I Wish My Generation Had Our Own ‘A Different World’
Howard University student Denver Hunt says today's Black college students are still waiting for a TV series that captures their experience the way Black TV did for earlier generations.
Denver Hunt, 21, studies journalism at Howard University. Growing up, she watched A Different World with her mom, but today she laments the lack of shows focused on older Black Gen Zers.
This account has been condensed and edited for clarity.
I feel like we haven’t really had a good representation of HBCUs since A Different World, and that’s been a very long time. It’s been a very long time since I think HBCUs have gotten the buzz that they should be getting.
Keke Palmer is for a younger Black audience because we grew up with her — Akeelah and the Bee; True Jackson, VP. So I think that we put a lot of faith in Keke, because she is one of the voices of a specific demographic of Black people, like not too young, but also not too old. For the older Gen Z and middle Gen Z Black adults, she’s very important to how we grew up. I would say that most of Keke’s work was very uplifting. It was nothing ever very sad or very harmful.
She carries herself in the media as she understands us, because she is us.
Maybe we lost the recipe. I put a lot on a lot of these shows to be like A Different World because I think we really do crave it. We really do crave to see ourselves again on TV because we definitely have something of an experience that many people who might go to a predominantly white institution don’t understand.
When we talk to white individuals who go to the University of Maryland, they don’t get it, and even different HBCUs like Florida A&M University might not understand a student from Howard University, but we understand that we go to an HBCU. I think that’s what we really crave — just to see ourselves again in a way that we can connect with.
All American: Homecoming was cool. A lot of those shows don’t last. A lot of these shows get canceled. A lot of these shows don’t make it to be a legacy like A Different World.
If I had a perfect view, I think that we would have a Black version of Boy Meets World, where they get to grow up all the way from point A to point B. That’s what I think we aspire to be.
I think that’s why a lot of us are so harsh on Black media. It’s because we have so much that we want to see because we’ve gone so long not seeing it.
