Representation

After reading chapter one of Adilifu Nama's Black Space, I began to think of my earlier years. I grew up in Belize. My entire existence was this tiny country, and needless to say, my everyday was surrounded by a plethora of diverse races and cultures. So I can admit, the rose coloured glasses I wore for my childhood years may have come from a combination of half privilege, half the fact that diversity was simply a normality for me. In short, I never questioned what I was consuming. At home, we got all the same American TV programs that one would experience here — and this may sound extremely naive — but as a child to pre adolescent, it honestly never crossed my mind to ask why there was a lack diversity in the TV shows and movies I had come to love.  When Nama said, “For decades, black representation was too concentrated, too weighted down by history, geography, and social location, to aesthetically transcend and diffuse into the ethereal imaginative space envisioned in the postwar of the 1950s” it made me think: How much of what I watched as a child had black characters as the main characters? Or people of colour at all?

Now, I know Nama focuses on the science fiction genre, and he specifically discusses far more racial representation in new-age Hollywood. However, I still wanted to take a bit of a different approach with this blog. After all, I may still be young, but at the age of 25, I can very clearly remember a time when television and movies rarely had racial diversity. So today, I want to take a look back into the early 2000s, and make a list of all my favorite TV shows and movies growing up that had leading black characters. 

True Jackson, VP (released 2008)

That's So Raven (released 2003)

The Proud Family (released 2001)

Twitches (released 2005)

The Cheetah Girls (released 2003)