Surely audiences can understand the difference between face paint that resembles blackface from the act of engaging in racist depictions that reinforce ignorance and hate. The bit is shocking, perhaps, but the butt of the joke is Chang's obliviousness to his appearance, which in reality barely adheres to the tasteless conventions of true blackface he is not attempting to portray real-world racist stereotypes, but rather, a fictional elf race.
#ADVANCED DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS SERIES#
RELATED: The Golden Girls Is the Latest TV Series To Remove Blackface Episode Jeong's character in the context of the episode is not attempting to negatively portray a Black person, but the actor is still wearing dark, visually offensive makeup. The joke is that Chang's over-the-top commitment to his D&D role as a "Dark Elf or a Drow" resembles blackface, and Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown) immediately calls out that the group is "just gonna ignore that hate crime." Entertainment has a long history of doing blackface to disparage Black people, more recently than should have been acceptable, as contemporary audiences and entertainers are currently coming to terms with, and it is a trope that was long overdue to be discontinued. "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons," however, should not fall into that categorization. Whether Ken Jeong is actually doing blackface here is complicated. As well-intended as Netflix's move may be, it is misplaced, and the episode in question deserves more recognition for what it is actually about and how central it is in Community's popularity and success. The streaming giant announced that it would remove the Season 2 episode, "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons," from the platform due to Ben Chang's (Ken Jeong) dark face makeup cosplay in the episode and its correlation with blackface. Communityis among the latest of these to be retroactively deemed inappropriate by Netflix.
Hollywood is currently undergoing a reckoning for past insensitive representations of race, but the movement is receiving some backlash from fans of popular series and films that are being censored and taken down from streaming platforms.
0 kommentar(er)
