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Best Black-ish Episodes to Watch to Learn How to not be Racist

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Hi everyone! It’s me again, but don’t worry—this article is a fun one! Ever heard of Black-ish? If you have, give yourselves a pat on the back, if not, I’ll explain: Black-ish was an 2010s ABC sitcom about an upper-class black family, the Johnsons, who work to hold onto their roots while living in a suburban white neighborhood. There is Dre, a Compton-born successful advertising executive obsessed with ensuring his affluent family maintains a strong cultural Black identity, and his wife Rainbow, a pragmatic biracial doctor who balances her family’s cultural identity struggles. Then there are their 5 children, fashionable eldest daughter Zoey, the nerdy eldest son Junior, the twins: the cunning cynical Diane and goofy upbeat Jack, and baby Devante. Don’t forget about Dre’s parents, Pops and Ruby, providing insight from an older generation and flashbacks to their 70s misadventures. Black-ish highlights the struggles of being black in America with raw honesty, ranging from issues of rude coworkers to police brutality. If you don’t know where to start, here is my top 20 Black-ish episodes you should watch and why: 

  1. The Pilot (Season 1, Episode 1): I always believe you should start with the pilot. It lays out the groundwork and logic of the show very well and gives a great intro to the Johnson family dynamics.
  2. Switch Hitting (Season 1, Episode 20): A wonderful look into “code switching”, a common practice where black people act differently when in white spaces than in black spaces to avoid discrimination. Guest-starring the hilarious Michael Rapaport, you don’t want to miss this.
  3. Please Don’t Ask, Please Don’t Tell (Season 1, Episode 22): When Dre’s closeted sister visits, drama follows. This is a relatable episode for anyone who has struggled with being fully out with family. Especially since black people are frequently excluded from queer communities, even here at Olin. 
  4. The WORD (Season 2, Episode 1): This episode is a great follow up to last month’s article, examining the use of the N-word in an upbeat and comedic way to ease the discomfort of a complex subject using sitcom PTA drama, what fun!
  5. Sink or Swim (Season 2, Episode 14): Whether it is Dre fighting the stereotype that black people can swim, the twins fighting the stereotypes of Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, or Rainbow fighting working mom stereotypes, the whole Johnson family does their part to prove their haters wrong! 
  6. Hope (Season 2, Episode 16): Hey, remember that time when an unarmed black person was shot by a cop, and the cop received no punishment for his crime? You know, that thing that happens on average 200 times a year. This episode examines the acquittal of one of those shootings and how the Johnson family teaches their youngest children about the dangers of being black in America.
  7. Being Bow-racial (Season 3, Episode 8): This episode expands on Rainbow’s own internal struggles as a biracial black woman, going back to her childhood as she learned to find a way to embrace being a black without losing part of herself, leading to the spin off series: Mixed-ish.
  8. One Angry Man (Season 3, Episode 16): This episode examines a young black man on trial and Dre, juror #8, takes it upon himself to save the young man from a false conviction, effortlessly combining a classic sitcom plot with lessons on racial discrimination in legal proceedings.
  9. Juneteeth (Season 4, Episode 1): Before Juneteeth became a national holiday, black families across the country celebrated it. With a full-on Hamilton style musical number, guest-starring Grammy-nominated singers, Black-ish shared the history and message of this important holiday across the nation. 
  10. Advance to Go, Collect $200 (Season 4, Episode 4): One of my favorite episodes, the whole Johnson family getting together to play a game of Monopoly, and like any family game night, it gets messy. There is jealousy, betrayal, greed, and destruction, all in 25 minutes! What’s not to love?
  11. Please Baby, Please (Season 4, Episode 24): In only 25 minutes, the Johnson examines the impact of Trump’s first presidency, the rise of gun violence, reemergence of white supremacy, and climate change all in the form of a bedtime story to baby Devante. 
  12. Gap Year (Season 5, Episode 1): Did you or someone you know want to take a gap year and parents disagreed? Well, the same thing happens to Junior in this episode when he decides to take his own gap year! A teenage boy is just trying to convince his parents to let him have a gap year while the parents treat it like an incoming apocalypse. 
  13. Black Like Us (Season 5, Episode 10): Colorism is a form of racism that is never talked about enough in the black community. In a black family of different shades, it unleashes tough revelations over unseen struggles done in the family’s own home. Johnson’s discussion of colorism is an honest portrayal of it and a reminder that even black people contribute to toxic racist cultures.
  14. justakidfromcompton (Season 5, Episode 15): When the family tries to get Dre’s cousin Kyra into a prestigious prep school, the school administrators view Kyra as a “charity case”, rather than a deserving student, highlighting the condescending nature of performative inclusion. It’s a great examination of the “savior complex” and what it means to truly provide a fair chance.
  15. Feminisn’t (Season 6, Episode 4): Did you know the Seneca Falls Convention did not allow black women to enter the event? Black women were also not welcomed to participate in the 1913 Women’s March, and not allowed to be members of NAWSA. Feminism has always excluded women of color, so Rainbow assembles some of her girlfriends to show the viewers what black feminism looks like.
  16. Hair Day (Season 6, Episode 11): Hair has huge cultural meaning to black communities, which this episode just scratches the surface of. Breaking the show’s traditional format with segments featuring real Black women, a musical number, and an animated sequence to cover the history, politics, and labor involved in various Black hairstyles.
  17. Election Special Part 1 (Season 7, Episode 1): When Junior can’t register to vote, he goes on an internet deep dive with help from his family to discover why he was denied his American right. From children’s books to gameshows, this episode uses different kinds of media to unearth the truth of voting in a style every viewer can understand. 
  18. Election Special Part 2 (Season 7, Episode 2): It’s election season and Dre’s rich boss decides to run for congress and guess what, so does Dre! With a fun cameo from Stacy Abrams, this special fully animated episode does a fun parody of election season. 
  19. What About Gary (Season 7, Episode 10): Dre takes Rainbow’s white cousin Gary under his wing to teach him how to be a proper Black Lives Matter Activist, but Gary resists. I praise this episode for highlighting how resistant white people are to real self-improvement if it requires them acknowledging or losing their privilege. 
  20. That’s What Friends Are For (Season 8, Episode 1): Michelle Obama comes over for dinner! That’s the whole storyline, but it’s MICHELLE OBAMA! Do I need to say more?

Black-ish is available for free on Hulu and Disney+! Happy Streaming!

Ivy Reviews Olin Library Books #2

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Fiction: Yellowface by R. F. Kuang, 2023

June Hayward, a self-described “brown-eyed, brown-haired basic white girl” from the Philly suburbs, will never be as successful of an author as her counterpart Athena Liu. While June’s debut novel is passed over again and again, Athena is dubbed “publishing’s newest prodigy … here to tell the AAPI stories we need” after her debut novel is nominated for Booker, Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. According to June, Athena is “diverse enough” to succeed. Then Athena dies, and June finds the finished draft of her next novel.

What defines Yellowface is author R. F. Kuang’s masterful use of an unreliable narrator. Over the course of the book, readers bear direct witness to June’s immersive inner monologue as what starts as a “simple editing exercise” turns into a finalized manuscript of June’s – Athena’s – next novel. Each step of June’s descent seems so simple to her: why not soften some of the white characters when they’re so “cartoonishly racist” in Athena’s version? Why not rename Athena’s characters—the unsung Chinese soldiers of World War 1—to make them more palatable to American audiences? Why not rebrand as “Juniper Song” and speak on a panel about East Asian storytelling? By the time the world begins to learn the truth, June is so lost in her own narrative that at times it seems she’s forgotten that truth entirely. Even by the end of the novel, June never stops spinning a story—“cyberbullied”, “stalked”, and “gaslit” are the words she chooses to describe what she’s experienced.

Kuang crafts an even creepier story by setting much of June’s internal monologue during her endless Twitter doomscrolling sessions. June has few in-person conversations to tether her to reality—her only real friend dies with Athena, after all. Instead, she drowns herself in negative reviews, online discourse, and discussions of what a “tankie” is—all while engulfed in a paralyzing fear that someone might find out her secret and shatter her newfound success. I found that an unsettling nostalgia for my extremely online pandemic years crept up on me during these scenes, though I truly hope that for other readers this will be an unfamiliar experience. Kuang’s commitment to grounding her narrative in the awfulness of the Internet makes June’s narrative spiral even more immersive to the reader.

Halfway through the book, though, the Twitter mob makes an unexpected move: it turns on Athena herself. Formerly idolized by the Internet as a “paragon of good Asian American rep”, her legacy is transformed into that of a “stunning example of Western imperialism brainwashing”. The mob accuses her of every niche moral failing under the sun: from refusing to critique the Tiananmen Square survivors that have become Trump supporters, to being a “champagne socialist” rather than a true Matrix, even the godlike Athena Liu cannot escape the vitriol of Twitter leftists.

Much of this is pulled from Kuang’s own experience in the online literary world. Her previous novels, The Poppy War and Babel, are both undeniably critiques of the horrors of colonialism. Yet the Internet cannot seem to decide whether she is too overtly critical or not critical enough. Even Athena’s in-world haters mirror the words of Kuang’s loudest critics, who described Babel as “heavy-handed”, “didactic”, and “frequently interrupted by lectures on why imperialism is bad”. But like Athena, Kuang is simply telling the story of her life. What’s different about this novel is that in Yellowface, Kuang is looking at that life from an outsider’s perspective. In doing so, she holds up a mirror to the readers themselves and asks: Is this how you view me?