Toonami launched on March 17, 1997. Tom wasn't the host yet — that came later. The block ran on Saturday mornings and then moved to weekday afternoons, and it aired shows like Thundercats and Voltron and later Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon and Gundam Wing, and it did so on Cartoon Network, which was on basic cable, which meant it was in most of the houses we grew up in.
What nobody has ever written clearly enough is this: the kids who showed up for Toonami in the beginning, who taped episodes on VHS because the good ones only aired once, who stayed up past midnight for the Saturday night block, who argued in homeroom about what was going to happen to Gohan next — those kids were disproportionately Black.
Not exclusively. But disproportionately. And the reasons why have almost never been part of the mainstream conversation about anime's rise in American culture.
What Toonami Was
To understand what Toonami meant to us specifically, you have to understand what television looked like in 1997. Not in general — specifically for Black kids in working-class and middle-class households who watched a lot of TV because that was what was there.
There was BET. There were sitcoms. There were cartoons, mostly American, mostly featuring characters who did not look like us, in worlds that did not feel like ours. And then there was Toonami, which aired stories about loss and loyalty and what it means to fight for something you believe in, featuring characters who were drawn rather than photographed — which meant, crucially, that the question of who they were for was more open than it had ever been in live-action television.
Anime didn't default to whiteness. It didn't default to Blackness either. It defaulted to something else entirely — to a visual language that was foreign to American racial coding, that let us project ourselves into it in ways that American television actively prevented.
"Anime didn't default to whiteness. It let us project ourselves into it in ways that American television actively prevented."
Goku could be Black. Usagi could be Black. Heero Yuy and Duo Maxwell and the entire Wing crew — we made them Black, in our heads, in our conversations, in the fan art that circulated on early anime websites that you had to know about to find. The stories were about us because we decided they were about us, and nobody could stop us from deciding that.
The Underground Before the Internet
This is the part that never gets told right: there was a pre-internet anime underground in Black American communities that operated through informal networks that would not be recognizable as "fandom" to anyone who came to anime after 2005.
It worked like this. Someone's older cousin had seen Akira at a friend's house. Or someone's uncle had a bootleg VHS of Ghost in the Shell that he'd gotten from a dude at a record shop. Or someone had found Sailor Moon on a channel that didn't come through clearly but you could still make it out if you adjusted the antenna right. And that person told their friends. And their friends told their friends. And the information spread through physical proximity — through school hallways and block parties and the back seats of cars.
We were doing community curation before community curation had a name. We were doing fandom before fandom had platforms. We were doing what people now get celebrated for doing on TikTok, except we were doing it with no recording devices and no audience and no algorithm — just the genuine desire to share something that meant something with people we knew.
The tape culture was real. You recorded Dragon Ball Z on VHS if you had a VCR with a timer. You labeled the tapes. You lent them out. You got them back — sometimes. You watched them until the tape degraded, then you recorded over them and started again. The physical constraint of the medium created a kind of scarcity that made the content feel more precious, more worth protecting, more worth talking about.
Why It Resonated Specifically
There is a longer essay to be written about why anime resonated so strongly with Black American audiences in the 1990s. The short version involves several things happening simultaneously.
The protagonists were often underdogs who had to develop their power through discipline and struggle — which mapped onto something real in the lives of kids who were watching them. The stakes were enormous and the grief was real — characters died, permanently, in ways that American cartoons did not allow. The aesthetics overlapped with hip-hop in ways that nobody had a theory for yet: the speed lines, the dramatic posturing, the emphasis on style as identity, the idea that how you moved and how you dressed was a statement about who you were.
And crucially: nobody was watching it yet. This was before the mainstream. This was before Hot Topic sold Naruto headbands. This was before your white classmates knew what Dragon Ball Z was. It was ours, in the specific way that things become yours when you find them before anyone else does — with a possessiveness that is partly aesthetic and partly territorial and partly just the particular joy of being early to something true.
"It was ours. In the specific way that things become yours when you find them before anyone else does."
What We Built
What the Black kids who ran Toonami built was not just a fanbase. It was a cultural infrastructure — a set of shared references, shared languages, shared aesthetic standards — that predated the official discourse about anime in America by a decade or more.
When scholars and journalists started writing about anime's rise in American culture in the 2000s and 2010s, they generally told the story of Cartoon Network and Toonami and then the internet as the mechanisms of diffusion. They were not wrong. But they consistently omitted the ground-level networks that were doing the work before those mechanisms existed — and those networks were disproportionately Black.
The oral history of this period has never been properly recorded. The people who built those networks are now in their thirties and forties, dispersed, living adult lives, mostly not thinking about it. But it happened. It was real. And the anime culture that everyone celebrates now — the conventions, the streaming, the mainstream acceptance — is built partly on a foundation that those kids laid, in the years before anyone was paying attention.
We were the early adopters. We were the tastemakers. We were the ones who showed up before it was cool, because we found something true and we held onto it.
That's what Over30BlackandNerdy is. Not nostalgia — or not only nostalgia. It's a record. It's a correction. It's the part of the story that didn't get told, told finally by the people who were actually there.
We ran Toonami. It's time someone said so.