I have never read a Judy Blume book. I have always been a big reader, but in my 29 years, Blume’s books somehow never made their way to me, despite the reading of them being classically recognized as a rite of passage for girls navigating youth and young adulthood. This isn’t totally surprising; I am Black, and many things in the cultural canon that are considered universal—Friends, the Beach Boys, Blume—are much more familiar to white Americans than they are to me.
I just assumed that Blume’s writing, like many of the cultural phenomena that are supposed to define white girlhood, wasn’t for me. In the year 2025, though, one of Blume’s most famous works has been remade into something that feels a little closer to home. Forever…, her controversial 1975 novel, is now a Netflix series—specifically, a modern Black teen show.
Adapted by Mara Brock Akil (the creator of the popular Black sitcoms Girlfriends and The Game), the new show, which is out on Netflix on Thursday, is freshly colored with melanin and relatable to my adolescent experience in ways rarely seen on screen before. Blume’s Forever… details a teen couple’s first foray into sex, and because of its subject matter, it is one of the author’s most censored books. The American Library Association even ranked it No.
7 in a list of the Top 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books in the 1990s (it ranked 16th for the aughts and dropped off the list for the 2010s). Fifty years later, Netflix’s Forever (stylized in all caps and, significantly, without the book’s ellipsis) transmutes the original text for both a Black audience and a modern era. The new Forever takes us to 2017 Los Angeles.
Two Black high school juniors, both aspiring pro athletes—basketball player Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) and track runner Keisha (Lovie Simone)—begin a first-love romance (complete with losing their virginities to each other) as they both prepare for college and, seemingly, the rest of their lives. Where the book focuses on the budding sexuality of the teens, Akil’s show takes a slightly different tack, using the Black experience as a focal point to touch on all other aspects of adolescence, from school to sex to one’s future. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement That feels novel enough in its own right.
But it is the series’ depiction of Justin’s dynamic with his parents, as a Black boy enrolled in a predominantly white school, that struck me as particularly unique. We see how Forever is unapologetically Black—by which I mean, it has moments and conversations that might only be understood by Black audiences, without attempting to explain them for non-Black audiences—from its very first scene. The series opens with Justin having an argument with his mother, Dawn (Karen Pittman), because he wants to go out to a party on New Year’s Eve, even though his father, Eric (the always transcendent Wood Harris), closed his restaurant early to spend the holiday with his family.
Justin, a plus-one invitee to the party he wants to attend, doesn’t know the details of who is throwing it or even where it is, which sets off alarm bells for Dawn, who is understandably worried about her son’s safety as a Black boy traveling alone at night. Justin argues that one party is nothing compared to his fellow classmates who stay out all weekend, and his mother points out that their behavior has no bearing on his because they’re white—to which Justin counters, “They’re white because you put me in an all-white school!” Eventually, Eric convinces Dawn to let Justin go to the party, but he reminds his son of three rules: 1) Be yourself, but if you’re interested in a girl “and she even hesitates?”—don’t do it; 2) If she’s drunk?—don’t do it; and 3) If she’s white?—don’t do it. Advertisement Advertisement I know what it’s like to be parented by a Black mother as a Black student who attended a predominantly white school.
There are fears that your parents have that often manifest in a strictness that feels unfair when held up against the more lax rules your white peers’ parents subject them to. It is unfair—not because Black parents are, but because life is. And they are right: The stakes are higher for Black children when it comes to getting into prestigious schools, being accepted in non-Black social spaces, and walking with full autonomy wherever you wish at night.
Still, Black parents work hard to provide their children with the opportunities they never had, which often means putting them in primarily white schools and hoping they get into primarily white institutions. Black students in these PWIs, as they’re acronymized, have to walk a line between understanding that they get afforded different liberties compared to their non-Black classmates and trying to enjoy the quintessential high school experiences that are afforded to those around them. Black parents—particularly Black mothers, as we also see in Forever—tend to come off as needlessly strict, but the need is strong and vast.
The world is dangerous. There’s the narrowest road that allows a Black child to safely grab life by the horns without the bull goring them in the chest. Even if a Black family is wealthy, as Justin’s is—as proven by their luxurious and spacious L.A. home, complete with a pool and their Range Rover—no amount of money can help them evade this issue entirely.
In fact, assimilating to upper classes can put Black people in greater peril, if they’re surrounded by non-Black people harboring preconceived discriminatory notions about their race. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Trayvon Martin was murdered on a random Florida street in 2012, when I was a sophomore in high school. According to my mom, when she tried to talk about it, I told her “I don’t care.” I don’t remember saying those words, but I am sure that the sentiment wasn’t true.
I cared, but I likely blocked out this conversation because I just didn’t want to talk about it. It felt like a shocking sadness that I didn’t know how to live with, and that I didn’t want to be vulnerable about in front of certain people, least of all my mother. In Forever, Dawn and Eric must parent a high schooler in the years following Trayvon’s murder, when his name has already become a known historical marker—as have the names of the many young, unarmed Black boys murdered by police or civilians between 2012 and 2017, including Jordan Davis, Michael Brown, Darius Simmons, and Tamir Rice.
Dawn’s overprotectiveness, expressed incredibly by Pittman, is eminently relatable, as is the tension it yields that is often left for Eric to mitigate in father–son heart-to-hearts. In one scene, Wood Harris delivers a lecture to Justin about heartbreak that could even, if it were longer, rival Michael Stuhlbarg’s famous fatherly monologue in Call Me By Your Name. Advertisement This is also where the parents’ desire for Justin to date a Black girl comes to the fore.
When Justin gets in trouble for sneaking out of school to see Keisha (and commandeering a driver’s ed vehicle to do so), Dawn gets upset—that is, until she learns that he did it to court a Black girl. Eric warns him: “What your mother wants, more than for you to have a future, is for you to have a future with a Black girl. Next time you plan on lying and steal some shit, lead with that.” This is another refrain in the Black community that is hard to explain, but very real.
There’s the idea that “Black love” is powerful, but it’s coupled with the understanding that it can also be dangerous for young Black people to get tangled up in white affairs, for fear that a Black child will be treated poorly, not trusted, introduced to different values, or worst of all, accused of something they didn’t do. Advertisement Advertisement Forever doesn’t show Justin in school much at all, but it doesn’t need to. Black students well understand the burden of having to hold their parents’ worries and hopes all in one body—a body that is rapidly changing, fueled by new, uncomfortable desires—while also being unable to communicate their differences to their white friends.
It is easier to act nonchalant than it is to deal with it all, the same way it is easier to go out than to write a paper that is supposed to explain the entirety of who you are to college admissions boards. It’s incredibly realistic that Justin waffles between being annoyed by his parents and deeply understanding of their teachings. It doesn’t help that in Forever, Justin has just one Black friend in school, and is often stuck in a cycle of impressing and then letting down his family (and, of course, feeling horrible about it).
But how can he explain to his parents that they put him in a world he is grateful for, yet feels alienated by? I was lucky to find a great group of Black friends and white friends in school, but if I hadn’t, then I would have been just as frustrated and lost as Justin is. Other shows have tried to showcase this nuanced experience of growing up Black in a white environment, but none have succeeded as pitch-perfectly as Forever does.
