I remember turning to my brother during a late season episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and questioning what could possibly be pulled from the '90s and mocked like the '60s and '70s. Wow, have I eaten my words. Looking at Will, Hilary, and Ashley's hair styles and clothing now, they're obviously recognizable relics from that era. The main theme's song and the graphic design also immediately take me back to circa 1992, when I used to skip around the house with my family and recite the rap, complete with that last head twirl he gives before he knocks on the Banks' front door.
Of course, as with every passing decade, we have a lot to look back and laugh at. But we've gotten a lot of good stuff from the '90s too. One of the things I really miss about that time was that shows like Fresh Prince and The Cosby Show (check out those sweaters) could even be on and popular. They were especially important to me as a black girl who grew up in Minneapolis and went to a pretty affluent school to see black people who talked like I did, did their homework just like me, and had relatively stable family lives as I did at the time. However, I'm hard pressed to find such a message on primetime television today.
Nowadays, when we're not mocking the pop culture of the decade, we're often celebrating freedom from its tyranny of political correctness. I remember textbooks and classroom posters of multicultural groups of friends: there were always two white kids, a black kid, an Asian, or at least someone of an indeterminate, poly-ethnic brown, and maybe a kid in a wheelchair. I even laughed at the idealistic inclusiveness back then. On the other hand, though, as I've grown older, I realize that my friends are of all different races. While some black people I know are unsettled by my Facebook photos with my white friends, they really have no clue how much effort I've put into including many different levels of diversity in my life.
It's not like I go out looking for new and diverse friends (in fact, new people are one of the things I am most dubious about, and I often dread having to meet them). Rather, I have found it quite natural for me to be in the company of different types of people, and I am actually interested in how we all differ. I like to be aware of those diverse presences around me, because, honestly, it really weirds me out to be in an inverse situation. Both to be outnumbered and to outnumber to the point of exclusion makes me incredibly uneasy, whether it's blacks and whites, women and men, Christians and atheists. Even being a witness to it gives an eerie layer to whatever I'm watching.
I guess I can understand the feeling of liberation from PC pressure. I certainly get annoyed at overboard attempts myself. But sometimes I think people dismiss it because they think we're done, we did our part. Many people of myriad backgrounds fought hard to be able to portray a stable, middle class black family on television, and that it was popular was a boon. Done. But I'd wager that many others who had never met one of those families let the possibility of the existence of others like them enter their minds and were better off for it. And probably still others, like me, became that much more comfortable with themselves and maybe even made it their mission to get to know lots of different kinds of people. Why does that have to stop, especially now when the anonymity of the internet and the divisiveness of our political landscape reveals that there are multitudes of closed minds out there? The closest thing we're getting now is having a completely opposite effect, with atrocious and embarrassing works from the likes of Tyler Perry.
A lot of those textbooks we used to have looked so laughably forced, and the friend groups formed on TV had so many easily identifiable token characters. But hopefully there are people out there for whom those situations were real life, and they'll create something feels a lot more natural and real. I think there are network television shows like that out there now, like "Community" and "Parks and Recreation." (Not to mention shows like "The Wire" and "Treme" -- of course cable is producing quality, diverse work) Fortunately, there are others out there who grew up in the '90s who will soon be in charge of creating the media that's pouring out into the world.
