In an interview at the Wilmington Library for the launch of his new book Growing Up Urkel, actor Jaleel White suggested Family Matters gets left out of the discussion on the best Black TV shows of all time.
“Being a part of the ‘TGIF’ [ABC programming block] brand sometimes makes you feel like you don’t belong in the pantheon of blackness,” he said at the 7:30 point of the chat, as seen below. “Blackness has been treated as a very monolithic experience in entertainment. 'If it’s not a hood story, it’s not a Black story.' And you know, sometimes I feel left out of that."
White, who portrayed Steven Quincy Urkel on nine seasons of the ABC sitcom, said that the show rarely comes up when people talk about the Black shows they grew up with. "If there’s ever a poll, and they say what are your favorite black shows? Martin is in there, Living Single… I already know we’re coming in last," he laughed. "But if there’s ever a poll and it’s just your favorite family shows, suddenly we rank really high. So it’s kind of interesting in how we look at ourselves even as Black folks.”
White also used the topic as a jumping off point to discuss how he became the defining image of Black male nerd culture for an entire generation.
"Somehow I became a symbol of Black male nerd culture, I know this for a fact. Any brother that grew up in the 90s and 2000s, he was told that he looked like me," he said. "He was called Urkel and he didn’t look anything like me, guaranteed. But still, his peers would find a way to call him Urkel. So it’s really humbling to see how far nerd culture has come. And really it’s not nerd culture, it’s smart culture, it’s hobbyist culture, it’s skateboarders… I could never have known in a million years that I could be the face of that.”
Just last month, White shared his reasons for turning down the opportunity to reprise his role of Urkel in a Family Matters reboot.
"Somewhere around 2013, 2014, I was approached by one of our former producers that Netflix had interest in doing a reboot of Family Matters on the heels of Fuller House having done so well. And that didn't make any sense to me," he said. "I didn't feel that it was right for us to have to copy what Full House had done to fit inside someone's business model to capture the magic that made our show make sense."
