*”Black-ish” will break out in song for its October 3 season premiere with a Hamilton-inspired musical tribute centered on the annual Juneteenth celebration.
“Juneteenth… to be fair, if that was the last day when slavery was officially abolished [in the U.S.], isn’t that really Independence Day?”, show creator Kenya Barris told Deadline.com. “How can we have an independence before everyone is independent and everyone’s free? …It came from that notion that we have to own our own stuff, whatever that stuff. You can’t expect someone else to take it seriously until you take it seriously. We wanted to really have a statement to America.”
The Season 4 premiere finds Andre Johnson (Anthony Anderson) and his family dealing with slave relations in this country and how they’re still relevant today. Barris says the idea for the episode came after he researched different events in American history.
“Slavery in this country kind of just ended… there was never really a reset button,” he said. “There’s never been one prosecutable case against slavery because it was just something that ended. If you’re Jewish in America, the Holocaust was a horrible thing.. there’s a face put to that evil.. there was a criminality put to that. The idea from the people who were the descendants [of slaves] was that there’s never really been a true apology.”
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