Robert Townsend moved to Los Angeles in the early 80s, determined to become a Hollywood star. And though he had quickly emerged as a draw on the standup circuit, the Chicago native struggled to reckon with the structural racism he encountered while auditioning for bit parts on film and TV – the vast majority of them ham-fisted stereotypes, from snitch to slave.
Before long, Townsend’s casting call stories – some of them humiliating, most of them hilariously tone deaf – became too overwhelming for his regular postmortems with Keenen Ivory Wayans, who was going through the exact same thing.
