Black-ish Was No Televised Revolution

The show always aimed for the third rail, but it played it safe more often than not.

- Craig Jenkins

EVERYTHING THAT’S GREAT, and everything that’s stiff, about Black-ish is present at the start. In the pilot, California marketing executive Dre Johnson gets promoted to senior vice-president of the Los Angeles ad firm Stevens and Lido. It ought to be one of the greatest days of his life, but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s paying an unforeseen price for living the dream. Dre was raised in Compton, but his children are Sherman Oaks blue bloods. ¶ He takes it personally when they come off bougie and detached from any real sense of struggle. His eldest son, Junior, prefers field hockey to basketball and goes by “Andy” at school; his youngest son, Jack, is unaware that Barack Obama is America’s first Black president. So when Junior comes home asking if he can have a bar mitzvah, his father calls a family meeting, barking, “I may have to be ‘urban’ at work, but I’m still going to need my family to be Black. Not Black-ish, but Black.” It’s the textbook Dre speech—the first of many—establishing a hard line on race and place for the other characters to carry toward enlightenment.