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1
It's tense racially. You can feel it in the country. It's very tense. I worry all the time about people in my life, you know?
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2
Because, like, my dad is an immigrant, so I worry every day that someone is going to treat him poorly because of the color of his skin.
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3
And my mom is a white lady from the suburbs, so I worry that she's gonna be the one to do it.
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4
Dude! Every time my mom starts yelling at my dad for something now, I just start recording her on my cellphone. I'm like, "You're getting canceled⁽¹⁾, okay?"
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5
We're trying to be better now. We're trying to be good. It's great. You know, we're in this movement now where, like, people, like, love diversity and, like, everyone loves culture.
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6
It's amazing. It's very beautiful. It's just, It's exhausting to me now to always have to be, like, proud of my culture.
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7
Because I never learned how to growing up. Like, all I learned how to do growing up was how to push it away to get by.
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8
So now it's just frustrating because now I have, like, these, like, woke friends⁽²⁾ that are mad at me for not being as authentic as they want me to be.
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9
They're like, "Why don't you know how to speak Arabic?" And I'm like, "Because I wanted to come to your birthday party in fifth grade, okay? That's why."
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10
Yeah. No one wanted a kid speaking Arabic at Laser Tag. Like, I don't know if you remember. It's tense.
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11
I hope it's genuine. That's all I'll say for this movement. I hope it's genuine change. I just don't think it is. It's just, It's too rapid of a shift. You know? It's hard for me to get used to we went really polar opposites.
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12
Like, I'm 24, and I remember a different America. That's how recently no one cared about this.
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13
I remember as a kid, like, I started shaving when I was in fourth grade. When I would go get my hair cut, I would have them thin it out with shears so it wouldn't be curly.
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14
If my parents packed me lunch with hummus in it, I would throw it all away because I would rather go hungry than be persecuted.
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15
I hated, like, who I was. You know that feeling? I have vivid memories of kids looking me in my eyes and saying, "Don't think we'll ever forget what you did to our country."
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16
And now things are different. I was at the grocery store, and I saw pumpkin-spice flavored hummus, and I was like, "Oh, my God. They forgot." My name's Emil Wakim. Thank you guys very much.
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17
Emil Wakim! There you go. Not too bad. Standing "O."⁽³⁾ Emil Wakim. You look sharp, buddy. He'll be at The Comedy Attic in Bloomington, Indiana, August 12th and 13th!