Forget the alleged blackface: The Golden Girls was mired in racism and rape culture throughout its run

Vulture

As Steven W. Thrasher and others have pointed out, the blackface episode that was pulled last week wasn't really blackface. Yet The Golden Girls has been fair more racially offensive in many other instances, says Thrasher. He adds: "Now that its reckoning has happened in the Black Lives Matter era because of non-blackface blackface, I wonder: Will the show pull episodes where Ruby Dee plays Blanche’s 'Mammy Watkins' (in the 1990 episode actually named 'Wham, Bam, Thank You, Mammy')? Or when Sophia did a Black voice ('Them’s just the appetizers!') while dressed as a mammy in the 1991 series finale? Or Paula Kelly playing the Black, mysterious, and lazy voodoo housekeeper Marguerite? Or when Dorothy — after submitting his essay on how his family immigrated illegally to a contest — prompts her 'Prized Pupil' Mario Lopez to turn himself into immigration so his family can be deported? Or when Chick Vennera played both a Cuban boxer Sophia bought on the street named Kid Pepe ('Kill Gonsales!') and later played Latin TV reporter Enrique Mas? Or when Keone Young played both Dorothy’s Japanese student Mr. Tanaka ('Joe Mama!') in one episode and Dorothy’s Chinese physician Dr. Chang in another (enduring endless racist jokes about Chinese food from Sophia)? From the pilot episode onward, Sophia was always putting down Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Middle Easterners. All four of the girls were racist. Rose once whooped it up in a Native American headdress and pretended to be an exchange student named Kim-Fung Toi in the series’s penultimate episode, using a racist accent." Thrasher also wonders why there hasn't been a reckoning over The Golden Girls' rape-victim-shaming jokes lobbed at Dorothy across many seasons. "The Golden Girls is often celebrated as a feminist sitcom, yet though we see Dorothy angry at Stan for many reasons, that anger is never about the rape," he says. "Herb Edelman has a guest role as Stan 26 times, and the rape is never acknowledged."