Black comic W. Kamau Bell gets inside the KKK’s hooded heads

In an era when the concept of actual dialogue is an endangered species in American society, an African American comic with a deceptively cheerful disposition wanders through the American South chatting up members of the Ku Klux Klan. No one officially knows who has paid for the billboard, but many suspect Rev. Thomas Robb, who, in conversation with Bell, won’t say if he paid for the sign, but does say “diversity is a code word for white genocide.” Sitting across from Bell at a local diner, the preacher offers that it is his “personal belief that black people cannot maintain law and order.” Throughout the hour-long premiere, you’re stunned not only by the crazy utterances of the Klan members but by Bell’s ability to keep things on a conversational level. Future episodes of “United Shades of America” will find Bell traveling to Daytona Beach, Fla., where he will interview retirees as well as college students on spring break, to Portland, Ore., to talk to African Americans who have been displaced by gentrification, to San Quentin State Prison to talk to long-term inmates, and to Camden, N.J., where he hangs out with local cops. Everyone talks about the ongoing “national conversation on race,” but for the most part, that conversation has been a shouting match at best. David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle.