Is the Current Anti-Racism Movement on TV Going too far?

Before you get upset at the perceived accusation of this blog post, know that I am not on the side that we don’t need anti-racism in the world which is what’s going to be needed at least until we get rid of racism, if that can even happen at all. One can only hope that we could wave a magic wand and have all of the racial problems of the world go away. Now it took a while after Black Lives Matter started before things got to be as serious as they are now in terms of content. But this is where we get to issues. Is getting rid of what racist things have been made in the past the best way of confronting this issue?

You’d think that the easy and obvious answer is that yes, getting rid of racism would work best. But there is a difference between owning the past mistakes that history has made and outright ignoring that they ever took place at all. Why not just air what the issue was while airing the content unedited? That works for some content.

The disclaimer from the old Loony Tunes cartoons reads as follows: The cartoons that you are about to see are a product of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in the U.S. society. These depictions were wrong then as they are today. While the following does not represent the Warner Brothers view of today’s society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming that these prejudices never existed.

I underlined the word were because that is how they felt that it was supposed to be, but it is quite clear that it happens still. I like that they admit that a mistake was made, but don’t want to pretend that there never was a problem happening at all.

The main issue that is causing problems today is blackface, where a white actor or actress paints their face as if they were black. This was widely accepted at a time, but generally discouraged nowadays, yet still happened a lot in episodes of 30 Rock, The Office, or other shows. They are pulling those of various streaming sites, making the episodes unavailable. Should they be doing this? This is basically my own real issue with taking things too far. You shouldn’t make the episodes unavailable. You should just put them out with the warning that it contains racial stereotypes or even edit it if you can.

Are they taking things too far? I’d say not really. They should try to make things better in the future. There might be a show in the future called Law and Order: Hate Crimes which would have to show a whole lot of horrible racial stereotypes (among religious, gay, and others) in order to have a plot and exist. Shows should do their best not to have horrible plots like this and not be racist outside of pointing out that such views are wrong.