Everybody Hate Chris Class Issues

In the pilot, we learn the basic premises of Everybody Hate Chris, a semi-autobiographical sitcom that chronicles the middle-school experiences of comedian Chris Rock in early 1980s Brooklyn. The Rock family has just moved out of the projects and into an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Young Chris is excited about the move, however his excitement vanishes when his mother informs him that he will be taking two buses everyday to become the only black student at Corleone Middle School, all the way out in white working-class Brooklyn Beach. In this way, two social spaces generate most of the show’s comic energy. Class issues are largely explored in Chris’s home life, while the show’s writers use Chris’s travails at Corleone to foreground questions

of race.
Everybody Hates Chris foregrounds the experience of class inequality unlike other blue-collar comedies, shows such as King of Queens or Home Improvement, which signify their characters’ working-class status via lifestyle choices (i.e., wearing Harley shirts, drinking beer, listening to Aerosmith, etc.).

On the contrary, Everybody Hates Chris generates much of its comedy directly from the class-based experience of struggling paycheck to paycheck and never having enough to pay the bills. In the episode screened in class, we see the matriarch of the Rock family, Rochelle, explaining to her husband over dinner why the family is not having any meat that night: she had just quit her job and therefore cannot afford any meat. In the following scenes, we gather that her husband, Julius, works two jobs every night in order to provide for the family, further supporting his claim that he “needs meat”. As a result of his desperation, Julius goes out into Bed-Stuy and “gets a deal” from the meat man, buying a crate of Vienna sausages. The narrator goes on to explain that “getting a deal” usually meant buying stolen goods, which everyone in the neighborhood was fine with as long as it was not stolen from them. It is a humorous scene, in which compiled clips show Julius “getting a deal” from different vendors only to accumulate in discovering one vendor has stolen his own uniform, however it is just a further emphasis on the black working class during the Reagan

Era.
What makes this focus on class all the more remarkable is that it comes in the form of a so-called “black sitcom”.

International buyers looking to pick up American sitcoms strongly prefer “universal” to “ethnic” comedies; however, this just usually means white, middle-class, family-focused shows of the Home Improvement variety. Thus, in the international TV marketplace, a white, middle-class experience becomes universalized as something that will appeal to everyone. Steeped in this discourse of whiteness, distributors reflexively brand as “too ethnic” any shows that deviate from this norm, including especially sitcoms that incorporate such features as black slang, hip-hop culture, racial politics, and working-class settings. The breakthrough success of The Cosby Show pointed a way out of this particular cultural and commercial box. In exchange for white viewers inviting the Huxtables into their homes, the show’s producers would banish explicit references to the politics of race and keep the narratives focused on “universal” family themes. But, equally importantly, because white audiences have historically associated poverty with “blackness” and coded middle-class status as “white,” The Cosby Show placed these family-friendly stories in a context dripping with wealth and class privilege. The commercial fortunes of The Cosby Show have thus left an ambiguous legacy. To get on the air, in short, class must be dismissed. Thus, shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, The Bernie

Mac Show, and My Wife and Kids reproduce the upscale Cosby formula in exacting detail.
On the other hand, “blackness” is also explored in Chris Rock’s retelling his childhood experiences growing up in Brooklyn and attending a predominately white school. In Everybody Hates Chris, the adversity young Chris faces is often a result of being misunderstood in his new white culture. In this episode, we see the fallout of a fight Chris has with the school bully. Students, and even some adult teachers, fear Chris. Rumors spread of the supposed fight, resulting in the school principal to talk to both boys, but ultimately favoring the white bully. Throughout the episode we see different scenarios like this one in which Chris is singled out, presumably because he is the “new kid”, but more obviously because he is the only black kid at this school.
Everybody Hates Chris is not preachy about racial issues, but it is an unabashedly black show, constantly aware of social and economic context and the way discrimination and poverty shape the lives of minority families. It is The Cosby Show without the class privilege, or The Wonder Years with a hip-hop soundtrack. It's a kind of throwback to an earlier television era, a comedy about a functional family whose members treat each other with affection and respect (laced with the occasional creative threat: “I will put my foot so far up your behind you'll have toes for teeth”).