For all of these aspirations, however, millennials have a hard time talking about race and discrimination. Although 73 percent believe that we should talk “more openly” about bias, only 20 percent say they’re comfortable doing so—despite the fact that a plurality of minorities say that their racial identities shape their views of the world.

What’s more, for all of their unity on tolerance and equality, white and minority millennials have divergent views on the status of whites and minorities in society. Forty-one percent of white millennials say that the government “pays too much attention to the problems of racial minority groups while 65 percent of minorities say that whites have more opportunities.” More jarring is the 48 percent of white millennials who say discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against racial minorities. With that in mind, it’s worth a quick look at a 2012 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, where 58 percent of white millennials said that discrimination against whites was as big a problem as discrimination against minorities.

To put it succinctly, statistically no one wants to see a black family on television and all that comes with the intentionality of living in that blackness.  The racial culture in which we live in gets reduced to quick one-liners on ABC’s “Scandal” with the Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings conversation between Olivia and Fitz.  Or the a comment by Meredith about being able to do her adopted African (do we even know what country?) baby’s hair.*  There’s nothing that’s in your face about race on fictional television these days.  Our culture may look like what we see on television, but it’s merely a facade with regards to how we act with one another especially ABCs Wednesday line-up: a typical midwestern working class white family on “The Middle,” (discounting “The Goldbergs” because of the time-setting), the blended families on “Modern Family” and the blackish couple on “black-ish” featuring an interracial couple.

For what it’s worth, tell me the last time you saw a black character on “Modern Family,” or “The Middle.”  I’ll wait.

What always boggles my mind is how black faces on television suddenly have to represent the entire spectrum of blackness in the United States.  Last night’s episode was racially and culturally interchangeable and has been the plot of sit-coms throughout the years: having the sex talk with your teenage child.  There was nothing about the show that made it an intentionally black show save a reference to Morgan Freeman and the youngest twin daughter making a reference to her hair not being combed (see above for Meredith’s daughter).*  Personally, I don’t have a problem with this episode strictly from an entertainment standpoint, but again, taking the story arc into consideration as well as what the pilot episode made itself to be, I do have some critical comments.

Blackness is complicated.  It always has been, and it needs to be said that the Africans brought to these shores and their descendants did not make it complicated; it arose from a need to find and create a space where none was given or allowed.  I saw tweets, Facebook statuses and a few penned opinions that the pilot episode went too hard with the race card inasmuch that there wouldn’t be anything to talk about after the first episode–I couldn’t disagree more.  There’s more to blackness than giving the head nod to fellow blacks in white spaces or surveying a room based on job titles and race with which the depth and breadth of that experience could provide material for decades to come.  Ultimately, if viewership declined from both whites and blacks because of the bold declaration of blackness then, sadly, we have a long way to go in this culture.

Is it because we’re ashamed of it?  Yes, I think so.  As an American culture (read: North American) we can point to the storied history of European immigrants that came to this country and succinctly tell the story by quoting “The New Colossus” the poetic inscription on the Statue of Liberty that says

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

And the stories of American ingenuity, the American dream, the rugged individualism and the grandiosity of American exceptionalism all play into the stereotypical story-line of Italian, Irish, Russian and German immigrants that then become exalted into epic mythological tales that tell the American story through movies like “The Godfather”–these stories become synonymous with America.  Meanwhile, the stories of black Americans can never be told beyond some odd 150 years ago, and there is no natal homeland connection because of the forced immigration of the slave trade.  Slavery is the temporal fulcrum of which modern day blackness must be understood.  To fully understand “black-ish” in 2014 and the fullness of aesthetics of blackness, it would require the viewer to have some basic working knowledge of America’s relationship with Africans in diaspora, and to get that full understanding, one would have to travel through the bowels of history and understand how race was formed, and how racism evolved and imbued the nascent strands of this democracy that wove together to form this “more perfect union.”

If you’ve read this far and have considered that I read too deeply into a mere sit-com that may or may not make it, you’re probably right, but for most of us who identify as black, be it because of skin color or ontological familiarity, usually our blackness is that deep.  It’s just as deep for interracial children who are at times unable to find sanctuary with their immediate families or even face being shunned at school, and it’s just as deep for someone of my skin color and the product of black parents born in the South.  The Brobdingnagian behemoth of blackness occupies both existential and ontological spaces in an almost palpable nature when black students are asked to do a family tree for a middle school project, and by the fifth generation names, dates and places peter out like a dried up brook, while their white classmates are able to trace family histories back to the Mayflower or beyond: the specter of race rises from the shame and silence of the black student and the historical fact of slavery becomes real.  When white co-workers speak of making grand pilgrimages to see relatives in Scotland or Denmark, most American blacks are forced to psychologically and verbally ignore the elephant in the room and speak of homesteads in places like Yazoo City, Greenwood, Belzoni, Hattiesburg, Bessemer, Tallulah, Natchitoches, Phenix City, Valdosta, Jackson, Augusta, Rocky Mount, Charleston and Petersburg as though they were regal places and the states in which they’re located are suddenly raised to country status.  When black Americans speak of family in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia on par with that of their white-counterparts traveling to France, to Italy and to Spain, it ignores the very present, but very invisible nature of race in this country.

The fact that millennials have a hope for a post-racial society is, well, hopeful, but it’s also discouraging that they don’t want to talk about it.  If I can be transparent, the shame I associated with not being able to name a country from which my family came from was real and present, and it wasn’t something I felt free to talk about  when I was a teenager attending school with students who were able to trace their global heritage.  I know I have a global heritage, but I can’t name my country.  But I can name slavery; I am the descendant of slaves.  Black people don’t want to talk about that or acknowledge it very often, and according to poll numbers neither do many white Americans.  It is a taboo subject.  Granted Donald Trump has painted himself into a corner of being a bombastic blowhard, the sentiment of his tweet probably carries weight with many white Americans, and no doubt some black Americans.  To be pro-black, especially in name, is to be seen as racializing something.  To be pro-black is to be considered “other” in this society at times, something that socially can function as a self-segregation.  It can even be considered racist according to the likes of Donald Trump.  Can you imagine that?  In this country, to declare one’s blackness is an act of racism.  The subconscious fears, false assumptions and sheer ignorance are real and make a subconscious difference in how we as citizens of the United States interact with one another in racialized settings.  Even on TV.

“Good Times” and “The Jeffersons” embodied the two-dimensional and safe blackness that dominated blaxploitation era imagery.  It was easy to watch “The Cosby Show” because their blackness was never in your face either.  And again, in the 1990s, those sit-coms were emblematic of safe blackness, or rather, what was considered social acceptable.  “black-ish” doesn’t seem to have a problem not towing the line if it wants to, but for many, to not do so suddenly moves that brand of blackness into an unsafe space, one where many get privy into the secret lives and minds of black people.  And if it’s not safe, meaning it’s too real and forcing many to have to make the chronological jump through the history of blacks in America, then, they just flip the channel or turn off the TV.

Apparently, some five million viewers felt that way.  And that’s too bad.

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL