Now that fans have watched the 2018 episode that tackles Colin Kaepernick’s protests – among other topics – it’s hard to see why it was ever yank.
Always with a pulse on the Black experience, it turns out “black-ish” has perhaps also been a little too forward in its time. An episode that was considered too hot for TV in February 2018, now looks positively accurate.
ABC made a very final decision when it decided to air the episode less than a week before the air. It has never seen the light of day to this day.
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On the issue, the episode had taken a stand on the hot-button issue of the day, which the nation – or at least part of it – saw in an uprising Colin Kapernick kneel at the national anthem in protest of police brutality against Black Americans.
This was more than two years in front of George Floyd’s death had everyone in conversation about this problem.
What this says is that this has always been an issue that was talked about in the Black community, but maybe ABC was not ready to talk about it on a national stage. If, that is, this was the point at hand (the episode covered a lot of ground).
It’s perhaps no surprise now that the missing episode – whose censorship is a huge part of the reason creator Kenya Barris has signed a lucrative deal with Netflix – made its way into Hulu’s archives of the popular ABC series on Monday .
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The episode’s streaming comes on Barris’ renewed request to ABC to finally make it available, describing it on Instagram as “22 minutes of television where I was, and still am, incredibly proud.”
The resonant today may also be louder than it would have been two years ago.
The season 4 episode was all about Dre (Anthony Anderson) trying to put his baby son back to sleep by talking about the world outside her window only to be interrupted again and again by the fears and anxieties of his family.
Perhaps the difference is that although Dre expresses fears in the Black community, the White community for the most part did not know them. Now, however, these very real and understandable fears are definitely brought under a footlight enough for all to see.
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In the episode, Dre worries about how aggressive white pride – which he defends as her right – has become in Trump’s America, with quotes from Charlottesville, while his father claims that pride must come from overcoming opposition, which means that white pride is not a thing.
Kaepernick’s protest comes to the fore in a discussion with Junior about his school banning kneeling at football matches, with Dre detailing a history of Black athletes protesting from Muhammad Ali to Arthur Ashe and more.
Again, this was a hot-button release two years ago, but this year the NFL has reversed the course and is in support of players protesting by kneeling at the national anthem they should choose – Trump and many of his supporters are not yet on board.
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Speaking of Trump, the show did not let the president go one year into his term, with Dre telling the story of “The Shady King” and his rise to power, complete with adorable fairy-tale animation.
Some outlets reported that it was the Trump-related content network in the same year the revival of “Roseanne” was the talk.
That does not even come up in conversation about climate change and mass shooting. It was an episode full of meaningful content relevant to his time … and even now.
But perhaps the most powerful legacy, as it will finally air in 2020, is how much it saw exactly where the country went back in early 2018.
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