80 THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020
Kenya Barris plays Kenya, the filthy-rich creator of a successful TV show.
ON TELEVISION
BLACK LIKE ME
“#blackAF,” on Netflix.BY DOREEN S T. FÉLIX
ILLUSTRATION BY CHARLOT KRISTENSEN
T
hink of the hashtag #blackAF as a
millennial remix of mantras of self-
love—“Black is beautiful,” “I’m black
and I’m proud.” The phrase, printed on
T-shirts and stamped on skin, has be-
come a kind of shorthand for a politics
of affirmation. But does it also veil a
prickly insecurity? “Black as fuck” is the
kind of thing an artist or a businessman
might say about his work or his behav-
ior in order to foreclose critique. After
all, who is anyone to question anyone
else’s blackness? Employed earnestly,
the phrase makes some people wary:
Why the fuck do you feel that you have
to proclaim your blackness? On the other
hand: Why the fuck is it such big deal
to you if I do?
The forty-five-year-old showrunner,
producer, and writer Kenya Barris wants
to be the commercial auteur of this iden-
tity paranoia. He is best known for the
show “black-ish,” which débuted on ABC
in 2014, garnered a wave of hosannas
from critics, and spawned two spinoffs.
In 2018, he signed a potentially hundred-
million-dollar deal with Netflix, a boon
to his long-term project to make risky
television about the black bourgeoisie.
In “#blackAF,” Barris’s inaugural Net-
flix series, he stars as Kenya, the filthy-
rich creator of a successful show, called
“black-ish,” who lives in a McMansion in
Los Angeles with his six children and his
lawyer wife, Joya (a very funny and lib-
erated Rashida Jones). “black-ish” fanswill get the most out of “#blackAF,” which
is like its rawer, foulmouthed twin. As
the Hollywood producer Tim Story, play-
ing himself, puts it, in a brutal rib midway
through the season, “‘black-ish’ seems to
tap into the hearts and minds of fifty-
five-year-old white women.”
“#blackAF” has alienated some black
critics, who have argued that it simply re-
treads passé conversations about race and
authenticity. The trap of seeking to be
representative is one of the show’s sub-
jects; still, Kenya’s personal dysphoria in-
evitably says something about the state of
the black race. Non-critics seem to have
a higher tolerance for the show’s flaws,
perhaps because it’s funny. Barris isn’t try-
ing to make his magnum opus—he just
wants to blow off some steam. One of
the show’s strengths is its filleting of stale
network-sitcom character silhouettes. The
Barris family is a picture of caustic dys-
function. One son is a “pathological fuck-
ing liar”; Kenya berates another for being
“soft.” The youngest, a baby, toddles into
the expansive kitchen and declares, “I
shit my diaper, Mommy.” It’s nothing
for Kenya to call his daughter a “thot,”
or for her to retort that he is a “dick.”
Kenya’s garish Balenciaga tracksuits
cloak a miser who worries that, in mov-
ing on up, from Inglewood to Encino,
he’s become a fraud, artistic and other-
wise, and that he’s passed the trait on to
his privileged children. In “black-ish,”
Barris sublimated his creative fear—that
he was a glorified barrow boy who had
benefitted from the hunger of the “black
wave” in Hollywood—into the character
of Dre, the head of the “urban division”
at an advertising agency. In “#blackAF,”
you wonder, and worry more than a bit,
about whether Barris is acting at all.
The obvious corollary to “#blackAF”
is “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” but Barris is
no Larry David, not yet—his writing
doesn’t do enough to distinguish the view-
point of the show from that of its repel-
lent protagonist. “#blackAF” also con-
tains shades of “The Bernie Mac Show”
and “Real Husbands of Hollywood,”
Kevin Hart’s prescient, self-skewering
series for BET. But Kenya’s nouveau-riche
anxieties belong most clearly to a broader
tradition of black-male complaint: his
wild swings from pomposity to soul-dead-
ness and self-doubt recall comedians like
Richard Pryor and Chris Rock, and rap-
pers from Future to Jay-Z. His identity