I WAS born during war and named ‘peace’. It’s a contradiction I’ve spent my life learning to live inside of, and one that feels especially resonant right now, writes Selam Amare.
We are living in a moment of extreme noise: outrage cycles, call-outs, pile-ons, public reckonings.
Accountability matters. Harm matters. But so does discernment. And increasingly, I’m asking a question that feels uncomfortable but necessary: when Black men are cancelled, silenced, or discarded, who actually benefits?
As a Black woman, an immigrant, and a comedian, I’m watching how quickly Black men are removed from public conversation, not always through justice, but through erasure.
Not through repair, but through disappearance.
The nuance collapses. The context evaporates. And the space left behind is not safer or more honest, it’s quieter, emptier, and easier for power to remain untouched.
This isn’t about excusing harm. It’s about interrogating patterns. We rarely talk about how cancellation culture, especially in media and the arts, operates differently depending on who you are.
Black people who are outspoken, political, visible, or imperfect are far more likely to be flattened into symbols: ‘dangerous,’ ‘problematic,’ ‘too much’.
Once that label sticks, complexity is no longer permitted.
Look at figures like Misan Harriman, whose work and activism unapologetically centre Black life, protest, and power [file complaint to IPSO, if you have not already here https://newscord.org/action/telegraph-harriman-smear].
Or Dane Baptiste, whose comedy refuses to soothe audiences at the expense of truth. Or Reginald D Hunter, a long-standing cultural commentator whose sharp social critique often lands uneasily because it refuses politeness over honesty.
These men occupy public space loudly — and for that, they are often punished more swiftly, more severely, and with less grace than their white counterparts.
As Baptiste has said: “Black people and creatives especially, despite their undeniable contributions and sacrifices to and for social progression are left out of political discourse unless it solely pertains to race, despite all marginalised groups benefitting from it.
“Our exclusion has resulted in the resurgence of fascist rhetoric, with nobody knowing how to combat it effectively, that has to end.”
That statement sits at the heart of this conversation. Because what we are witnessing is not just cultural disagreement, it is structural exclusion dressed up as moral clarity.
When white public figures stumble, there is often a path back: a pause, a rebrand, a ‘learning curve’.
When Black public figures even simply speak too plainly, the response is frequently total removal. No roadmap. No restoration. No return.
And here’s the part we don’t say out loud enough: silencing Black men does not protect Black women. It does not create safer communities. It does not dismantle patriarchy or white supremacy.
In fact, it often strengthens the very systems we are supposedly challenging by removing dissenting Black voices from public life.
By being erased, institutions don’t suddenly become more accountable. They become more comfortable.
As a Black woman, I hold multiple truths at once. I know misogynoir is real. I know harm is real. I also know that collective punishment without context has historically been used against us, not for us.
The same mechanisms that silence Black men today will, and do, silence Black women, queer people, migrants, and refugees tomorrow.
The stakes are not theoretical. They are cultural. They are economic. They are human.
Comedy, for me, has become a way to sit inside these contradictions without resolving them neatly.
I don’t believe laughter is an escape from responsibility, I believe it’s a tool for truth. Comedy allows us to disarm hostility, invite empathy, and say the things we’re told are ‘too uncomfortable’ to name directly.
But art has never been about quiet survival. It has always been about resistance. On that note, I want to highlight the importance of grassroots comedy spaces that are actively centring Black and Muslim voices and artists from migrant backgrounds, often doing the work mainstream platforms overlook.
Projects like the Funny Muslim Ladies Tour by Salman Malik, Comedy Cafe Bradford by Bobby Jethro and Kash Kureshi, Unruly Comedy by Kobi Coker, Up the Score by Ricky Bolee, and Wise Fools (featuring Diesel and Bamphh) are not just comedy nights, they are cultural spaces of resistance, care, and representation.
They are building stages where nuance is not only allowed but celebrated.
This matters because there is a wider undercurrent of anti-Muslim sentiment in public discourse, often amplified by online spaces where nuance is quickly lost and narratives are easily distorted.
I recently shared a short video reflecting on my experience of being near a ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march, and the response made something very clear: context disappears quickly online, and people often project assumptions onto communities rather than engage with lived experience.
It has made me think more deeply about how different communities are framed, spoken about, and debated — and how easily those conversations become flattened into extremes.
On that basis, I also want to widen the lens in this piece by highlighting Muslim comedians and grassroots platforms who are actively shaping more honest, human storytelling.
In a time where so much is being simplified, their work insists on complexity, humour, and truth.
Championing art from Black, refugee, and migrant backgrounds right now isn’t a diversity exercise. It’s a political act. It’s a refusal to allow our stories to be edited down to whatever makes the mainstream most comfortable.
It’s a reminder that behind every headline is a human being, flawed, brilliant, grieving, loving, trying.
When we rush to silence Black men without nuance, we don’t move closer to justice. We move closer to censorship dressed up as morality. And history has shown us, time and time again, that censorship rarely stops with its first targets.
Peace, for me, has never meant passivity. It has meant presence. Showing up anyway. Speaking anyway. Laughing anyway.
In this upcoming solo show, *Selam Aleykum, I Come in Peace*, exists and is rooted in my lived experience as an Ethiopian diaspora woman raised between cultures, faith, grief, and belonging.
Born during conflict and named “peace,” exploring what it means to survive contradiction — to carry anxiety and humour, reverence and irreverence, softness and rage in the same body.
In a time where anti-immigrant rhetoric is becoming louder and more normalised, immigrant stories are once again being reduced to threats, statistics, or slogans. Black stories are flattened.
Black men are cast as problems to be managed or removed. And Black women are expected to carry the emotional labour of holding everything together — quietly.
In this moment, peace looks like insisting on complexity. It looks like resisting the urge to discard people instead of engaging with them. And it looks like making space — through comedy, culture, and conversation — for voices that power would rather mute.
Because if we’re not careful, we’ll wake up in a world where the only voices left speaking are the ones that were never at risk of being silenced in the first place.
Paul Hodge: I climbed Everest to redeem myself
