(AllHipHop News) A prominent motif of Ibrahim and Omar Ashmawey’s Boiling Pot film is the idea of guilt due to noninvolvement. In the SECOND part of AllHipHop’s EXCLUSIVE interview with Girl Meets World‘s Danielle Fishel, she discusses how Boy Meets World handled race, racism in the NBA and more.
In the film, Fishel’s character ‘s father is not the most politically correct man and at a dinner with his daughter and her fiancé, he surprises her with his racial commentary. According to Fishel, before she filmed a second of Boiling Pot, that scene and the idea of being blind to racism, especially in your own family, was the most memorable:
The idea that some of us go around really blind to racism, that if we don’t experience it, then we don’t think it exits. I’ve definitely been one of those people. I was definitely one of those people that thought ‘racism’, while not gone altogether, but racism..we’ve come a long way. That was my mentality, because that’s been my experience. That’s what it seems to me, because nobody talking about this much anymore.
Fishel also gave a very candid theory on racism in the NBA in the aftermath of the Donald Sterling controversy:
The thing that I do think is really great about it coming out is that I think there are so many more people. Owners of teams, just so many more people that feel the exact same way. Say the exact same things in the privacy of their own homes or with their friends and their family. Maybe not in privacy. It’s just been protected for some reason. Now that it’s been out, I hope that nobody is protected for it anymore. We need to have that discussion all the time.
During an episode on of Boy Meets World, Black female character Angela said she wrote a paper entitled “Maintaining Black Identity When You Have Three Very White Friends”. According to Fishel, Boy Meets World‘s greatest commentary on race was that it never gave one explicitly:
What I loved and our executive producer and a lot of other people loved about Boy Meets World was that it was one of the first shows that had an interracial teenage couple, but it was never mentioned ‘oh, you’re going to date a Black girl?’ He fell in love with this girl, and they were together and it wasn’t talked about, because it wasn’t important to us. We loved her as a person.
Check out the full SECOND part of AllHipHop’s EXCLUSIVE interview with Danielle Fishel below: