“I think it’s just part of my personality,” she said a month later, when we met again on a rainy, blustery day in late April, this time at a nail salon near Union Square. Ramsey is tall at 5 foot 10 inches, and I am nearly a foot shorter at 5 feet, she bent to my eye level.
Later, when I introduced myself to her, it occurred to me that, though Ms. Ramsey gave career advice, encouraged positive self-talk and offered the audience resources for finding a therapist. She listened more than she spoke, her face relaxed into an expression of concern while one of the other comics joked about the excruciating process of having her eggs frozen. On the panel on mental health in March, she was thoughtful and subdued. In the first episode of “Decoded,” for instance - in which she discusses the ramifications of associating black Americans with watermelon and fried chicken - there is an interlude in which she bites into a slice of watermelon, moans and, with a knowing look to the camera, says, “Tastes like oppression.” In another, she plays an instructor at a “race ambassador” training and cheerfully promises to teach the group of people of color to navigate the “brand new, awesome responsibility” of representing an entire culture in their office or neighborhood.īut she also has a sober side. Ramsey is expressive and animated, often pumping her fist into her hand to punctuate a point or breaking into an impression in the middle of a story, but she pairs this playfulness with biting sarcasm. Ramsey has done “what we all wish we could do,” which is “as we get better in terms of technical acumen and writing, and all the parts of the puzzle get sharper, the core of that person’s work and what they believe in stays the same and true to who they are. Fontana, the producer of The Box Show and a collaborator of Ms. In 2016, she also joined the now canceled “Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore” as a writer, bringing her internet expertise to a standing segment called “#HashItOut with Franchesca Ramsey,” where she dissected the Twitter controversy of the moment. And her subject matter has expanded to address issues like xenophobia, classism and mental health stigma. In 2015, she signed a deal with MTV to create and host a web show called “Decoded,” now in its sixth season, where she creates similar videos for a broader audience. Ramsey an online celebrity, and she pioneered a particular type of content: politically correct, identity focused comedy skits and commentary. Ramsey wears a long, platinum blonde wig, and, in scene after scene, her character makes problematic statements such as “Is it, like, bad to do blackface?”The video made Ms. Ramsey, 34, got her start on YouTube, and her big break came in 2012, after her video “Sh_t White Girls Say … To Black Girls” - a parody of the seemingly innocuous but actually offensive comments some white women make when interacting with black women - went viral. She’d taken to ignoring her trolls - some of whom have created a host of videos dissecting and disparaging her work and role as a “social justice warrior,” a pejorative term used to describe activists who speak out online - but with the publication of her book, she said, “I know it’s going to ramp back up.”
#THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY MANUAL#
In “Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist,” out May 22, she mines her own errors and condenses what she’s learned into a sort of manual on social justice, complete with a glossary of terms like ableism (discrimination against people with disabilities) and ally (someone who defends the rights of marginalized groups to which they do not belong). Ramsey’s work, as a comedian, writer and actress who comments on inequality, is perhaps particularly vulnerable to vitriol - and a new book may expose her to more. That night’s presentation was The Box Show’s last. She was one of three comics who had been invited to speak on a panel as part of The Box Show, an “intersectional feminist” program run by writer and director Kaitlin Fontana, who had for several years been performing inclusive comedy skits with a multicolored cast. Ramsey was on stage at Caveat, a Lower East Side speakeasy tucked underground behind a nondescript door and a long set of stairs.
As a woman of color, she said, she dealt with a lot of harassment, and unplugging had been “paramount for my mental health.” “The internet is an actual dumpster fire,” said Franchesca Ramsey to an audience in March, explaining why, though she’s built her career online, she’d been retreating from social media lately.
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