Politics & Power Quote by Bert Williams

Williams lands the blade with a performer’s timing: the punchline isn’t his identity, it’s the country. By separating “disgraceful” from “inconvenient,” he refuses the moral framework that white America tried to staple onto Blackness. There’s nothing shameful to uncover in being “a colored man,” he says, and the phrasing matters: “discover” implies he actually looked, as if he’s responding to a dominant culture that treats Black inferiority as a given fact waiting to be confirmed. He comes back empty-handed. The only reliable finding is “inconvenient,” a word so mild it becomes accusatory.

That understatement is the subtextual power move. “Inconvenient” is what you call a delayed train, not segregation, lynching, job exclusion, housing discrimination, or the exhausting requirement to be twice as careful and half as visible. Williams compresses a whole architecture of racial cruelty into a polite inconvenience, letting the listener feel the gap between the term and the reality. It’s a comic strategy that doubles as survival: say it lightly enough to be allowed to say it at all.

Context sharpens the sting. Williams was a Black star in vaudeville who often performed in blackface, navigating an industry that demanded caricature while exploiting his talent. The line reads like an aside from someone who knows America will applaud him onstage and punish him off it. His intent isn’t self-pity; it’s indictment, delivered with the velvet gloves of irony because bare knuckles weren’t permitted.