Oh Theo.
If like me, you grew up in the 90s and your most formative memories are of a particular era, it most likely would revolve around The Cosby Show. For a lot of us there was very limited offering that represented a Black family like that on TV. Very few and what we got we held on to with a firm grip because we knew the narrative about us and the way the world was wont to see us and so a show that featured a Black upper middle-class family, with two working and actively engaged and present parents, raising their Black children in the way they did, was a formative memory.
Theo Huxtable was my first crush as he was for many of us girls growing up back then. He also represented something culturally significant for us as Black people, a wholesomeness. At the time, it was a novelty to see the growth of a young Black boy captured on our screens in all its pure and innocent glory, to capture him and represent him in his most formative years and for it not to be marred by those who would seek to redress history. It was a nuanced wholesomeness that typified the growth of this young Black boy on our screens, something we were not used to seeing. A Black boy allowed to simply be that.
Someone commented that the death of Malcolm Jamal Warner was affecting Black folks in a particular way most things don’t, and the simple reason is because he meant something to us. To see a young Black boy on our screens go on to live the wholesome and fulfilled life, brought up in a healthy and loving home, the way Theo Huxtable was, meant a great deal to us. He was ours, our Theo Huxtable. Our brother in the midst of all his sisters. Our crush in the midst of the other crushes, our friend as he navigated the nuances of Black Boyhood, guided by loving parents and teased by loving sisters. He was ours and we will miss him dearly. By all accounts, he went on to be more than Theo Huxtable, and he did, a wonderful actor, a gifted musician, a poet who used his voice and words to bring about change and do good in the world. But he was first and foremost, Our Theo.
This hurts so much because it was a theft of a life with so much more living to do and sometimes, it doesn’t seem fair. This doesn’t seem fair at all.
Rest In Peace Malcolm Jamal Warner. Our Theo.