"Every year, when I teach undergraduates about minstrelsy and blackface, I look around for a recent example -- and I have never failed to find one," says Rebecca Wanzo, a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. "Fashion companies place grotesque images on clothes or bags. A white Australian performer like Iggy Azalea skips the black makeup but makes money by taking on an African American persona in her music. Anime clearly has a blackface problem. But I have never used any examples from 30 Rock, Community, The Office, Scrubs or The Golden Girls, which had episodes pulled or scenes edited out from various streaming platforms because they were deemed 'blackface episodes.' A number of these episodes, albeit to varied effects, comment on racism. Protests that have sprung from George Floyd's killing and other recent cases of police brutality have had widespread effects, including new examinations of the politics of racial representation. Given the ways in which caricatures of Black people are often used to justify such violence, interrogating Black representation in popular culture is a natural outgrowth of the movement. But as a scholar who works on racial caricature, I can't help but feel that pulling these episodes demonstrates a mere surface engagement with this history, and an inability to recognize precisely what makes racist representations injurious. t is easier to pull these episodes than to do the hard work of thinking through the embedded nature of black caricature and racism in popular culture, not just in the United States but around the world." Wanzo adds: "One thing is clear: If we removed every trace of racism from the pop culture canon, we would be left with quite the fragmented legacy of works. When I teach about the history of popular culture in the United States, I emphasize that African Americans -- and racist caricature -- are not peripheral to its development. They are at the very center of it."
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TOPICS: The Golden Girls, 30 Rock, Community, The Office (US), Scrubs, George Floyd, African Americans and TV, Blackface, Black Lives Matter