The New Yorker:

The actor, who died last week, carried the burden of representing the meritocratic Black boy par excellence, and made it look easy.

By Vinson Cunningham

A few hours after the news of Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s death began to spread, one of my closest friends called me. I knew before I picked up that he wanted to talk about Warner. We commiserated in low, disbelieving voices. This friend and I were not raised under identical circumstances, but we’d both felt the spectre of “The Cosby Show” ’s Theo Huxtable—easily Warner’s most famous role—hovering over the memories of our childhoods. Theo was funny, cool, affable, confident around adults, often charmingly sneaky, a bit of a trickster. He was always getting into something. He had a troublemaking friend named Walter, whom everybody called Cockroach. The two boys came up with a pretty corny rap to help them understand Shakespeare, which Theo initially thought “wasn’t even written in English.” Great Caesar’s ghost! When he messed up with his girlfriend Justine, he asked his dad for advice and ended up learning how to sing the blues. His room was a godforsaken mess.

Theo’s parents were impressive Black professionals who lived in an impossibly large Brooklyn brownstone, and sometimes he felt—and boldly expressed—the strain of the expectations that followed. In the very first episode of “The Cosby Show,” Theo’s in serious trouble because of his lacklustre grades. Theo, fighting back, gives a long, impassioned speech about how, despite the material successes of his parents—Heathcliff (Bill Cosby) is a doctor, Clair (Phylicia Rashad) a lawyer—he simply wants to be like “regular people.” You know, drive a truck, open a gas station, get his hands dirty, and otherwise embrace a more tactile, grounded way of living. There’s life beyond brownstones.

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