses), they have tended to be overwhelmingly white affairs, both with the audience and especially with the performers. This night was no exception, with two of the people out of a total of twenty-five or thirty who got up being people of color, one an African American guy and the other a guy who appeared to be of South Asian descent.

One of the games entailed the guy who was leading the games ringing a bell after someone said a line that he didn't like or didn't think was funny, and they immediately had to come up with a different line. The African American guy was playing, and his set-up was at a concert. Nothing that anyone was saying was really very funny, and the last line of the skit was directed at him. The guy speaking, who was white, said something, but the bell was rung. He said something else, and the bell was rung again. The third time, he said something to the effect of, “Dude, I think your blackness is rubbing off on me.”

The place went nuts upon the delivery of this line. Questions of race aside, the comment wasn’t really funny—it didn’t quite make sense in the context of what they were talking about. But that one line made the place erupt in laughter louder than anything else that had been said that night. That line was the end of that game, and people were supposed to just leave the stage at that point. But the African American guy stayed on stage, put his arm around the guy leading the games, and addressed the crowd, saying, “I’ve been gone from this city for eight years. I’m glad to see that my race is as much of an issue as when I left.” He wasn’t laughing when he said this—he kind of had a grin-and-bear-it-type look on his face. People laughed when he said it, and the night went on. Every time he was up there for the rest of the night, a comment was made referencing his being black. And every time, he gave a slight smile (although he didn't look happy), shook his head or turned away from the crowd, and tried to continue on with what he was doing. It was like he knew that he had to just get through the requisite racist nonsense in order to participate in what he loved.

It was clear to me, watching this guy, that he was a huge fan of improv. He was yelling out things for the performers to do the whole night, and was cracking up hysterically at many of the jokes. And it was also clear that he had heard all of this shit before, and was trying to just plow through it to get on to the part he really enjoyed, the comedy that wasn’t about his race. Maybe I was reading into his body language and statements too much, but it appeared to me that he was caught in this struggle between participating in something that he loved, and dealing with the racist shit he had to put up with as a result of participating in it. No one else there who performed appeared to be going through this sort of internal struggle. They all got up onstage, did their thing, seemed to enjoy it, and got off. It wasn’t so easy for the person there that seemed to be enjoying the show the most.

What happened at the iO made me really wonder how white people can keep up the silly charade that we live in a color-blind society where race doesn't matter anymore. How is it that people can cling to this notion of not seeing color and of race being insignificant, yet in a situation like this all it takes is a drink or two and a light-hearted atmosphere for the racism to start flowing effortlessly?