Removing racism from our TV screens should be applauded – not derided

In the past week, Britain’s moral reckoning came to a head in a way that most of us would never have predicted. Thousands marched in Black Lives Matter protests across the country, the removal of several slave-owner statues was organised by both people and state, and streaming services removed shows depicting blackface from their platforms. One way or another, it seems, the revolution will be televised.

The 1939 film Gone with the Wind has been removed from HBO Max. The BBC, Britbox and Netflix have taken the TV show Little Britain down, comedian Leigh Francis (aka Keith Lemon) offered a tearful apology for portraying black celebrities such as Craig David, Trisha and Mel B using prosthetics and blackface over the years, and The Mighty Boosh and The League of Gentlemen were also jettisoned from Netflix for racist stereotypes.

Although there was some grumbling around the statues, it seems nothing provokes the ire of British people more than the removal of racism from our TV screens. Take away memorials to slave owners and many won’t exactly be exactly happy about it – but you won’t catch them fishing out 300lbs of bronze from the river.

Challenge the placement of racist films and early 2000s shows like Little Britain, where the characters have one, singular joke repeated each episode without fail, and grossly exaggerated and unimaginative stereotypes of minority groups are constantly perpetuated? And it’s “Yes, in the interests of a free and fair society, we’ll hold onto that. No need for further discussion, thanks.”

HBO Max said Gone with the Wind was “a product of its time”. The BBC justified their removal of Little Britain by explaining that “times have changed”. Critics have argued this is a knee-jerk response to Black Lives Matter protests, that arbitrary woke culture has won, and the leftists are dragging this country to its knees. But black people have been opposing these tropes for centuries. And the energy of such critics would be best spent taking a second to ask themselves why, in 2020, they still find outdated caricatures with jokes that “punch down” so amusing, and for whom these racial stereotypes were even created?

HBO Max has revealed plans to reinstate Gone with the Wind at a later date, with a message explaining its historical context – the same is now done for old cartoons such as Tom & Jerry – but this is the very least they can do. A message explaining that such characters and plotlines no longer reflect modern times should prefix such shows, without that, it’s green-lighting casual racism by entrenching outdated views and permitting impersonations of minority groups that rely on racial characteristics as costumes.

Gone with the Wind glorifies the antebellum South with lazy depictions of African-American slaves who, far from yearning for freedom and autonomy over their own lives, are blindly loyal to the “Massa”. It features Hattie McDaniel as a “Mammy”: a favourite trope of golden-era Hollywood, but which has popped up in more recent films like The Help, and typically depicts devoted, dark-skinned caregivers who exude total compassion towards white people in exchange for the lowest level of basic decency.

The Mammy is seen elsewhere too. Even today, the stock character fronts the Aunt Jemima brand, which has been in stores since 1893. She is the subject of songs such as “Mammy’s Little Coal Black Rose” which was popular in the 1920s; Mammies are also a staple of many minstrel shows in the 19th and 20th centuries, where white actors donned black paint and grease, mocking black people for white amusement. This wasn’t just an American thing; the trend gripped British imaginations too – lest we forget that from 1958-1978 the BBC ran The Black and White Minstrel Show.

For years, these tropes aligned with the economic and social interests of mainstream white Americans and Europeans, placing black people as jiving, happy puppets, all too eager to put up and shut up, while providing some humanity to a racially hierarchical society: racism with a smiling face, as it were.

But the trouble with these tropes is that they remove all personal agency from black people, in real life and onscreen, preventing us from being seen as full and multidimensional beings. McDaniel played an astonishing 74 different maids in her career. And although she became the first black Oscar winner for Gone with the Wind, she was forced to accept the award in a segregated LA hotel where she was not even permitted to sit with the rest of the white cast.

In 2012, Viola Davis also won an Oscar for her “Mammy” maid character in The Help, a film set in 1950s segregated America which was widely critiqued for perpetuating a white saviour complex. Davis later expressed regret over her role in 2018 but in the past few weeks, it’s been reported that the movie has seen a resurgence in popularity from many eager to “learn” about the ills of racism. This caused so much alarm that it even prompted Netflix to make a separate genre called Black Lives Matter, containing carefully selected films and documentaries that offer a little more nuance.

Hollywood and our wider society are quick to heap praise upon black people for playing narrowly defined roles which reflect an ideally unequal world where minorities are not so self-assured. But these groups are even quicker to critique us for demanding more. Racism today is more covert and subtle than ever, and opposing boring, backwards stereotypes that deny us our agency is one way to jettison casual racism from our society. To those who insist upon clinging to a deeply divided and one-dimensional TV history, I say: move on.