I love the show black-ish, and I’m sad that it’s wrapping up its eighth and final season, but it was amazing and will always be amazing even during the re-runs. I watched two episodes today, “The Natural” and “The Nod”:
Season 8, Episode 2: “The Natural”
At the beginning, Andre “Dre” Johnson imagines himself playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers and striking hits, and then we see him at his new position at work at an advertising agency, where he got bumped up from the urban marketing department to the general marketing department. At first, Dre is excited by his new promotion, but when he gets there his new colleague tells him that there is reserved seating in the conference room and that he can’t just sit anywhere. Then, when he is actually pitching ideas to the team, they just smile and nod but don’t take any of his ideas, and instead talk amongst themselves. There is one guy who sits barefoot and reads Herman Hesse and just blurts out ideas out of thin air without making any effort on his part, and yet his colleagues (everyone except Dre) thinks his pitch ideas are genius. Dre feels like he’s being excluded from the conversation and that his ideas don’t matter, and imagines that he keeps striking out at the plate when the pitcher throws the ball to him.
Meanwhile, Diane tells her family she is going out on a date with a boy from school. While Rainbow is ecstatic, Ruby, their grandmother, doesn’t trust this boy that Diane is dating and tells her to take precaution. Diane thinks she isn’t attached to the boy and throws away the cheap necklace he gave her. Rainbow tells Ruby she’s being ridiculous and that Diane should go ahead with her date. When she comes back from her first date and Rainbow asks how it went, Diane replies with a fake smile that it went ok, but deep down Ruby knows she wasn’t happy on the date and tells Diane to break off the date if something doesn’t go well. Rainbow again thinks Ruby is being ridiculous. Then Diane comes back with a knockoff purse that her date bought her, and Rainbow is angry that he bought her a fake bag and tells her to call off the date. Later on, when they ask her how it went with breaking up with the guy, Diane said she ended up having a good conversation with him and they made up and are still dating.
Meanwhile, Dre is still unsure about his new promotion, especially because of their ignoring his ideas. Dre puts together an entire binder of ideas for pitching the car commercial they’re working on and brings them to work the next day, but then his boss Stevens tells him that they are putting off the car commercial and moving on instead to a promotion for butter. Dre tells them they are ridiculous and calls out Griffin, the coworker who sits and reads all day barefoot during the meeting. Upset, Dre consults his old coworkers from the Urban department, Charlie and Josh. He tells them he feels that he is out of his league in the job and Charlie and Josh take him to play some baseball. They give him some good advice and tell him to not give up in his new position. He also consults Rainbow and she tells him that things aren’t going to be easy in his new role but that he can do it. He then reflects on the advice and meets with Griffin to apologize, but then Griffin tells him that he himself could learn a lot from Dre and the Urban department since they work really hard behind the scenes. Dre’s new coworkers end up appreciating Dre’s work and listening to his ideas, and Dre envisions himself finally winning at the baseball game.
This episode really encouraged me because it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re in a new environment and it seems like everyone else’s ideas are better than yours. Dre constantly gets his ideas shut down in his new department and it seems like he does all the work and everyone else just magically has talent to think of new genius ideas off the top of their head. But deep down, they respected what Dre did but since he was new they weren’t sure whether he knew what he was talking about when he pitched different ideas. The fact that Dre made those efforts in his new department behind the scenes, though, showed me that even if people seem like they’re not watching my efforts they are, and that I may just not need constant approval to know that I’m doing a good job. When I got a new job in 2018 I felt I had to know everything from the get-go, to be super eager to start and get my ideas going, but like anything in life, learning something new or getting a job in a completely different field than you’ve done before is going to be challenging to get used to at first and there is always going to be a learning curve. And because I felt I had to know everything right away and prove myself to my coworkers, I would get easily frustrated when I made mistakes or didn’t learn things as quickly as I wanted. After more than three years working at the company I came to realize that I didn’t have to prove my worth to anybody because what I was doing was valuable to the company in its own way, and that each role at the company has its own unique purpose, but that the ultimate role is to work together as a team in our different capacities to deliver excellent customer service to clients. I also realized that I am always going to be learning something new at my job, whether that comes in the form of soft skills like teamwork or patience or hard skills like Microsoft Office or databases, and that I am responsible for my own growth at the company. When I get my efforts recognized at work, like Dre, I felt like the work I was doing mattered, and it taught me to keep doing me and keep growing in my own unique way at the company.
Episode 3: The Nod
The episode opens up with Dre helping Junior carry his Hobbit Shire project to class, and they pass by another Black dad and his son. Dre and the dad exchange what’s called “the nod,” which is a greeting that Black people give each other out of acknowledgement and respect. While Dre nodded, Junior didn’t nod to the boy, and Dre asks him why he didn’t do it, dropping and damaging Junior’s project in the process. Later on at dinner, Dre complains to Rainbow and Pops that Junior didn’t nod to his Black classmate like he was supposed to, and Rainbow tells him to let it go because Junior’s generation has a different view about the struggle and race than Dre’s generation. Dre explains that the nod is basic etiquette in Black culture, and that it’s the equivalent of a baby waving hi or a man scrunching up his face when a woman with a big butt walks by. When Junior still doesn’t get it, Dre feels like he failed and Pops defends Dre and tells Junior that the nod, and the “butt thing” are basic etiquette for Black men.
This is the clip explaining the nod for more context:
Meanwhile, Diane and Jack are drawing pictures at the kitchen table and Rainbow looks at Diane’s drawing and thinks they are test tubes because Diane wants to be a doctor like Rainbow, but Diane tells her they are something else and refuses to be a doctor because she thinks it’s boring. No matter how much Rainbow tries to convince Diane of the benefits of being a doctor, the main one being that she gets to save lives, Diane isn’t buying it.
Dre then gives the nod to another Black coworker named Charlie, one of the few other Black people at Stevens and Lido, the ad agency he works at. He moved recently from the Starbucks corporation in Seattle, and is trying to make new friends. He latches on immediately to Dre because he’s the only other Black person at the firm, and Dre promises to make Charlie feel welcome at the firm, even though he feels Charlie seems a little too eager to make friends with Dre. Later Charlie meets Dre in the urinal and breaks the etiquette of standing two urinals away from Dre, instead taking the one right next to him. Dre confesses that he’s stressed out that Junior doesn’t have any Black friends at school (earlier he and Pops met with a Black socialite club that Rainbow told Dre about in the hopes that Junior would make Black friends there, but the couple who runs the club tells them they need a deeper purpose for sending Junior to the club since they are about community service and respectability and not so much about simply making Black friends.) and Charlie tells Dre to take Junior to Compton so he can make Black friends. Dre then takes Junior to a basketball court in Compton so Junior can play with the guys, but all Junior ends up doing is failing to make any of the shots and being beasted by the other players during the game. Meanwhile, Diane at first is bored to be at the hospital Rainbow works at, but then she sees several injured patients rolling by in gurneys down the hall and because Diane is into blood and violence she changes her mind and later tells Rainbow, who apologizes to Diane that she saw that stuff, that is was the best experience ever and that she wants to be a doctor after seeing all the blood.
Dre and Charlie run into each other in the break room and Charlie urges Dre to try some of his soup, not respecting Dre’s boundaries. Dre tells him to cool his jets and Charlie apologizes for being so insistent because he and his son just moved and they haven’t made a lot of Black friends. Dre invites Charlie and his son, Eustace, over for dinner. He introduces Junior to Eustace and tells him to go and play with his new Black friend. While Junior and Eustace are playing, Charlie is telling inappropriate jokes at dinner and comes down from the stairs wearing Dre’s new OG Air One shoes from Dre’s shoe collection. Rainbow warned him that Charlie had no boundaries, but Dre didn’t listen at first and gave Charlie the benefit of the doubt, but now that Charlie has stolen his shoes, Dre is more comfortable expressing his boundaries. Dre tells Junior to say goodbye to Eustace, but then finds that Eustace and Junior bonded over Junior’s Hobbit Shire project and both love Lord of the Rings. Dre realizes that Junior did develop friendships with other Black kids in his own way, and Junior ends up exchanging the nod with an Asian classmate, who gives the nod in return. At the end we see Pops, Dre and Junior sitting on a park bench, and Dre and Pops are teaching Junior how to scrunch up his face when a woman with a big butt walks by. He soon becomes a natural at it, and then says “damn” and scrunches his face up when he sees an attractive woman walk by.
I really loved this episode because it reminded me that there’s no monolithic way to be Black. There were times when I didn’t feel I was “black enough” but then in sophomore year I took a class in the Afro-American Studies department called introduction to Black culture, and towards the end of the course we talked about the different expressions of identity within Black communities, and how there’s no single narrative of Blackness but rather diverse narratives. When I was lonely in college and depressed, I googled the term “black nerds” and I came across a wealth of search results, one of them being an article about a web series called The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae. After watching episode 9 of season 2, “The Check”, I was hooked on the series and couldn’t get enough of it. I saw myself in the protagonist of the series, J (played by Issa Rae), because I was struggling a lot with awkwardness and wanted someone I could relate to and looked like me. Watching J struggle through life as an awkward Black person made me feel less alone.
And in blackish, I found that same solace in Junior. He doesn’t know many other Black kids at his school he can hang out with, and unlike his dad, he grew up in the suburbs around very few other Black kids at his school so he didn’t really have the same upbringing and etiquette that Dre had of acknowledging another Black person’s existence when you’re walking down the street or anywhere where you don’t see too many Black people. Junior and Bow don’t think it’s a big deal but Dre and Pops do because Pops raised Dre to give the nod to other Black people when he encountered them. But when Dre finds that Junior and Eustace bond together over their shared love of The Lord of the Rings, he realizes that Junior was going to find other Black people to hang out with, just in his own unique way and just as he was. This gave Junior the confidence to extend the nod to other young men at his school to show he’s seen them and recognizes their shared humanity, whether or not they are Black like him. I remember in college struggling to acknowledge other Black people; except for my Africana Studies courses, most of the spaces I frequented in college were white: the asexual community, the orchestra I was in, the town. Before college it didn’t matter to me whether or not I acknowledged other Black people around me; I thought, “yes, I’m Black, but I’m human, so who cares?” But then in college, after learning about the experiences of other students of color who felt isolated in these predominantly white spaces, I realized that it is in fact a big deal when you see another Black person and recognize their presence, especially when there aren’t many Black people in the spaces you’re in. I went to a conference my junior year for Black undergraduates, and seeing so many other Black people made me feel less alone, especially because the dorm I lived in there weren’t many other Black people. I also learned I could just be myself; I usually get nervous before conferences or at networking events because I tend to be introverted, but I realized I could just be myself, and I was able to network in my own unique way. I also found other Black friends in college to hang out with. I think that’s why I click with Junior in black-ish so much because he’s nerdy and a lot of times doesn’t feel like he fits in with everyone else, but he remains true to himself and ends up finding people who respect him for who he is.
The Arts Are Life 