Quickie: Blackface - a podcast by Jai//Em

Quick links:
Minstrel Show
NYT: 1619 Project - Blackface, Appropriation & Black music

Show Notes:

Hey, hi and hello! Jai//Em here with a quickie about blackface.

Right now, this week, last week, today, yesterday, probably tomorrow and the day after that… we are canceling episodes of TV shows and canceling movies. When there's blackface, when a white person is playing a black animated character, all of that's going away. And people are freaking out about it.

Tina Fey has requested that four episodes of 30 Rock be removed. The guy that plays Cleveland on Family Guy is a white man (if you didn't know I think his name is Mike Henry). He has stepped down from playing Cleveland. Jenny Slate is no longer playing a biracial character on the animated show. Many British TV shows have had to pull episodes (a lot of British blackface going on, I’m sure many of you are not surprised). The Office has cut a scene from the episode that had blackface in it, so you can still watch the episode, but the scene has been re-cut. Community has removed a black face situation, and the latest is that the Golden Girls has removed the episode “Mixed Feelings” where Michael, Dorothy son, and Lorraine, an older black woman, get together and get married. And that is because in the episode Blanche and Rose walk into the room wearing mud masks while Lorraine's family is in the room, and they have to defend themselves because it's not blackface, it’s mud masks…

Listen, we have a lot of shows with racist bullshit in them and they need to come down. Think about it this way, the writers on the show decided that in the show with the black people they needed some jokes. What could they do?.... Ok, we’ll put Rose and Blanche in mud masks and then they'll defend their blackface as just being mud masks! It will be funny and awkward because, of course, it's not black face!... But now you're writing something that puts them in blackface on the show. 

You’re putting people in fake blackface for a non-blackface, blackface joke. And then producers on the show, the people behind the scenes, all the way up to the top, do you know what I mean? All the way up-- it's a Disney produced show right the Golden Girls falls under ABC and Disney! That's bad. It's bad that hundreds of people in each of these cases -- The office, 30 Rock, all of these British shows were talking about, Family Guy, Community. It's bad that hundreds of people are okay with this before we even see it. That's the problem.

We're gonna have to keep remembering that this revolution is going to have a lot of casualties, because white supremacy and systemic racism is everywhere and everything is going to be taken seriously. It's a problem when shows and movies that are predominantly run by white people continually think blackface is funny.

All you have to do if you don't know about blackface is look up minstrel show. You can look up “minstrel show” on Wikipedia. I will put a link in the show notes. Blackface is basically the origin story of appropriation for black entertainers. White people dressed in blackface to make fun of black people, to perpetuate stereotypes about black people, and make money doing so. So, Blanche and Rose in mud masks (because the writer wrote a blackface non-blackface joke) results in the Golden Girls show making money.

And we're talking about my favorite show, right? I haven't canceled the Golden Girls, but I do cancel blackface. It's as easy as that. I haven't canceled Black excellence but I do cancel The Cosby Show.

I haven’t canceled Quincy Jones and his ability to make amazing R&B music, but Michael Jackson for me is cancelled. Simple as that. The world has not exploded because of this, it won't explode if we lose a bunch more of our TV shows and celebrities that we have, up until now, been making excuses for or overlooking the bullshit.

The world will go on. Actually, it'll be a better place because of it. This will go into history books, hopefully, if the right people are writing them, that in 2020 and 2021 we removed blackface and racial stereotyping from the entertainment industry. That would be amazing! So don't fall for the BS that this is going too far. This needs to happen and we want it to happen.

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