As soon as the trailer surfaced online for “Black-ish,” ABC’s new sitcom about an upper-middle class black family🎶 living in Los Angeles, questions♛ about authenticity began.
The show, which is loosely based on the lives of the creator Kenya Barris and Anthony Anderson (who is a co-executive producer and also stars as Andre Johnson), was not going t༺o be measured solely by laughs alone, but also by realness.
How much would they get right about the black experience in 2014? The answer may vary as the season progresses, but in the pilot episode, h💧ere are five moments where the “Black-ish” writers kept it real.
Baked fried chicken
When Pops (Laurence Fishburne) sits down with the family for dinner, he takes issue with Andre’s wife Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross) over t𒀰he way she cooks fried chicken. She admits it’s baked fried chicken. Pops suggests “fried fried chicken” may be “too black” for Rainbow, who is biracial.
His remark is laughed off, bu♓t any fried chicken lover would probably be up in arms simply trying to pass off baked chicken as fried.
Andre’s son, Andre Jr., wanting to be called Andrew
At school, Andre Jꦺr. may get away with being called Andy by his friends, but his father will not be honoring his son’s request to address him by his nickname at home.
For anyone who grew up w🅺ith a name other people could never seem to pronounce correctly, this scene likely resonated, and was made all the more true when Andre Jr. was adamant that he use his nickname.
The African rites of passage
The Jackie Robinson rule
As Andre walks into the office building where he works as a🍒n executive at a big-💯time advertising company called Stevens & Lido, he waves to the security guard, the front desk attendant, the janitors and the mail person. All of them are black.
“When one of us made it, it was kind of like we all did,” he says, and suggests the promotion he is about to get ౠto senior vice president (the first black man in the company’s history to do so) makes him something like the Jackie Robinson of the company. FYI: “Jackie🐬 Robinson” is code for first black person to do anything. Barack Obama is the Jackie Robinson of the Oval Office.
‘Black-ish’ music
The music chosen by the producers made the scenes even funnier. When Andre, still bitter over his appointment as the senio⛄r v.p. of the agency’s “urban division,” gives his first presentation for an LA tourism account, he creates a video filled with wild police-car chases and scenes from the 1992 LA riots, and the background tune is , which advocates usi🌞ng hip-hop to incite change and revolution.