Karen Malina White

One of the ways My So-Called Life was different from most shows set in high school was that most of its performers were actually teenagers. This made Karen Malina White, born in 1965, stand out. She had in fact already done thirteen episodes of A Certain Popular ‘80s Sitcom About a Black Family and twenty-six of its spinoff, A Different World. She’d played Jazz’s wife, Jewel, an ex-con, in two episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. She’d even done an episode of Herman’s Head. Actually, it’s kind of frustrating how hard it was to find images of her from that stage of her career.

Because I do still think of her as Abyssinia Churchill. She’s only on two episodes, but she’s a notable presence on at least one of them. She’s not a good friend of Angela’s, just someone she sees in class, so it’s not as though we’ve suddenly acquired Angela’s Black Friend. Abyssinia is a very smart girl who is pretending to be less smart so as not to show up her boyfriend, the opposite of Angela who is ignoring her schoolwork so as to spend more time with Jordan. Abyssinia goes to tutoring she doesn’t need because her boyfriend does; we are to be proud of her for finally admitting that she is smart and good at math and doesn’t need to pretend not to be.

Frankly, Abyssinia is smarter than Angela. Angela would probably need the tutoring even if she weren’t skipping class all the time to go to the boiler room with Jordan. Abyssinia has the feel of a girl who could skip class and still wouldn’t need the tutoring. She’s struggling with expectations that she not be smarter than her boyfriend, because girls just aren’t smarter than boys, especially not in math. It’s nice to picture her as an engineer or something somewhere, having learned that day that anyone who tries to shut you down like that isn’t worth your time.

In the years since then, White’s career has continued. Her character, Nicolette Vandross, on Malcolm & Eddie was obsessed with Eddie, though White herself dated Malcolm-Jamal Warner for more than seven years. Aside from that, she’s mostly done guest shots, obscure movies and shorts, and TV shows I’ve never heard of. Mostly, to be fair, things for which I am not the target audience. She also played the mother of a Dahmer victim in the lesser Dahmer TV drama, a role which enabled her to use the ASL she’s been studying since fifteen.

Oh, and of course The Proud Family. Seventy-eight episodes and a movie, all told, mostly as Dijonay, though also as Mrs. Jones. Dijonay was even designed to resemble White. It’s one of the only cartoons to air with a predominantly BIPOC cast—especially after the removal of Tara Strong—and is actually aimed at a BIPOC audience. It’s one of those shows that would get declared woke and DEI and so forth by certain people and is, in fact, much-needed representation of children who aren’t used to seeing themselves on TV and deserve to.