Eight years after Blackish first lit up our screens with black humor, the show ended a glorious run that had seen multiple spinoffs and 15 Emmy nominations.
It had all come from the creative mind of Kenya Barris, and there was more where that came from.
The wild imagination he had cultivated from childhood was now in full expression, and Barris was going to exercise it to its limits.
Growing Up In The Minority
Born in Inglewood, California, to a Jehovah’s Witness mother and Muslim father, Barry quickly understood the experience of being in the minority and holding a worldview different from others.
He developed a love for books at a young age when he was made to stay in the house while the other kids went out to play due to his asthma.
His writing muscle was another thing he developed during that time, creating new worlds in comic books and selling them along with lollipops to his classmates for a quarter.
Initially, The Candy was the main attraction to the students in his school, but eventually, they got hooked on the characters he was creating.
Writing for him was also an escape from the traumatic events he experienced growing up, including losing his brother to Leukaemia and his mother shooting his physically abusive father.
The family’s social status significantly improved when his father got a settlement from GM after losing a lung in a chemical accident at the General Motors factory where he worked.
His mother used the settlement they got from General Motors to move the family to a more upscale neighborhood when he was in the seventh grade.
Now he had an insight into how the elite lived. However, his family still remained in the minority as there were very few black people in that social class.
His experiences living in that neighborhood would provide inspiration many years later when writing his hit series, Blackish.
In preparing for a career in Hollywood and with dreams of becoming the next Spike Lee, Barris went to Clark Atlanta University, a Historically Black University, to study film.
Black-ish
Two decades after he finished college, Kenya Barris had fine-tuned his writing skills, selling pilots for TV shows and working in several writers’ rooms, including Soul Food, Girlfriends, and I Hate My Teenage Daughter.
In 2003 alongside childhood friend Tyra Banks, he created America’s Next Top Model, earning himself a nice safety net and further advancing his career.
But his most significant breakthrough came in 2014 after selling 19 pilots. Disney’s ABC picked up the pilot for Blackish. A politically conscious comedy sitcom tackling social issues like gun violence, the ethics of spanking, and homophobia in the black community, whether you can be Black and Republican.
Blackish is a sort of autobiography for Barris. Its main character and narrator, Andre (Dre) Johnson, a black advertising executive played by Anthony Anderson, has moved from a childhood growing up poor to an adult life of wealth and relative comfort, just like Barris had done.
Also, his wife, an anesthesiologist character called Rainbow, played by Tracee Ellis Ross, mirrors Barris’ wife, the real Rainbow.
Unfortunately, because of their elite upbringing, his children cannot relate to what he considers fundamental aspects of being Black.
Having a form of blackness but denying its power, “I looked around, and what I remember black being, my kids were a filtered-down version of that, “They were ‘Blackish.’ He said to California Sunday
Blackish came at the right time and was among an array of TV shows, including Empire and Insecure, that started what has been described as the modern golden age of black television.
These shows displaced their white counterparts at the top of the rating list, earning prime-time spots on the cable networks and reinforcing what has long been established, that viewers appreciate shows with a more diverse cast.
Blackish was so successful that multiple spinoffs were created to further explore the worlds of individual characters, creating a mini ‘ish’ universe.
To give a glimpse of Blackish’s impact, Apple CEO Tim Cook added Juneteenth to the official Apple calendar after the Blackish episode on Juneteenth aired.
Breaking Out
In 2018 Barris became a casualty of the culture war raging across America since 2016 when Donald Trump took office.
At the time, NFL players kneeled in protest against racism and a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, where the hot topic issues, and Barris wanted to develop an episode of Blackish around those events.
But Disney, not wanting to draw the ire of the president and his supporters, asked him to tone it down.
Barris refused to air the watered-down episode and asked to be released from his Disney contract. He moved to Netflix, where he created popular films and series like We The People and Entergalactic.
In 2021 he left Netflix to create what would become BET Studios with Viacom CBS; to develop and sell content from minority voices to outlets within and beyond the Viacom CBS portfolio.
Barris was taking advantage of the push for diversity that had swept across Hollywood, beginning during the Black lives matter protests of 2020.
Speaking to Hollywood Reporter, he said, “it’s a special time in this industry if you’re black and have got something to say.”
He had a lot to say, and the deal would allow him to do that, as it was not the usual partnership deals he had signed with Netflix and ABC.
He borrowed the Tyler Perry model of ownership for the new venture and secured an ownership stake and a board seat.
Kenya Barris has had a long and exciting career in Hollywood, but his overarching goal has always been to make content that TV audiences, regardless of race, want to watch and which helps them understand each other in our increasingly polarised world. With his new venture, he has more power to achieve that goal.
