Everybody Wanted To Go To Hillman

There’s no such school as Hillman College. No campus, no quad, no dining hall called the Pit. Somebody built it on a soundstage in Los Angeles and gave it a zip code that doesn’t exist. And still — decades later, with a whole new generation about to walk through it on Netflix — people who never once set foot on an HBCU campus will tell you, without blinking, that they went there.

That’s the trick nobody talks about enough. We didn’t just watch Hillman. We enrolled.

Whitley Gilbert taught us that a woman could be exacting, a little ridiculous, fully spoiled, and still be somebody worth building a life with. Dwayne Wayne taught us that persistence looks like showing up in the same flip-up glasses for four years and refusing to let go of what you’re sure about. Put them together — on and off, broken up and back again, wrong for each other right up until they weren’t — and you had the blueprint half of us are still measuring our relationships against. Not because it was perfect. Because it was earned.

And Whitley and Jaleesa, roommates who couldn’t have started further apart — one from old Richmond money, one a divorced Jersey girl five years older than everybody in her hall — showed us something we needed just as badly: that the friendship doesn’t have to make sense on paper. It just has to hold. That’s the education nobody puts on a syllabus.

Here’s the part that gets me every time I think about it. Somewhere in those four seasons — Colonel Taylor barking about discipline, Mr. Gaines behind the counter at the Pit dispensing more wisdom than half the faculty, professors who pushed Kim and Freddie and Ron in ways their own families sometimes couldn’t — there was a whole vision of what mentorship could look like when it came from people who looked like you. We didn’t grow up around that. Most of us grew up watching for it.

I’ve talked to grown women — lawyers, nurses, two of my own cousins — who will tell you flat out: I picked my school because of that show. I pledged because Whitley crossed. I roomed with a stranger my freshman year on purpose, hoping for a Whitley-and-Jaleesa out of it. Some of them got exactly that. Some of them are still looking. Either way, the show planted something that a syllabus never could have.

What’s strange is watching it now, as an adult, and catching things a kid never could. The show was funnier than we remembered and heavier than we remembered — apartheid, the LA riots, HIV, all of it walked straight into a sitcom without asking permission first. Debbie Allen took over behind the camera partway through and made sure Hillman would carry weight, not just jokes. As a kid you laughed at Dwayne’s glasses flip. As an adult you notice the show was quietly handling things nobody else on television that year would touch.

That’s the thing about seeing yourself at nine years old and then again at forty. The show doesn’t change. You do. And somehow it still fits.

A new Hillman is coming. Different daughter, same halls, same everything we were hoping somebody would finally hand down. We’ll believe it when we see it — but we’ll be watching with the same hope we had the first time, which is really the whole point.

Until next issue,

Simone Sinclair

Editor-in-Chief, Flava