D&D General Netflix pulls Community's Dungeons & Dragons episode over blackface concerns

[Todd Roybark]

Comedy is not the problem. Satire is not the problem. Art is not the problem.

Depends upon if your are delivering the joke or the butt of the joke.

I am old enough to have seen on broadcast TV the original Looney Tunes cartoons that had animated blackface depictions.

This was considered normal, and in the late 1970s to early 1980s, discussions of the ethics of blackface depictions did not take place in popular culture.

This is a very personal story, but in 1980 or so, I asked to dress up for Halloween as Michael Jackson. I was unaware of the history of blackface performance at the time...( I was around 5 years old). My mother, was also apparently unaware of this history, she thought nothing of it.

Michael Jackson was so popular, that for suburbia, he was not black, but white famous.

Black Shoe Polish on pale skin gives a texture and color very similar to Drow Skin tones.

So Comedy, Art, Satire that is uncritically consumed, that is not inspected, and only countenances a single viewpoint can very much be a problem.

Look the streets of the world are not greatly impacted by this particular removal of Community. I do not applaud, or support the move itself.

This conversation is, however, useful, I think.

 

[Orcslayer78]

Orcslayer, most derogatory representations are not concerned with fidelity.
In fact, extreme, non realistic parody of the target group is the point.

One is not aiming to be accurate.

That is true for anti-Catholic rhetoric and it is especially true for American depictions of “blackface”.

Many Italian posters, recently, have made statements like this as well:


Clearly there is a cultural difference between the slice of the USA I live in and Italy.
I would like to understand this difference, better. Why do you think, the fidelity argument you proffered resonates in Italy, yet not so much for some in Los Angeles?

Because in Italy there isn't a which hunt, in Los Angeles there is, and companies and conventions are scared to death and they're censoring everything because of the fear of being boycotted. In Italy we still think straight, in USA, in this moment, you're blinded by fear and anger.

 

[Morrus]

This really isn't a discussion about D&D, it's a discussion about the general concept of blackface. The fact that there was D&D in the episode is very tangential to what most of the posts in this thread are talking about (and the post just before this is somebody from Italy offering his opinion of the political situation in America, which is definitely not D&D). We've been closing threads on this topic for a while now, as they all end up basically the same thread rehashed over and over again until half the participants end up being asked to leave. Thread closed.