Who is being served?

Pulling 30 Rock’s blackface episodes is meaningless, Alyssa Rosenberg writes.

At a moment of broad cultural reckoning around race and racism, it’s not surprising some artists find themselves embarrassed by some of their work and wishing it would disappear. Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, asked NBC to pull four episodes of 30 Rock featuring clueless white characters wearing blackface. NBC has made the episodes unavailable on multiple platforms.

That’s a shame. Attempting to retroactively neaten up the cultural record may be convenient for corporations and for artists looking to preserve their reputations, but it does nothing to change the balance of power in an overwhelmingly white industry.

When it premièred in 2006, 30 Rock felt radical compared to the competition. Its portrait of a grumpy white liberal feminist reluctantly accepting a Black comedian foisted on her by a conservative network executive could be downright lacerating. But major shifts around race and gender are underway — 30 Rock is no longer in the vanguard.

There are worse things than to represent a pivot point in popular culture. NBC is muddying the historical record. It’s true, now that NBC has yanked the episodes, “no comedy-loving kid needs to stumble on these tropes and be stung by their ugliness,” as Fey put it. It’s also the case that any comedy-loving kid coming to 30 Rock for the first time will now be able to binge the show without realizing that Fey and Carlock made four episodes that included characters in blackface.

What’s better: that they never learn that these comedy power players once thought blackface was acceptable? Or that they get a clear sense of what the entertainment industry tolerated, how it has changed and what it took to bring those shifts in attitudes about?

The closest comparable is Disney’s decision to disappear Song of the South, its 1946 adaptation of the Uncle Remus folk tales set in Reconstruction-era Georgia. The movie is both a part of film history and an embarrassment, presenting a laughably sentimental vision of the postwar South, one rooted in a white author’s version of Black vernacular.

As critic Mark Harris recently wrote, “Things don’t stop existing because you drape a shroud over them any more than they stop existing because you cover your eyes, and rewriting the past is not how you write a better future. Speaking only for myself, I’d rather know everything, have everything, see everything.”

Keeping Song of the South available as a historical document wouldn’t implicate anyone currently working: producer

Walt Disney and directors Harve Foster and Wilfred Jackson are dead. The blackface episodes of 30 Rock do say something about Carlock and Fey, who produced the show and wrote some of the episodes in question and who still have considerable power.

It may be baffling to some that a mere eight years ago it was acceptable for a television show to deploy blackface, even as satire. But revoking them does more to sanitize Fey and Carlock’s records than it does to promote racial equality in Hollywood.

The Washington Post