“You can have good times with anyone, but it’s really different and much more interesting when you look at how you get through the bad times with someone.”
― Kenya Barris
“As much as we want to say racism is dead, it’s still rearing its ugly head constantly.”
― Kenya Barris
“It’s hard to take a stand. You’re not going to make everybody happy.”
― Kenya Barris
“I wanted to do a show about a family that is absolutely black. Because as Du Bois has shown, we do have to live a double consciousness every day in the world. We have to walk our path and walk the mainstream path, and there’s never really been a show that’s talked about what that’s like.”
― Kenya Barris
“For me, it was important to keep my name in ‘mainstream Hollywood.’”
― Kenya Barris
“Sometimes you realize that life isn’t defined by the good times.”
― Kenya Barris
“I don’t necessarily believe that ‘The Cosby Show’ should disappear as a cultural reference, but it is. That’s sad to me. I understand why. He was a man who possibly did some really bad things, and he should be punished beyond a doubt. But that show, and the impact it had not just on black culture, but culture, was amazing.”
― Kenya Barris
“Black, white, rich, poor – we galvanize through the hard times. We really see it happen in relationships. In the best and worst of those moments, you come together, and you look for your tribe.”
― Kenya Barris
“I’ve found that the more honest and true you are and can talk about a character and people’s experiences, it’s less ostracizing. It actually has the opposite effect than one would think. It makes the characters and the story more inclusive.”
― Kenya Barris
“Whenever you put a family together, they may share some points of views and morals, but there are going to be differences.”
― Kenya Barris
“When you’re in the middle of it, when you’re a kid growing up, you don’t think, ‘This is my first heartbreak.’ You just think, ‘My heart is broken.’ But then as a parent, you look back, and you see your child go through his or her first heartbreak, and you’re realizing, ‘Oh my God, this is her first heartbreak.’”
― Kenya Barris
“Everybody – every single person – has a story. Find yours and tell it in your voice.”
― Kenya Barris
“’A Different World,’ for me, was in a lot of ways responsible for me going to college. I wanted to go to a black college, and I wanted to get out of Los Angeles. It’s just a natural part of all of our journeys, that idea of leaving home.”
― Kenya Barris
“There’s never really been a true apology for slavery.”
― Kenya Barris
“’Black-ish’ is a show that has spoken to all different types of people and brought them closer as a community, and I’m so proud of the series.”
― Kenya Barris
“Writers’ rooms are terrifying. You take someone whose never done this before, and this is their life’s dream that is about to happen or not about to happen – that is an amazing amount of pressure to have.”
― Kenya Barris
“After the first couple of years of on ‘Black-ish,’ my wife and I actually broke up. We got back together, and it was this really, really difficult time for me.”
― Kenya Barris
“When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn’t make you feel something, then it’s probably a failure.”
― Kenya Barris
“My mom went through civil rights; my dad went through civil rights. My name was Kenya because they wanted to give me an African name.”
― Kenya Barris
“I am what I am as a writer because of Norman Lear and Spike Lee. Norman Lear in particular.”
― Kenya Barris
“My father lost a lung in a chemical accident at General Motors, and after a while, he got a settlement that sort of changed all of our lives and moved us from, what we say, ‘ashy to classy’ in some aspects.”
― Kenya Barris
“My kids are nothing like I remember black kids being when I was a kid.”
― Kenya Barris
“I want to make sure I don’t leave any money for my kids, so I’m going to spend it all on clothes.”
― Kenya Barris
“When you reach a level of status – and making it to college is an accomplishment in itself – you are trying to define who you are.”
― Kenya Barris
“The thing that I get so often with network comedies – and, I think, some of the most brilliant people in the world do them – but it’s easy to hide behind a joke. I kind of feel like when you have to face things, and you don’t have humor, it becomes very vulnerable; it exposes your deepest and darkest fears in some aspects.”
― Kenya Barris
“The acknowledgement and celebration of Juneteenth as an American and possibly international holiday is something that I would put in the life goals column for me.”
― Kenya Barris
“No civil rights movement has gotten anywhere without the help of white liberals.”
― Kenya Barris
“At my core, I’m shy.”
― Kenya Barris
“Honestly, I regret not having spanked my kids.”
― Kenya Barris
“I still believe a little bit that changing gender roles have hurt relationships.”
― Kenya Barris
“My kids did not know that Obama was the first black president. I felt like I needed to tell them because I felt like, ‘How could you not know that?’ But for the ones who didn’t know, he was basically the only president they knew.”
― Kenya Barris
“I’m doing another pilot about a black Democratic pundit who’s married to a white Republican pundit. And the purpose of me wanting to do that show – and ABC sort of supported me in the way they did – is because I feel like, you know, the political system is like an old married couple.”
― Kenya Barris
“I set out to tell my story, which is based on my family. Dr. Cosby told his story in ‘The Cosby Show.’ The comparisons stop there in terms of my creation of the show. We just both happen to have black fathers at the center of it.”
― Kenya Barris
“I tried to do Kwanzaa with my family and was like, ‘This sucks. What am I doing this for?’ For me, I felt like I was doing it because I was trying to live up to someone else’s idea of what ‘black’ was.”
― Kenya Barris
“I’m not for having to support everything that’s black, because I definitely don’t. But I do feel like it is imperative for us to see that we are not a monolithic people.”
― Kenya Barris
“For me, Shonda Rhimes is an amazing person that I look up to. She empowered a lot of her writers to go on and do other things while, at the same time, she made sure she kept her stamp on those things and grew her business.”
― Kenya Barris
“I have a ‘hope for the best, expect the worst’ mentality.”
― Kenya Barris
“I’m a huge fan of writing for people rather than writing and then trying to wedge people in. I’d love to know who the people are before I can write for them. For me, it’s a much more organic way to create characters.”
― Kenya Barris
“What I did not want to be was a fad, because fads die. I had one of the George Michael Wham! neon-colored sweatshirts, and I thought it would never go out of style. Fads die.”
― Kenya Barris
“I know a lot for me, personally, the best moments have come from watching my kids have an experience I never thought about as a kid but then remembered as a parent.”
― Kenya Barris
“I love Donald Glover.”
― Kenya Barris
“I wanted to be a doctor, because I grew up on ‘Cosby.’”
― Kenya Barris
“At 24, I was probably making more than 95 percent of my friends. I was burning through money.”
― Kenya Barris
“I feel like money is an interesting thing when you don’t come from it.”
― Kenya Barris
“Most importantly, I want my kids to be happy. You’re only as happy as your saddest kid.”
― Kenya Barris
“I think that, for so much of our matriculation through American society, black people sort of feel like outsiders.”
― Kenya Barris
“As wild and raunchy as Richard Pryor was, people related to his honesty because they found something in their life that they understood.”
― Kenya Barris
“No one’s pro-police brutality.”
― Kenya Barris
“For me, one of the big things I really worried about a lot was nuclear war growing up.”
― Kenya Barris
“You get a little older, and you start understanding the world in a different way and what you don’t have control over and what you do have control over.”
― Kenya Barris
“If Adam Sandler does a bad movie, he doesn’t bring down the whole white race. But if Tyler Perry does, it’s like, ‘See what you guys do?’ and that type of thing.”
― Kenya Barris
“Actors are magical people. They can take words you wrote and say them in a way that, although you thought the line was good when you wrote it, it’s fantastic when it comes out of their mouth.”
― Kenya Barris
“To me, the Peabody was as big if not bigger than any award, but I do understand an Emmy Award-winning show has a different buzz when it comes to start talking about renewals and things like that. There’s a professional something to it that matters.”
― Kenya Barris
“I think that’s the key to any artistic endeavor: You want it to feel fresh and not have people look at it like it’s re-creation of something else unless it’s done in a really strong way.”
― Kenya Barris
“The small moments I’ve had to talk with President Obama, I’ve told him, ‘I get it.’ His presidency was in some ways almost overshadowed by the fact that he was the first black president.”
― Kenya Barris
“I love Meryl Streep.”
― Kenya Barris
“And I feel like, as a black man within black culture, I know very well firsthand – as do my parents and my grandparents and great-grandparents – we’re used to things not going our way.”
― Kenya Barris
“I really want to do what ‘Veep’ did. ‘Veep,’ in a very comical way, gave us a look inside the political machine, but I want to do it for the average American family.”
― Kenya Barris
“There has never been a prosecuted case of slavery. There’s no criminality to it. So, it was just like, ‘It’s over,’ and thus, because it was over, and it was never considered ‘wrong’ in the prosecutable, criminal sense of the word, the country doesn’t take it as wrong.”
― Kenya Barris
“Laurence Fishburne – he’s a great actor, but he dances and sings, too? He can just do everything.”
― Kenya Barris
“I dug deep, and I found that there were people who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump – because they saw what they believed was going to be hope and change, and under Obama, their particular lives did not change.”
― Kenya Barris
“I would say any creative person has that: you can’t just force a topic. Whether you’re a painter, you want to do a cartoon. Anything. Something may come up that’s not your style or suited to what you are working on at the moment. So you file it away and hopefully find a place for it.”
― Kenya Barris
“I want to start really developing more on the film side.”
― Kenya Barris
“Of all the ‘Black-ish’ characters, Zoey is most like my daughter, who goes to U.S.C.”
― Kenya Barris
“My wife is a doctor, and we had a decent life financially. My kids were going to nice schools and had nannies. We weren’t rich, but we were better off than I was growing up. And I looked around, and I was like, ‘Who are these people?’ It was the opposite of what I remembered growing up.”
― Kenya Barris
“I hear people say, ‘I’m not a role model’ all the time, and it’s like, ‘Well, of course you’re not!’ It doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to look at you as one, though.”
― Kenya Barris
“I’ve been on predominantly ‘white’ shows before, and I had also been on predominantly ‘black’ shows. I would complain that when I was on a white show, they would only hire me because there was a black character or they needed a black voice. But then I would be mad if they went and hired a white dude in my position.”
― Kenya Barris
“As a creative, you have to be your truest form. You can’t worry about fitting into whatever boxes people want to put you in.”
― Kenya Barris
“I believe comedy is a really good lens to filter serious issues through. If people are laughing, they don’t necessarily realize until they stop laughing that they just took something in that’s going to start a conversation.”
― Kenya Barris
“ABC has a general policy that you can’t show images of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.”
― Kenya Barris
“I don’t know Channing Dungey well, but we have talked several times, and she seems like an amazing executive.”
― Kenya Barris
“I have five kids, and people can say ‘nature versus nurture,’ but it is nature! Nurture has so little to do with it. I have five kids, and there are five totally different people in my house.”
― Kenya Barris
“Jill Soloway is a friend of mine. She does ‘Transparent,’ and she’s amazingly funny and brilliant and bright. And I love her show.”
― Kenya Barris
“We should be aware and constantly having conversations about the world because that’s how you change it from the bigger standpoint rather than acutely trying to change things.”
― Kenya Barris
“When I was growing up, I never saw couples fight on the family sitcoms I loved to watch. Subsequently, when tough times arose in my own relationship, I wasn’t prepared and felt so isolated and alone. Marital issues weren’t a part of the narrative that television told me was a ‘working relationship.’”
― Kenya Barris
“I will be so happy when ‘diversity’ is not a word.”
― Kenya Barris
“I hear a creak in my house, and I’m calling the police immediately, but at the same time, I do know that when I call them, I’m going to make sure to say, ‘I’m a black guy, and this is my house.’”
― Kenya Barris
“The PC way of handling culture has been to not talk about it. But we should be talking about it.”
― Kenya Barris
“I consider myself a disciple of Norman Lear. And one of the things he did was topic-driven humor.”
― Kenya Barris
“Comedy used to be a vehicle for change. Now, comedy has gotten to this quirky, nonsensical place, which I enjoy. But I do think there is room for discussion-based humor. We can tell those stories in a way that feels edifying.”
― Kenya Barris
“We’re supposed to be becoming more evolved as a society, and we’re actually becoming less evolved.”
― Kenya Barris
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