Ivy Rose Reacts: Black-ish In America

Just as the semester is finally starting to rev up, TV makes its triumphant return with Fall premieres. Luckily, I don't have classes on Thursdays because I can already tell that Wednesday nights are going to be a problem for me with the return of Modern Family, The Middle,  The Goldbergs  and the premiere of ABCs new family comedy: 'black-ish, which struck an unexpected chord with me and motivated today's post.

Here is ABC's description of the show: Andre 'Dre' Johnson (Anthony Anderson) has a great job, a beautiful wife, Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross), four kids and a colonial home in the 'burbs.  But has success brought too much assimilation for this black family? With a little help from his dad (Laurence Fishburne), Dre sets out to establish a sense of cultural identity for his family that honors their past while embracing the future. 

 While it may look like this generation's Cosby Show (upper/middle class black family living in suburban America), after watching the first episode I can already tell there are going to be some pretty significant differences between the two.  Where the Cosby show attempted to show that black families were just like any other American family, 'black-ish complicates that argument and attempts to shed light on the unique set of issues facing many black people in this supposed "post-racial" society we find ourselves living in today. Although I grew up in a more diverse neighborhood than that of the family on `black-ish, I connected to the show as it works to answer a question that I've been grappling with for quite some time: What does it mean to be black in America? 

The entire first episode of the show focuses on Andre (Anthony Anderson) trying to make sure his family "keeps it real", but what does that mean and why does it often seem like the answer to that question is buried at the bottom of a barrel of stereotypes created long before many of us, and our parents, were even born? While I wouldn't call myself a Don Lemon fan I did find his reaction to `black-ish  closest to mine. Yes, some of the jokes were a little overkill in their attempts to make a point, but overall the show asks America to lift the lid off of the "black box" and expand the definition of what it means to "authentically" express one's race (which by the way is not synonymous with culture). With different ethnic, economic, educational and family backgrounds black culture can differ from house to house and yet the lens through which society views black people remains small and expectations for behavior limited. 

This limited scope is what leads one word, such as urban, to cause a black face to pop into the minds of many; it's what reduces multicultural education to adding books with black and brown faces and the occasional use of a popular rap song to teach a lesson; it's what causes black college students to find themselves as the voice of their people in many of their classes and it's what places a black teenager in a hoodie walking through his neighborhood at night or playing his music too loudly at a gas station with his friends or walking across the street in the middle of the day as a threat to society.

As I continue my studies, which find me primarily focusing on the use of culturally responsive/sustaining approaches to education as a method to close opportunity and education gaps,  I stress more than ever the need for people to have a strong understanding of their racial, ethnic/cultural backgrounds as they learn to define their individual identities. However, as the face of America continues to become more diverse, our definition of what it means to be Black/White/Latino(a)/Jewish/Christian/Muslim/Male/Female/Gay/Straight and whatever other signifier you want to add to the list has to expand with it.  Maybe I read too far into what the creators of the show were trying to do, after all it is just a prime-time family comedy, but hey that's how this black-ish chick reacted to it. 

"We've finally been able to get to a place where we can pull apart the monolithic idea of one race or another and actually move the dialogue into a class or cultural conversation, realizing that there are different layers, pieces to the experience,"

        - Tracee Ellis Ross, in an interview on `black-ish