Pulling 30 Rock's blackface episodes is a bad idea: "NBC is muddying the historical record"

The Washington Post

NBC yanking four episodes of 30 Rock featuring blackface amounts to "cleaning up the record of two influential creators who are producing a 30 Rock special to promote its new streaming service Peacock, as well as writing and producing a comedy starring Ted Danson for the broadcast network," says Alyssa Rosenberg of Tina Fey and her producing partner Robert Carlock. Rosenberg adds: "Unlike HBO Max’s recent decision to temporarily pull Gone With the Wind until the company could find a way to add context to the movie, NBC is doing its best to make the blackface episodes of 30 Rock disappear, not just by pulling them from syndication and streaming services but also by making them unavailable for individual purchase. It’s true that 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 in her request. 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 of television that included characters in blackface, and did so in the 21st century....Yes, it may be baffling to some viewers that a mere eight years ago it was acceptable for a network television show to deploy blackface, even if it did so with the intention to satirize the white people who painted their faces. But making those episodes unavailable does more to sanitize Fey and Carlock’s records than it does to promote racial equality in Hollywood." ALSO: 30 Rock was actually pretty racist towards Latinos.