Black-ish’s Exploring The Black Experience and Black “Other” Hooked Me

As a Black and Latinx individual being raised in white suburbia, it can be difficult to find representation in mainstream media for your unique experience. You never feel like you are less Black, but apparently everyone tells you that you are. You are reminded everyday that you are a strong Black woman, but loving Fleetwood Mac, The Doors, and Whitney Houston confuses a lot of people who believe what they see on TV as Black. You can imagine my excitement when I heard a show called Blackish was going to be on prime-time television. Unfortunately for me, Blackish was just that, a good show-ish. The show follows a well-to-do family, the Johnsons, in the suburbs of California (specifically SoCal area) and their lives as a Black family growing in white suburbia. The family consists of mother Rainbow, bi-racial and raised in a hippie household, who prides herself on being a successful doctor; Dre, the “started from the bottom now we’re here” father from Compton, now living in the suburbs working as a marketing agent at a top marketing firm, head of the “urban division” (which they address in the first episode); and their 4 children, who are the subject of Dre’s concern throughout the show that they are indeed not growing up with the necessary Black experience he remembers.

In the first episode, we see Dre worry obsessively that his family is not “Black enough.” Seeing his son enjoy nerdom and his family all around not participating in “traditional Black culture.” By the end of the…