I had very little in common with Theo Huxtable. The only son of Cliff and Clair Huxtable on “The Cosby Show” lived in the big, diverse city of New York, while I languished in a small, racist Ohio town. Theo had a good relationship with his parents, while mine were so busy working, they barely had time to acknowledge me in passing. Theo’s family had money; my family was poor. Theo had Black friends (who can forget Cockroach?), whereas I spent my time trying desperately to get white people to like me. And perhaps most crucially, Theo was straight and I was gay — which meant my male peers essentially shunned me for my perceived “girliness.”
Malcolm-Jamal Warner, the actor who played Theo, died tragically on Sunday while swimming during a family vacation, drowning after a current pulled him deeper into the sea. He was 54 and leaves behind a wife and a daughter. Warner’s acting career continued over the decades after “The Cosby Show” went off the air, but to many Black boys like me who grew up in the 1980s and the 1990s, the character he brought to life as Theo will always be his most iconic role.
For all the ways my life didn’t resemble Theo’s, when I sat in front of the television every Thursday night, watching the laughs and foibles of the Huxtable family, the commonality we shared was unmistakable.
Theo looked like me.
When I sat in front of the television every Thursday night, watching the laughs and foibles of the Huxtable family, the commonality we shared was unmistakable.
White America often doesn’t understand this singular and seemingly simple thing: the power of representation. The magic of looking into a world beyond your own and seeing the possibilities reflected back at you from a person whose skin is the same color as yours, especially during a time when Black faces were especially few and far between on prime-time television, much less during “family hour.” I was buoyed by the fact that Theo Huxtable was dark-skinned, just as I am, and I could see myself reflected in his character — even as his fictional circumstances bore little resemblance to my real-life ones.
Much has been made of what is or isn’t the “correct” way to show Black American life in books, television and film. Many Black Americans bemoan what has been dubbed “Black trauma porn,” which some have defined as the serving up of Black pain and poverty for the entertainment of white people. There have been questions around what fictional characters we are allowed to play (can we be mermaids or elves or Hermione Granger?). And, of course, there is always the danger of Black actors playing those roles that put us in the crosshairs of racist stereotypes.
But Theo Huxtable defied stereotypes. He wasn’t the precocious Black kids Arnold or Willis Jackson from “Diff’rent Strokes,” whose adoption by the kindly Mr. Drummond made their characters little more than framing devices for how good and benevolent rich white men can be. And Theo wasn’t anything like the streetwise pimp Huggy Bear from “Starsky and Hutch.” He wasn’t Jimmy “JJ” Evans from “Good Times,” who, according to my mother, was a “buffoon” the likes of which she hadn’t seen since “Amos and Andy.”
I mean no disrespect to the actors who played these roles; they took the work that was offered, and for Black thespians at the time, the pickings were extraordinarily slim. It seemed like every Black character existed only to be validated by the white characters around them.
But Theo Huxtable didn’t need to be validated by anyone. He had depth and growth. He wasn’t the “best friend,” the comic relief, the criminal with a heart of gold — or just the plain old criminal. He was goofy, irresponsible, willful, mischievous and lovable. In short, a teenager. And for all our differences, those were qualities we shared.
This isn’t to say “The Cosby Show” was especially progressive. Black scholars have opined that the sitcom was unrealistic and didn’t fully convey the breadth of the Black experience. The show could have better directly addressed racism, but instead it gave some the false impression that it existed in a world where racism was a more minor concern. But, at the time, I was just happy to see a different kind of Black family being portrayed on television. And, although rare, its existence in the world was no less real than the one in which I was living.
My two favorite episodes of “The Cosby Show” involving Theo’s character couldn’t be more different. The first was the one in which he was revealed to have dyslexia. I remember he called himself “stupid” — which I believed deep inside that I was, in part because of poor grades and indifferent teachers. But Theo’s diagnosis made me think for the first time that maybe I wasn’t “stupid,” and it made me realize for the first time that Black boys don’t have to be perfect in order to live.
The second was the hilarious “Gordon Gartrell” shirt episode, wherein Theo desperately wants an expensive shirt that his parents won’t buy him, so he hires his sister to sew one for him — to disastrous effect. I had done something similar a few weeks before I saw the episode, when I took a pair of scissors to my galoshes, desperately trying to fashion a pair of LL Bean “duck shoes,” which were popular in the ’80s. My family couldn’t afford them, and I wanted so desperately to fit in. I wore them to school, and the shoes and I received the drubbing we both deserved. But when I saw Theo Huxtable doing the same thing on television, it became clear to me that he, too, was just trying to fit in. In both these episodes, he was humanized in a way that I hadn’t seen before. He was complex like we all are.
Theo couldn’t have been played by just anyone and inspired the same emotions. Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s honest and empathetic performance of this young Black man — literally growing up while playing the role on camera over nearly a decade — changed my way of thinking and paved the way for the knowledge that all Black boys’ stories are welcome.
My heart breaks for Malcolm’s loved ones. And I only hope he understood the profundity of the art he brought to the small screen and how many Black boys he inspired to tell their own stories. I’m one of them.
