‘Black-ish’ Tackles Race, Police Brutality Head-On In Powerful Episode
In a powerful episode that aired Wednesday night, the ABC sitcom “Black-ish” tackled police brutality and racial unrest in the United States, shining a spotlight on some of society’s most damning problems.
Instead of a brute treatment that would have seen the Johnsons, an upper middle-class African-American family, go through a series of knee-jerk reactions centered around outrage, the characters voiced nuanced responses that fit perfectly with the complex times of today.
The episode, titled “Hope” began with the Johnson family watching a breaking news announcement from CNN’s Don Lemon on the eminent grand jury decision involving a police shooting of an unarmed black man.
The show stayed true to its comedic roots for much of the episode, with quick one-liners interspersed with serious dialogue. But showrunner Kenya Barris made sure it also delved deep into solemn territory, depicting a riot that at one part had the family’s teenage boy, Dre, vowing to join protesters in the streets.
“We didn’t want to have it so joke-heavy that we trivialized the situation and the seriousness of the topic they were talking about,” Barris told EW in an interview. “We really just tried to make sure we gave ourselves enough balance to still get the point across but at the same time, give people an entry point where they felt like they could get into it and not be bummed out the whole time.”
The episode, which Barris said came to him as he discussed what was happening in Ferguson, Missouri, with his own child, features a hard-hitting back-and-forth between the father Andre Johnson and his wife Rainbow over her attempts to soften the news that the officer who shot the man would not be indicted.
“I don’t want to lie to them, I just want to give them a little faith in the world,” Rainbow says to her father-in-law at one point.
On Twitter, people commended the episode for its frankness and true-to-life nature.
The episode also deftly handled the millennial angst that many young people grapple with when confronted with societal injustices.
In the end, for many fans of the show, the episode struck the perfect tone: Not black, not white, not quite gray, but certainly “Black-ish.”
This article was originally published on HLNtv.com.
