Show creator, Kenya Barry, defines Black-ish in an August interview with the Huffington Post, here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/29/black-ish-kenya-barris-critics-_n_5737966.html

Asked to describe the meaning of Black-ish, he responds:

I think it's a really inclusive word much less than an exclusionary word, in terms of it really speaks towards the homogenized society we're living in today...

...And so the ideology of what he saw, growing up, to be black, there's a little bit of a filtered, subtracted, watered-down version of that...

But then at the same time, he looks around and sees that there's an additive version when he looks and sees a lot of the cultural impact that black culture has had on what America is today, has spread beyond our particular race. He sees, Kim Kardashian is "black-ish." Dirk Nowitzki has a "black-ish" style of playing basketball. And he looks and feels like culture, in general, is at a place where it reached this sort of convergence, where it's all become sort of this one thing, and we've all sort of merged into this big homogenized pot of where we're from each other. And everyone else, in his eyes, has become a little bit more "black-ish."

My issue with that--

The mimickry and "integration" of Black culture into some "homogenized cultural pot" where we're all "borrowing" and merging into one another isn't a neutral or positive phenomena that "just happens" and we all woke up one day and realized we were a little *less* Black-ish and everyone else became a little *more* Black-ish, as some trade-off for stewing in that pot.

Lol. I stay woke. I'm not "less" anything.

Cultural theft and ransacking? Not new. Neither is the world assuming that their elements of ludicrous MIMICKRY and representation *is* Black culture.

Black bodies have long been a problematic vehicle for those who identify, regardless of race and ethnicity, with the troubling assumptions and desires of the White gaze.

What bothers me is when my own people get lost in those shenanigans and look at ourselves with that gaze (no matter how multi-cultural, homogenized, liberal, "new," and "nuanced," the position and framing of Black folks and culture may be in the "intelligent" light of it).

The show was like watching Black folks perform an unconscious type of upper-middle class blackface. Others still engage in "nuanced" forms of blackface-- in an attempt to "integrate" and meld into the pot, why not us, too?