#blackAF: Challenging the White Gaze or Just Navel-Gazing?

This weekend Netflix dropped the eight-episode first season of Kenya Barris’ new series #blackAF. At first blush, it might feel…familiar. #blackAF does cover the same ground as his successful ABC sitcom Black’ish. Once again, Barris mines his own experiences, and the story centers on a Black husband and father named Kenya Barris who’s hit it big and is living with his lawyer wife and six kids in L.A. This time around, though, without the constraints of network censors and a prime-time slot, there’s a lot more cursing, and Barris is playing himself. Perhaps both literally and figuratively. The show is staged as a mockumentary, its primary conceit being that second-born daughter Drea is making a documentary about her family to accompany her NYU film school application. This allows for context-setting via voiceover from Drea, confessional moments, and lots of awkward sideways glances at the camera. Unfortunately, unlike in hit shows like The Office and Parks & Rec, here that awkwardness often feels unintentional. While the story is presumptively told from Drea’s perspective, the lens rarely strays from the show’s creator/lead character and his preoccupations and insecurities: with money, with how white people view him, with wanting his wife Joya (played by Rashida Jones) to remain the same person she was several children ago.

The pilot in particular comes across as masturbatory. In some ways, it’s the same pilot that introduced us to Andre and Rainbow Johnson, but that ma…