Shameless Authenticity

While reading sections from Asante's The Afrocentric Idea, I recalled a story arc in season 10 of the television show Shameless. 

Liam Gallagher is a biological member of a white Irish family in the south of Chicago, yet his skin is black. The show plays on this concept as a joke, that a distant relative was a slave and that's how Liam received his black genes. As Liam gets older, he meets more black people and wants to discover more about his background. He seeks to examine blackness not in its biological form but in its philosophical one, as articulated by Asante. 

Liam starts to dress in dashikis, even getting beat up by classmates for it. He dresses as a different black historical figure each day - from Frederick Douglass to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Jimi Hendrix. His next-door neighbor, V, is also seeking to take back her heritage. Though she is a black woman raised by black parents, the show emphasizes her loss of black culture through her assimilation into the white dominant ideology because of her marriage to a white man, job working with predominantly white people, and lack of friendship with individuals of her race. For breakfast every morning with Liam, V cooks a recipe from a slave's cookbook. Liam skips Lucky Charms for broiled ochre.

Asante describes authenticity as "triumph in allowing people to realize themselves through their own history" (137). Liam had the opportunity to examine his Irish side and his black side. He chose to explore the history of the black part of his heritage, one that was foreign to many of his white family members. A history that often put him at the butt of the joke. His authenticity is exemplified by the various black figures he seeks to resemble. By dressing as prominent black figures, he may be able to learn more about the history of his own blackness, a history to which he has no other people in his personal life to turn.

In a similar vein, V finds herself invited to "the cookout" after not having attended one in quite sometime. She finds herself surrounded by black people, people who she identifies as her peers. Yet, as she spends more time at the cookout, she overhears people making fun of how she talks, the dish she brings to the potluck, and realizes she can't follow along with the dances that everyone performs at the barbecue. She comes home, crying to her mother, exclaiming "Mama, I forgot the electric slide," to which her mother welcomes her home with open arms. V has abandoned her blackness and has not come to terms with that loss. The loss of her artistic history explores briefly her negritude. Though we may not consider the electric slide as "the literary and artistic sensibilities of African intellectuals in the field of creative motifs and ethos," it still exists as a part of her history. It still exists as a part of the contemporary black social group (137). In this way, it still contributes to Asante's concept of negritude. 

While V and Liam do not touch on afrocentricity, they do contribute to the examination of authenticity and negritude, suggesting blackness does not exist solely in biological terms, but in philosophical ones as well. In particular, because Liam, though black, belongs to an entirely white biological family.