ABC's upcoming sitcom: "Black-ish"

[MartyMcFly]

Not trying to turn this into a sociohistorical discussion, but that's the problem. How can a show set in the rich suburbs of California HONESTLY discuss what it means to be black in America in 2014? My answer is it can't. We are on the cusp of a New Nadir as political subjugation has silenced our voices, economic exploitation has transformed into sub working class work for the masses, and social humiliation and state sponsored violence is SOARING right now across the nation. That show does not engage the question of the black masses: 90 percent of the black population in this nation does not live like that at all. So what exactly is it trying to show? People aren't watching because it doesn't depict the reality for the majority black class as it struggles to fight racial, capitalist, and gendered oppression

It can breh based on the fact that it's a black man coming from a different perspective. He comes from a lower-middle class place and he's trying to understand how the world has changed for him and changed for everyone in it, including his kids. It's still a sitcom breh, you can't expect it to tackle big social issues like the crime rate and police brutality, at least not head on, but what it does do is tackle social issues within black america: how we communicate to each other and what that means, tokenism, spanking, professionalism, being a black man in a white environment, covert racism, etc. Not as heavy as tackling the crime rate or capitalism breh, but still necessary

Have to be sure of whose delivering the message tho. It's coming from a black perspective but at the same time, if the writers aren't black, that's where u begin to have nikkas questioning its authenticity.

This show is in good hands tho

It was created by a black man and the show runner is black, along with Anthony anderson and Larry Fishburne being execs. I get what you're saying but we've got the internet at our fingertips, it's easy to do all that research when the show is announced as opposed to jumping to conclusions that it's going to be c00ning.

 

[Alexander The Great]

Right..like it bugs me that dudes would think that it would be c00ning. Why is that the first instinct? A show with the premise of exploring what it means to be black in America in 2014 while living in the very rich suburbs of Cali..what about that says c00n?

have you watched tv, movies, music, or any form of "entertainment" over the last 20 years? Yeah, there's a reason I, and a lot of other people were/are cautious of a network show entitled "Blackish"

 

[MartyMcFly]

have you watched tv, movies, music, or any form of "entertainment" over the last 20 years? Yeah, there's a reason I, and a lot of other people were/are cautious of a network show entitled "Blackish"

Yes I've watched breh but I also found out what the show was about and the angle it was coming from the same way you could: using the internet and just reading. We jump to conclusions when we don't have to because all of that info exist for us to just dig into. I get where you're coming from breh but once you see the talent behind the show, then it becomes obvious where the show was going and what the aim was

 

[The Phoenix]

I stopped watching after the first episode. I just felt like it was saying the word BLACK way too much. It felt kinda awkward. But the kids were watching it the other day and I started watching some of the other episodes with them. The show is actually pretty damn good and it really hits its stride very early. I'm glad I didn't miss out.

Shame on you dudes for eyeing that daughter. You nikkas have no shame. I hope the NSA is taking your names down and getting a cell ready for yall.

 

[kp404]

It can breh based on the fact that it's a black man coming from a different perspective. He comes from a lower-middle class place and he's trying to understand how the world has changed for him and changed for everyone in it, including his kids. It's still a sitcom breh, you can't expect it to tackle big social issues like the crime rate and police brutality, at least not head on, but what it does do is tackle social issues within black america: how we communicate to each other and what that means, tokenism, spanking, professionalism, being a black man in a white environment, covert racism, etc. Not as heavy as tackling the crime rate or capitalism breh, but still necessary

I agree with that, but the question to why more blacks aren't watching is simply identification. As the socioeconomic issues continue to worsen, the black masses turn away from unrealistic depictions of their lives; plus you have to add in that ABC does not have a tract record for black television in recent years...

Frantz Fanon's Black Skin White Masks discusses the problems with shows like this and the black community; its a sociological/psychological problem that we have always had since the creation of the black working class and black middle class at the beginning of the 20th century

 

[MartyMcFly]

I stopped watching after the first episode. I just felt like it was saying the word BLACK way too much. It felt kinda awkward. But the kids were watching it the other day and I started watching with them. The show is actually pretty damn good and it really hits its stride very early. I'm glad I didn't miss out.

Shame on you dudes for eyeing that daughter. You nikkas have no shame. I hope the NSA is taking your names down and getting a cell ready for yall.

 

[Alexander The Great]

Yes I've watched breh but I also found out what the show was about and the angle it was coming from the same way you could: using the internet and just reading. We jump to conclusions when we don't have to because all of that info exist for us to just dig into. I get where you're coming from breh but once you see the talent behind the show, then it becomes obvious where the show was going and what the aim was

....well....that's why I recorded the 1st episode then I was gonna give a chance breh

 

[MartyMcFly]

I agree with that, but the question to why more blacks aren't watching is simply identification. As the socioeconomic issues continue to worsen, the black masses turn away from unrealistic depictions of their lives; plus you have to add in that ABC does not have a tract record for black television in recent years...

Frantz Fanon's Black Skin White Masks discusses the problems with shows like this and the black community; its a sociological/psychological problem that we have always had since the creation of the black working class and black middle class at the beginning of the 20th century

I agree..more blacks aren't watching because we'd rather watch love and hip hop or the kardashians, or the real housewives of _______ or reruns of shows that we used to watch 20 years ago. Apparently we respond more to ratchet shyt now

 

[MartyMcFly]

....well....that's why I recorded the 1st episode then I was gonna give a chance breh

Well hop on the train breh. We always talk about how we want good black shows on TV, we gotta keep this one around because you how it goes: We gave you nikkas something good and you didn't accept it so we're going back to ratchet

 

[kp404]

I agree..more blacks aren't watching because we'd rather watch love and hip hop or the kardashians, or the real housewives of _______ or reruns of shows that we used to watch 20 years ago. Apparently we respond more to ratchet shyt now

When you have nothing but minimum wage work with no benefits and the only shows they promote heavily about blacks anywhere are those fukking reality shows, what else are you gonna watch? let's not let the corporations and networks off the hook because they know what they are doing when they heavily promote those reality shows...Its more of stereotypical propaganda of black=negative or backwards (I don't use the term ratchet because its a ridiculous term)

 

[MartyMcFly]

I stopped watching after the first episode. I just felt like it was saying the word BLACK way too much. It felt kinda awkward. But the kids were watching it the other day and I started watching some of the other episodes with them. The show is actually pretty damn good and it really hits its stride very early. I'm glad I didn't miss out.

Shame on you dudes for eyeing that daughter. You nikkas have no shame. I hope the NSA is taking your names down and getting a cell ready for yall.

That's Nas' little cousin too breh. Don't let him catch wind of it and start coming after nikkas

 

[MartyMcFly]

When you have nothing but minimum wage work with no benefits and the only shows they promote heavily about blacks anywhere are those fukking reality shows, what else are you gonna watch? let's not let the corporations and networks off the hook because they know what they are doing when they heavily promote those reality shows...Its more of stereotypical propaganda of black=negative or backwards (I don't use the term ratchet because its a ridiculous term)

Now its a chicken and the egg conversation though: did the networks give us that shyt because that's what we wanted or because that's what they wanted to give us? I can see arguments on both sides but I know that we used to get Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, Good Times, Amen, Cosby Show, A different world, Living Single, Martin and a litany of other shows depicting us in America in various social and economic standings but always striving and always pushing to be great and better...then it was gone

 

[kp404]

Now its a chicken and the egg conversation though: did the networks give us that shyt because that's what we wanted or because that's what they wanted to give us? I can see arguments on both sides but I know that we used to get Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, Good Times, Amen, Cosby Show, A different world, Living Single, Martin and a litany of other shows depicting us in America in various social and economic standings but always striving and always pushing to be great and better...then it was gone

We didn't want that reality shyt. They gave us that shyt. The network capitalists don't give a fukk about what we want. They want to depict blacks in a negative way, so they propagandize it and we eat it up because they put so much publicity behind it...

The reason we had so much diverse black content in the 1980s and 1990s was because the Black Freedom Movement (particularly the Black Power Movement) had long lasting effects on people...HBCUs were celebrated, black clothing, black culture was dominant in the black masses from the 1970s to the early1990s..but, because of the neoliberal global capitalism taking off in the 1990s, you saw a decline at the end of the 90s into the 2000s of black content. 3 strikes you're out was putting more blacks behind bars, NAFTA and other global deals took away black working class work so those that could find work turned to minimum wage work, which of course can not pay bills (and you don't qualify for state assistance in many cases), so crime and drugs become the only way to feed your family. Thus, the black masses loss the ground they won in the civil rights movement and black power movement...so racial capitalists used this opportunity to remove blacks from media (especially since the black middle class shrank, so very few had any sway in determining the programming on tv...the ones that stayed wanted to depict us as negative and stereotypical, which is what you see now), and because they have so much money, they publicize it so heavily, its psychologically locked into people's minds.

So again, we didn't ask for those shows...they promote and propagandize the shyt so much that it has unconsciously attracted the masses to those depictions of black life...

 

[MartyMcFly]

We didn't want that reality shyt. They gave us that shyt. The network capitalists don't give a fukk about what we want. They want to depict blacks in a negative way, so they propagandize it and we eat it up because they put so much publicity behind it...

The reason we had so much diverse black content in the 1980s and 1990s was because the Black Freedom Movement (particularly the Black Power Movement) had long lasting effects on people...HBCUs were celebrated, black clothing, black culture was dominant in the black masses from the 1970s to the early1990s..but, because of the neoliberal global capitalism taking off in the 1990s, you saw a decline at the end of the 90s into the 2000s of black content. 3 strikes you're out was putting more blacks behind bars, NAFTA and other global deals took away black working class work so those that could find work turned to minimum wage work, which of course can not pay bills (and you don't qualify for state assistance in many cases), so crime and drugs become the only way to feed your family. Thus, the black masses loss the ground they won in the civil rights movement and black power movement...so racial capitalists used this opportunity to remove blacks from media (especially since the black middle class shrank, so very few had any sway in determining the programming on tv...the ones that stayed wanted to depict us as negative and stereotypical, which is what you see now), and because they have so much money, they publicize it so heavily, its psychologically locked into people's minds.

So again, we didn't ask for those shows...they promote and propagandize the shyt so much that it has unconsciously attracted the masses to those depictions of black life...

Fair enough breh. But I'd argue that there are always black people or just people in general who want and respond to ignorance. I know people like that and so do you I'm sure

 

[kp404]

Fair enough breh. But I'd argue that there are always black people or just people in general who want and respond to ignorance. I know people like that and so do you I'm sure

The only reason certain black people respond to that type of ignorance is that it is propagandized so heavily by white capitalists to continue a subjugation of the racial classes of black and brown masses...that shyt is not organic man...black folks don't create or want a culture of ignorance; never have in our history. It was CREATED by white racists and capitalists who control both the means of production and the mass media...its a historical and contemporary trend. Check out Franz Fanon's work about the effects on racial capitalism on the colonized (Wretched of the Earth), or Leon Dash's All Our Kin, which shows how the black underclasses refuse to take the idea of "ignorance" or "distrust" or any other stereotypical claim about us at all...its deeper than "black folks want ignorance" THAT IS NOT TRUE and my PhD work I do disproves that idea. We have never wanted ignorance and we still don't today...you see individuals who are like that because those ideas and most importantly, those SOCIOECONOMIC CONDITIONS make it that way...man it so much going on in our community that we have no control over its mindblowing...point is that none of the ignorant shyt you see is organic or our own doing; there is a systemic reason and that's what my work is trying to show and fix