I’ve got hope on the brain.
Precisely, I’ve got “Hope,” last week’s episode of ABC sitcom
Black-ish, on the brain. You know, the one billed as a Very Special Episode in which the Johnson family tackles police brutality.
However, pretty much every episode of
Black-ish works as a Very Special Episode, given that the show established itself from the pilot as an exploration of what it means to be black in America through the eyes of three generations.
We’re in the show’s second season, and already we’ve gone through workplace tokenism, association with an outside culture, spanking (often phrased as a racial thing), materialism, biracial prejudice, street cred, homosexuality, the “N-word,” guns, fear of doctors, segregated churches, black Republicans, barbershops, neighborhood loyalty, and swimming.
Amid the national conversation on police brutality and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, it was inevitable that
Black-ish would have something to add in its most serious chapter yet.
The episode left me near tears. To watch something this bracing, this real, this contemporary and true about the psyche under which black Americans live, on network TV no less, was almost too much to handle. This episode links the political to the personal in the space in which black people are heavily disregarded – their feelings.
As I sat with scenes of “Hope” rolling in my mind again and again, and then started thinking about another newish show with a black cast that addressed a similar topic.
The Carmichael Show (NBC) premiered the episode “Protest” in August 2015 as part of its six-episode first season. (The show’s second season, a 13-episode order, debuts next week.) Upon rewatching “Hope,” I went back and watched “Protest” again.
Black-ish’s episode begins with the Johnsons awaiting word on whether a police officer who severely tasered an unarmed black man after a traffic stop will be indicted.
“Hope” ping-pongs between the three generations of the Johnson family to give different perspectives and nuances to the issues surrounding police brutality. We go from “police are thugs” to “not all police,” from “he had a gun” to “the gun was in the trunk,” from “the system can work” to “the system is rigged.”
We get the respectability politics of Ruby advising “yes sir, no sir and thank you sir” butted up against the specters of Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland, and cover-all phrases from the prosecutor about the victim being “no angel” and the police “followed procedure.”
Despite the frustration expressed as the Johnsons await the announcement and then find out the cop won’t be indicted, “Hope” still finds the funny by having each family member respond with organic jokes only that character can say.
For example, the exchange between patriarch Dre (Anthony Anderson) and teen daughter Zoey (Yara Shahidi) about the victim.
Dre: “He got tased 37 times.”
Zoey: “Is he OK?”
Dre: “He got tased 37 times, so, you know, he’s not great.”
Youngest son Jack (Miles Brown), who’s dopey and innocent, regarding unarmed victims: “The police are shooting people with no arms? … Of course he didn’t have a weapon. He had no arms.”
Old-school Pops (Laurence Fishburne) and Ruby (Jenifer Lewis), ready for the protests to become violent, get in their licks about “riot cash” aka silver nickels and charm bracelets from exes because “precious metals and sexual favors are the only currency during times of civil unrest.”
But then the episode digs even deeper as it turns the police brutality discussion into when and how do parents Dre and Rainbow tell their children what it means to be black. Not simply the racism, but the psychological impact of living under it.
A picture of Tamir Rice, the Cleveland child shot dead by a police officer, is shown twice to drive this point home. Black children
aren’t seen as children, and they don’t get to be children for long.
Innocence can’t last under white supremacy.
It reminds me of a time when I was 8 years old. Some of my West Philly parochial school schoolmates and I joined our fathers and the church clergy on a weekend retreat deep in the Main Line suburbs. The kind of place where moneyed white men get closer to God.
During some afternoon free time, a few of us kids were outdoors, cutting up and talking loud like children do. Our church deacon, who was black, came over to us and yelled at us to be quiet and behave. He yelled at us: “Be quiet, or they won’t let any more black people here!”
Just like that, we were crushed under the everpresent white gaze, ready to condemn us and all our kind. (Odd enough, this retreat was across the street from the Catholic prep school I would end up attending years later for high school.) Amid a point of pride in being invited to a place open only to grown-ups, we were brought low to be afraid of what could happen to us.
Black-ish, which has spent a lot of time in other episodes dwelling on the many inconveniences of being black even amid material success, uses “Hope” to get at the piece of the black psyche that vacillates between hope and terror.
Anthony Anderson delivers the best dramatic performance of his career, as he looks back on the combination of pride and fear watching Obama, uncovered and unprotected, walk the inauguration parade route that bright Tuesday afternoon in January 2009.
“Tell me you weren’t terrified when you saw that. Tell me you weren’t worried that someone was gonna snatch that hope away from us like they always do,” Dre says. His speech is intercut with footage of Obama that day, looking so much younger, so vibrant and cheerful in a time when, as Dre says, “we felt like maybe, just maybe, we got out of that bad place and made it to a good place.”
Obama, before a racially resentful nation doubled down with a Congress set on opposing him at every turn and grinding government to shutdown and near-halt for years.
In “Protest,”
The Carmichael Show takes a different tack. A show without any children whose innocence needs spoiling,
The Carmichael Show still builds itself out of generational conflict among people rooted in the 1960s, and millennials those rooted in the post-civil rights era.
The Carmichael Showsets up an
All in the Family-style confluence of types by which to debate topics. Jerrod’s parents are old-fashioned and retrograde, but never one-note. His girlfriend is biracial and from a more privileged background. Jerrod is the down-the-middle everyman, and is weighed against his ratchet brother and hood rat ex-wife.
Jerrod (Carmichael) is settling into his birthday and an expected surprise party from his parents, when news comes out that a police officer shot dead a black teenager in the street, and protests were already under way.
His girlfriend, Maxine (Amber Stevens West), wants to attend the protests: “Listen, I think that we should go down and protest. 'Cause, you know, I tried to go to Occupy Wall Street but my flight landed when the protest ended, so I just saw
Book of Mormon twice and went home.”
Jerrod just wants to spend his birthday with his parents, but Maxine persuades his mother, Cynthia (Loretta Devine), to jump back into the protest fray. “I’m going upstairs and I’m gonna change into my civil rights clothes!”
His father, Joe (David Alan Grier), goes into some respectability politics of how to walk, what to buy, how to behave in order to avoid police brutality, and adds “I blame it on the hip-hop.” Grier’s line delivery draws laughs by accentuating the ridiculousness of having to follow so many rules of comportment that aren’t guaranteed to save you, while acknowledging that sometimes that might keep you alive despite robbing you of dignity.
Cynthia continues the argument against the current generation when she returns from the protest, slamming it for having T-shirts and a DJ, instead of dressing properly and singing spirituals like in the old days. Which, funny enough, didn’t sound too different from when
Oprah Winfrey criticized Black Lives Matter.
As good as
The Carmichael Show episode is, “Protest” is hurt a bit by being the second episode. We haven’t had enough time to sink into the characters beyond the “types” they’re set to fill.
Black-ish has had more time to build up to this point and let your attachment to the characters carry the drama further.
The Carmichael Show is a traditional sitcom structure with soundstage-type sets, the multicamera filming, the live studio audience and laughter that needs a setup-joke-setup-joke pace. The actors can ratchet their antics up or down to feed and feed off the audience’s energy.
Black-ish follows the more contemporary approach, with handheld cameras, “on location” setpieces, and no audience laughter. It allows for the drama to hit harder for this episode.
But while
The Carmichael Show skims along the surface of that hope-terror matrix
Black-ish lays bare, it instead pushes at the everyday, death-by-a-thousand-cuts impact of life while black.
Jerrod complains that Maxine’s insistence on joining the protest is interfering with his birthday plans. While it’s played for laughs as Jerrod’s self-centeredness, it also jabs at how racial injustice is not only infuriating and depressing. It’s also, to paraphrase actor Bert Williams, really inconvenient.
“Why did Mom and Maxine have to go out there now, you know?” Jerrod says to his father. “It's not like two more protestors are gonna end racism. ... I just don't understand why someone had to get shot on my birthday.”
Jerrod begins to unpack that his apathy really is a mask for his fear, the it-could-have-been-me feeling combined with feeling powerless to change it.
Black-ish’s Zoey arrives at the same conclusion, breaking into tears when Junior says he’s going to sneak out to the protests.
Both episodes seek a resolution through the same idea, if by different means. Jerrod agrees to stand by his girlfriend in protest as he opens up about his feelings and psyche as related to racism. On
Black-ish, the Johnson family heads down to the protests after youngest daughter Diane (Marsai Martin) asks, "If you give up, who's gonna fix it for us?"
“Hope” and “Protest” communicate, through different means, how black people persevere amid such injustice despite so much despair and fear. That resilience and grit speaks to the survival instinct, to persist and rebound and keep going.
And, in doing so, we reaffirm that which makes us fully human.
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