'Black-ish' Argues Eloquently About How Black Lives Matter
Black-ish, now in its second season, has become the most socially-conscious network sitcom on the air, as well as one of the funniest. Built around the Johnson family — advertising exec Dre (Anthony Anderson), doctor Bow (Tracee Ellis Ross), their four children and Dre’s live-in parents — this is an upper-middle-class Los Angeles clan that, week to week, grapples with the usual sitcom concerns of anxious parenthood and troublesome child-rearing.
But in even the most innocuous plots, black-ish finds a way to remind you that this is a specifically black family dealing with everyday events that often yield up race-related issues. On Wednesday night, black-ish will drop the pretense of a comic plot to address as directly as possible the subject of police brutality toward black citizens in a remarkable episode titled “Hope.” It is structured around the way the entire family — including Dre’s father (Laurence Fishburne’s Pops) and mother (Jenifer Lewis’ Ruby) — reacts to ongoing cable-news coverage of the impending announcement of an indictment of a white police officer for the alleged mistreatment of a black youth. (CNN’s Don Lemon is seen on-screen doing the play-by-play coverage.)
Commencing with the music of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and pictures of real-life tragic figures such as Trayvon Martin, this black-ish — written by series creator Kenya Barris — offers a tough, frank enactment of dialogues and arguments that occur among black families around such firestorm issues. As the assembled cast watches the TV reports, Pop explodes right at the top of the show, “The police are damn thugs!” Dre adds sarcastically that “only 92 percent” of them are thugs — “the other eight percent are advisors on Law & Order.”
Dre is a complex variation on the bumbling TV dad, one whose pride in making a good living and providing for his family is undercut by the often higher wisdom of his equally hard-working wife, his scolding parents, and his skeptical kids. At work, Dre is frequently the only black guy in the room, and thus subject to condescension or obsequious flattery in efforts by his white co-workers to get “the black man’s point of view” on anything from current events to the best way to pitch the “urban consumer.” This week’s episode reminds us of the frustration simmering just beneath the surface of Dre’s genial exterior. The half-hour places a Dre who sides with his Pops in taking a dim view of authority figures, versus the idealism of Bow and his children.
The unofficial guest star on black-ish this week is the essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates: Junior (Marcus Scribner) invokes him, having read Coates’s best-selling book Between the World and Me, and Coates’s image appears briefly on the family’s TV set, as a guest invited to comment on the pending indictment. Dre is miffed that Junior doesn’t realize that much of what he quotes from Coates are sentiments he himself has said about the condition of being black in America. It’s at once a joke — that silly sitcom dad, trying to puff himself up! — and a serious observation: that one reason Coates’s writing strikes a chord is that it is often a finely articulated version of what many black people do say, mostly to each other.
Barris’s script links Coates to earlier writers including Malcolm X and Alex Haley (funny flashback to an Afro’d Dre lecturing his father while quoting Malcolm’s autobiography), and James Baldwin (“Who’s he?” asks Junior, heartbreakingly). One thing black-ish does superbly is remind its mass audience of the wide range of opinions there are — that being black does not mean hewing to a party-line. In this, the show has always done a wonderful job of contrasting Bow — Rainbow, the progeny of 1960s idealist hippies, blessed and trained with a mind for science — with Dre’s parents, old-school working-class blacks who operate from a position of hard-won pragmatism.
That contrast gets full play tonight. The episode builds to a conclusion that binds its title, “Hope,” to the initial promise of the Obama presidency, and then undercuts it with a despairing realism. All this, plus super-good jokes name-checking Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, The Black Panthers, O.J. Simpson, and Peabo Bryson (look him up, kids). Make sure not to miss “Hope.”
Black-ish airs Wednesday nights at 9:30 p.m. on ABC.
