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The title is a provocation of sorts.
), the Jay Rock theme song, the Netflix-y Strong Black Lead of it all.
But allow me to resist.
The running motif is that Kenya, sad sack, wears blackness like a badge.
It fucking started back in slavery, Kenya exclaims to his writers table.
We are made to pay attention to this.
Everyone at the writers table gets to take a nap.
Her buddy-buddy, go-girl publicist, our surrogate, responds mid-diatribe, Okay.
Episodes conclude with reminders of the big message, in case you didnt get it the first time.
In episode five, Kenya deflects a question about his generations general insecurity with that answer.
Whatever question you ask me, the answers gonna be because of slavery, he tells his daughter.
So, yes, I can do this all day.
as evidence of the Middle Passage.
The show suggests this in its cheekier moments, yet routinely recoils.
What is Kenya Barris afraid of?
A shame, that.
If the legacy of slavery is here, it must be cropped and inserted.
In the third episode theme: Juneteenth Kenya wants to make sense of a painting hes just had hung.
It came, he announces.
The family is less than impressed.
Its a black square, Joya shrugs.
Its obviously a piece on blackness so he says before the flailing begins.
Joya wonders how much it cost, implying the possibility that her husband got took.
As black people, theres so many different things; vibrations of so many different colors.
And its the sum total of all of these colors that presents blackness in its purest form.
In all of its brilliance, all of its splendor.
Black AF is rhetorically weighty, but ultimately a myth.
