Alfred Martin, an assistant professor of communications studies at the University of Iowa who is doing a research on The Golden Girls' Black fan base, says: “Pulling it from an archive seems to not only be an overreach; it is also rooted in this idea that folks can’t make the decision that this is not an instance of blackface and is very different from 30 Rock and Mad Men.” Amid the Black Lives Matter movement, the pulling of blackface episodes is even worse. “What they’re doing is as if your parents said ‘clean your bedroom,’ and instead of cleaning your bedroom, you clean the kitchen. This is not what anybody is asking for,” he says. Martin also points out that the pulling of the episodes also results in erasing Black performances and Black people being blamed for the decision. “I belong to a Golden Girls fan group on Facebook, and there were some white folks in there who were essentially like, ‘Black folks ruin everything.’ And people were saying, ‘Black folks never asked for this!'" he says.
TOPICS: The Golden Girls, 30 Rock, Mad Men, The Office (US), African Americans and TV, Blackface, Retro TV