Malcolm-Jamal Warner was America’s brother | Notice

I am sad, so deeply sad. I cried, literally, during a call, when an alert crossed my laptop this week that Malcolm-Jamal Warner was dead. I couldn’t believe it, I didn’t want to believe that he, my friend, drowned during a swim, somewhere at Costa Rica, when he was on vacation with his wife and his little daughter. Fifty-four, 54 years old. Why does good often go prematurely? Matthew Perry. Tupac Shakur. Amy Winehouse. Kurt Cobain. Marilyn Monroe. Aaliyah. Bobby Kennedy. Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. Billie Holiday. Bruce Lee. Selena. Janis Joplin. Vincent Van Gogh. Whitney Houston. James Dean. Princess Diana. Brittany Murphy, the list is diversified, mythical and, yes, so deeply sad.

Meanwhile, we also had a relentless parade of black male celebrities – Chadwick Boseman, Kobe BryantDMX, Michael K. Williams, and more than I dare to count this decade – just go, disappeared, none of them even at senior distance. All deaths disorder my soul powerfully, it doesn’t matter who it is, famous or not. But I must admit, without shame, that it hurts in a certain way every time I hear about another black man left, as black often say.

Now it’s Malcolm-Jamal Warner. Actor nominated at the Emmy. Musician winner of a Grammy. Poet nominated with Grammy. Beloved husband, father, son.

I do not remember when neither where nor how I met him personally, but it was at the time. Nevertheless, like hundreds of millions of viewers across the planet, I was presented to Malcolm-Jamal via The Cosby ShowOne of the only three American television programs that have been n ° 1 in the evaluations for five seasons (the others: Everything in the family And American idol). To say The Cosby Show Revolutionary and the change of game would be a rude and the roughness. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan America, AIDS and Crack epidemics, and the initial explosion of brands like Apple And Nike, the show was a unicorn. It saved a difficulty Nbc network. He presented to our nation a different way of seeing the black experience. It has become a global phenomenon of pop culture during its eight seasons race.

We had never been assisted by a black family like this in the history of television: two professional parents with five children – four girls and a boy – entrusting in their beings, the whole house a manifestation of the era of civil rights of what was possible. No racist stereotypes, no degrading facial expressions, no tilted heads and no broken body of the old Hollywood. Yes, a legitimate and just account representation, and like the lonely male child of the Malcolm-Jamal clan remixed Theo Huxable with an enchanting recipe of joy of black boy, a cool jazz meets a hip-hop fanfaron, and an insatiable thirst for the rope of life.

I’m just a little older than Malcolm-Jamal and I never thought I would see someone like him on television. But he was there, in the living color. I was inspired. I was doubly amplified when I learned that he was born in Jersey City, nj like me. He was me and I was him. In the smile and laughter of Malcolm-Jamal were also mine. In his childhood difficulties to virility, my tests and my tribulations. It was a related spirit, and, moreover, what Mary Tyler Moore meant for women 10 years earlier is what Malcolm-Jamal Warner meant for black America, for black boys like me.

No, we cannot delete what the creator of the show, Bill Cosby, was accused of these many moons later. The allegations of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment are brutal and “tarnishedAs Malcolm-Jamal said in an interview, the great heritage of The Cosby ShowProbably forever.

But we cannot throw this historic television program and its participants either because of a single person. The Malcolm-Jamal Warner that I learned, as an actor, as a musician, as a poet colleague, as a voice, chief and manufacturer of bridges, was kind, united and really full of hope and love. If we simply scan a social media platform because the tragedy will see the testimonies, from a wide spectrum, saying exactly the same thing. Malcolm-Jamal Warner was a very different type of man.

Alas, I do not know what Malcolm-Jamal Warner thought of the accusations against his father of television other than some declarations here and there that one can easily Google. I imagine it was tormented and torn. I have never spoken with him to be in a successful television program so early in life. He knew I knew, just as I knew he knew that I had been on the very first season of MTV The real world. Ours was a safe space, two products of pop culture, which preferred to talk about poetry, music and hip-hop. Two black men in America, on this earth, trying to sail in all spaces, perpetually, while we travel through the chapters of Reagan, bushes, Clinton, Obama, Biden and Trump.

I know by losing Malcolm-Jamal Warner, and the way we lost it, with so much breath still breathing, leaving his wife, daughter and mother behind, is a collective trauma that is inexplicable. I cried, my wife cried, my wife’s mother and so many others we know cried. Because losing it amounts to losing a blood parent, a close friend. Because Malcolm-Jamal, named after the icon of civil rights Malcolm X and the jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal, was really the brother we all needed.

Kevin Powell is a poet, filmmaker and author of 16 nominated books with Grammys. He previously wrote a Nowsweek Cover on Spike Lee. Kevin lives in Brooklyn, Ny follows him on all social media platforms: @PoetkevinPowell.

The points of view expressed in this article are the own writers.