There are so many ways to be and to be black at the same time, but we're finally seeing that full range expressed much more widely than before.

You can call me namastunde or surfatunde. Either works.

Mostly I try to be the best example of me that I can be.

By the time I got to Harvard, I feel like I knew who I was, and my job there was to throw as much against the wall as possible, to see what would stick.

I work in comedy, journalism, media, and technology, many of which don't have a lot of black faces in visible positions. I walk through Brooklyn with a surfboard. It's fun to challenge and expand people's expectations.

As far as hip-hop is concerned, I'm no expert and rarely think consciously about how I "represent" hip-hop.

There's certainly a lot of noise in the hip-hop world now [that] I don't pay active attention to, but to the extent that I represent some flavor of what's happening in hip-hop - it's subconscious.