Midterm Essay Essays (951 words) - Black-ish,

Ashley Altidort Professor Jones Black-ish and the Black Middle Class March 13th, 2019 Analysis of Black-ish Episode 501: Gap Year Black-ish, a show that attempts to tackle sensitive topics in the black community enough for digestion to the unrelatable, does so through the Johnson's black middle class family and their troubling scenarios residing in a predominantly white suburb. Karyn Lacy's "Blue Chip Black" examined the lives of black middle class and how they constructed and maintained five distinct social identities: public, status-based, race-based, class, and suburban- and analyzed their experience in regards to the social construction of identity. She developed the idea of the Black cultural toolkit to draw attention to both material and nonmaterial forms of culture that these black families used to negotiate their daily life. The Johnson family enforces the status-based identity in Lacy's black cultural toolkit in episode 501, Gap Year, through symbols and material culture. After realizing how lost and uncertain he was about college, Junior decided to come back home from Howard University and take a gap year, where a student takes a year off before going to college. When he decided to break the news to his family, it was not met with support. His parents Dre and Bow, and his grandfather, Pops, insinuated the idea of a gap year being only an option for wealthy and privileged kids and instantly opposed, as Pops said, "Is this some white shit? Everything around here is some white shit." Dre tries to find some answers at his workplace and his white coworkers are more receptive to the idea because of the opportunities it proposes, but not for young black men. Steven, his boss, highlighted a statistic that further supported Dre's reasoning for the enforcement of education for his children, "Rich young white males are more likely to stay well to do, while rich young black males are more likely to become poor." Due to imbalanced incarceration rates, employme nt bias, and discriminatory policies, a black male has lower chances of being successful in his lifetime compared to a white male. Education, one of the major cultural capitals important to black middle class families, allows both inclusionary and exclusionary boundary work amongst classes. Lacy compares the differences between blacks in Sherwood Park, Riverton and Lakeview as they stem from difference in wealth and the types of assets middle class blacks depend on to create opportunities for themselves and their children. (115) Blacks who spend generously on their children, like those in Sherwood Park, regard their status primarily in the context of status reproduction. They see their spending as an investment, similar to Dre and Bow, and the blacks in Riverton and Lakeview who spent more conservatively on their children consider spending regularly on luxuries, like private school tuition, as a threat to their status position in efforts of protecting what they have. Dre struggles to understand Junior's firm stance on taking a gap year because "his ancestors didn't cross that river so he could take a gap year." Education presented opportunities of success for Dre that were not optional for him to take because of the environment he was raised in, yet it has become one for Junior. In a conversation with Dre, Bo asserts her status identity as a part of an elite black middle class group, "I am Dr. Rainbow Johnson. I went to Brown University. I went to USC medical school. People know my nameI have a reputation to uphold. My kids go to college!" She uses forms of material and nonmaterial culture to further emphasize her status- she brags of her education and diplomas as a pathway to economic independence and reflects on the effort it took to reach her current status position. Similar to the blacks in Sherwood Park, their perspectives of status includes defining and comparing the black middle class to the upper classes. (117) In the second to last scene of the show, Dre attempted to talk Junior out of taking a gap year, however seemed to associate masculinity with education, "A man has to realize an opportunity like this may not last forever, a man's scholarship could be gone once he finally decides to go back to school." Dre says this with regard of