How ’90s Us Sitcoms Shaped My Identity

Is it weird that sometimes I just slip into an American accent? Usually it’s when I’m being hyperbolic – as people over the pond often are – or to embellish key phrases like “Oh my gaaawd”, “Shut uuuuup” or “You’re literally gonna die” with a sprinkle of vocal fry. Mostly it sounds like I’m possessed by a Valley girl, but every once in a while I’ll slip into the lilt of a southern belle. Just to keep things fresh.

The fact I can mimic and place dozens of regional accents in the States is testament to a childhood in part spent glued to the American TV shows being beamed into my Manchester sitting room. In the ’90s, I was a small child loyal to Sky channels like Trouble, Nickelodeon and Disney, all broadcasting the likes of Moesha, My Wife and Kids, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Sister, Sister and Black cartoons like The Proud Family (or even secondary characters like Susie Carmichael in Rugrats) into my home. We absorbed so many references (I know about the African American holiday, Kwanzaa from Moesha, for example) and cultural taboos (like the day one of Will’s cousins in The Fresh Prince brings home a white boyfriend), by osmosis.

The majority of the shows focused on a middle-class family setup, but One on One and The Parkers showed the pressures of single parenthood, while Girlfriends examined the difficulties professional Black women have in finding love. For little Black girls like me, our learning about Black womanhood, love, and comedy came from this golden era of the Black sitcom.

In real life, Black people at work or in social groups often find themselves being characterised as the “strong” person who fixes things. This stems from pop culture’s obsession with casting us as the help (as seen quite literally in films like The Help). In all of the other television written by or produced for white people, meanwhile, we only ever seemed to be an accessory to someone else as the “Black best friend” or the “mammy”. But even if, on reflection, Moesha (played by Brandy Norwood) is irksomely well behaved and inoffensive – which probably has a lot to do with respectability politics and the desperate need to have positive representation on screen – it was through this show that I learned dark-skinned girls could be at the centre of our own stories.

Later, that show’s riotous spinoff The Parkers would show the college experience via the lens of motherhood. Nikki, having initially dropped out of college to have Moesha’s best friend Kim, decides to join her daughter in her freshman year. Aside from the stellar lead performance by Mo’Nique – who later went on to win an Oscar for her 2009 role in Precious – the show also offered range in its portrayal of plus-size women. Kim, played by Countess Vaughn, had injected humour into Moesha, but was sidelined as the big, bubbly friend. Here she shone alongside her mother as a nuanced character: a win for body representation at the time.

In these shows there was room for depth and variety: characters from lower-income families, and hairstyles from weaves and perms to braids and curls. Ashley Banks from The Fresh Prince – a cultured and curious little Black girl of the kind still rarely seen on TV – was learning a musical instrument just like I was; in Sister, Sister, Tia and Tamera navigated their teenage crushes. It was the full scope of the human condition, and they looked just like me and my family. They were given the space to be three-dimensional and complex, meaning that I could be too.

I still have home videos of my DIY sitcom ’90s Girls. It starred myself and my older sister and had a hip-hop intro that we also sang in an American accent (the lyrics, to my memory, were: “We’re the ’90s girls, in a ’90s world. Don’t we look so sexy? We’re ’90s girls”). Each episode mimicked the storylines of the sitcoms I’ve mentioned. We didn’t think of ourselves as being any different from the stars of those shows, despite the geographical gulf between us.

Of course, Black Britishness is culturally distinct. American high-schoolers don't have to wear a school uniform, for one. And baked into our adolescent experience are elements from across the diaspora, as the majority of us have a parent, grandparent or great grandparent that has left a trace of African or Caribbean culture on our identities. We might go to Nigerian church hall parties with huge pots of jollof, or listen to a mix of hip-hop and reggae at a family party as jerk-seasoning smells and smoke linger in the air. While there are standout BIPOC characters in shows like Tracy Beaker and Kerching!, mostly the nuances of our Blackness, our heritages and our Britishness weren’t the leading storylines on mainstream television. As a result a lot of us spend our adolescence learning to embrace all sides of ourselves with joy and pride. But these shows illustrated young Black people learning to navigate the world and take on those challenges, often with support from their family.

However, there are universal experiences that link us and these shows laid that bare for all to see. It’s powerful to see parts of yourself reflected, and I only hope that this decade will see a resurgence of a range of stories of Black people simply existing, so the younger generation can enjoy the full scope of the Black experience.

Lead image courtesy of: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo