Possibly as an option, but they should also offer the original version. In extreme cases a contextual note à la what WB puts at the beginning of some old cartoons might be a good idea though.
Qualified No because I'm not comfortable saying "never" - I might entertain that excepts exist. But generally, if a story is worth telling, it's worth telling as is.
My answer leans closer to "No" the more integral to the story. An example front and center in my mind is "American History X" - remove the racism and you remove the magnitude of the character's redemption.
@penryu I think that would just be a 6-minute skateboarding video.
I was more thinking of racist depictions of Black, indigenous people, and people of colour. So, the racism occurred behind the camera, not on the screen.
remove teachable moments? Remove all the books talking about racism from schools too? Pretend it didn't happen? Because the Republican party fear they'll feel guilty? Republicans have proven they feel no guilt. They'd love to drop the N word on the regular and even bring back slavery, just ask Lindsey Graham when he's stinking drunk. 😡
For example, the Hollywood Hays Code censorship regime would prevent movies from showing non-racist couples. No scene can be clipped/removed to fix that. Decades of censorship of "mixed" couples is racist itself, by omission.
I am not sure how we would define racist scenes. Hollywood produces entire movies that perpetuate racism. By reinforcing common stereotypes of racists and indigenous people, they focus attention away from where racism is the most problematic: in the decisions of the powerful. The white savior movies such as Black Panther and Avatar are a couple examples.
Community 2x14 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - one of the best episodes of the entire series. The entire episode is literally about how being a hateful bigot is bad, and it got pulled from Netflix because of a joke at the beginning where one of the players appears made up as his _fictional character_.
30 Rock 5x10 Christmas Attack Zone - yes, it's a dumb joke, but the entire point of Jenna and Tracy's characters is that they're *bad people* with occasionally redeeming qualities. Actually, I suppose that's the point of literally every character on 30 Rock. Everyone's a shithead except Milton Greene
it would have been nice, but at the same time that probably requires a kind of rights that they don't really negotiate for. I would assume it would be up to whoever owns the original rights to the thing to actually re-edit a new version of it
Old sitcom: skip the episode that has blackface or whatever other racist baloney may be triggering to a person of color who is just trying to relax before bed
one person's "culturally authentic light entertainment" is another person's "didn't need that nasty spike in blood pressure I've already got hypertension thank you."
I feel like if we had dealt properly with how racist our society really was we wouldn't be where we are now. We certainly don't need to be casually covering it up now.
in the early days when Netflix was US based and mostly DVD there was a “gay content” flag that defaulted off for new accounts. If you watched some Margaret Cho or mildly gay themed TV shows it would turn on then the more explicit gay content would no longer be filtered out. Nowadays they are global and have a much more complex way to hide things you probably don’t want to see, and different jurisdictions get different content.
I watched Gone With The Wind for the first time a few weeks ago. Wow that’s awful. Anyway it included a prelude explainer of the history and while I both appreciated the context and the fact that it was unedited, I know too many people have treated it as a manifesto instead of the openly racist, revisionist tale it is.
I think the difficulty of preserving streaming media is a problem; I worry about our history being edited, with the original version disappearing down the memory hole.
We regularly see director's cuts and fan edits that improve or change previously released media in interesting ways, and people usually don't get upset, so long as the original is also available. I think that's the key, to allow improvements so long as history isn't lost, but can streaming media pull that off?
qualified no. Have a warning at the start of the movie or TV show that there will be racist scene(s) but show them as they originally were. We won't learn from our past by hiding it, but we should be made aware that it is there in our entertainment.
I definitely have a strong personal bias against any lurid depictions of violence and abuse of a group different to the producers and writers. D&D's (the GoT guys, not the game) violent misogyny is an example of something I don't think has any artistic value. That said I would still say something with a point, but poor execution like the police brutality at the start of They Live is also emblematic of the problem I see. The Land Has Eyes was produced by Fijians and depicts racism well otoh
There are probably times when editing would be appropriate, but in general, I would say we should see these media as a product of their time, and let the history stand as it was. Otherwise, we risk becoming blind to the reality of how things were.
There are basically two types of racist depictions in films. Those who show them from their racist understanding, and the series that want to document racism because it is (still) commonplace.
In my opinion, the former should not be broadcast (anymore). The latter must be sent uncut.
It might be technically possible to excise the Yunioshi scenes from the film and still have something that holds together narratively. It's been a while since I've seen the movie and I can't remember if he's got any crucial plot role.
First, it's letting ourselves have the nice parts of the film without confronting the very bad parts.
Second, the edited films would have no people of colour whatsoever. There's something dark about that; dealing with racism in media by eliminating everyone except white people.
I'm "qualified" because we've seen some positive developments in this area in recent years.
For example, Lizzo removed an ableist slur from her 2022 album based on online criticism. She acknowledged the problem, apologized, corrected it, and learned from it.
If creators can do something similar when new film and TV comes out, great.
Streaming media gives us the option of updating contemporary films in real time. That's pretty amazing.
> I think the better option is to let these "classics" fall into the memory hole of history.
Yes, I agree.
Btw., Hollywood is constantly making new adaptations of old movies or movies that aren't American enough for audiences (without meaning that judgmentally). If such classics of the narrative seem important enough for our time, they can be remade. But then without racism.
I disagree with this "fall into the memory hole of history". It creates a "winner writes history" timeline, and alas US is projecting a lot of culture to the world.
Schindlers List and others are not even possible in this context, or you introduce a thin line pushing it arbitrarily. Furthermore think about the open allowed hate speech in USA that is banned in Germany due holocaust denial. All no problem according to US norms.
The plus side is, by letting it fall out of grace somewhat, is that it fosters new current works. With current standards.
We should not forget, that certain stuff in history can only be explained by the climate in society back then. The cultural works are an important part of this.
Think about the MASH discussions. Which war to pick, having mandatory ER time per episode etc pp. But again, some other stuff can only be understood cross generation if you know their culture.
@mwfc so, there's a big difference between a piece being available for review in libraries and archives, and having it featured in a streaming service.
It will become unavailable. Libraries have become less and less important here (Germany) and assuming people will try to do the extra mile of going to a library or just get some stuff on the go during their normal cultural consumption.
We have plenty of BBC, Public Broadcast productions that will become streaming service.
I have witnessed "All the President's Men" screening in American History class being turned off by the principal in highschool due to cursing once.
If we were to draw a line for sexism. How many would be discarded totally? (All?) They can be considered historical references, but their value as art will be lowered.
It also covers for the "studio system" that produced these movies, letting them off the hook. I'm sure Disney et al would love to rewrite their role in history!
this is really what I was getting at, but you've said it better.
The thing I keep trying to balance that against is not perpetuating the experience on future generations. Either being the target of casual racism, or seeing people behave that way without consequence.
"There's something dark about that; dealing with racism in media by eliminating everyone except white people."
This is also just a lot of TV made about idealized White people back in the day so it would also leave some of the most erasing and racist media on the "ok" shelf. White supremacy is also TV shows and movies that only show White people (as you are getting at!).
Unless there is *also* a minstrel show scene in “White Christmas” (which wouldn’t surprise me but I don’t remember it), my guess is that you were referring to “Holiday Inn” (see the “Legacy” section): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiday_Inn_(film)
That’s the first movie that has the song “White Christmas” in it.
There's value in watching something and realizing it's racist as hell despite being "a classic." I'd say it's better to let something lapse into obscurity because it's racist as hell than to Whitewash it so it appears superficially less racist.
I'd add in, IP (and the pretty ridiculous timeframe it spans now due to corporate interests becoming more important than public or artists' interests) and the need of streaming services to sort of firehose content distorts how long things remain "commercial" now so things don't fade out of sight nearly as organically as they did in the past (many artists who were massively famous in their time are mere footnotes in history now because things fall in and out of public taste/favor). Not that this is relevant on the ethical side of things but it does influence what we're exposed to and how we're exposed to it.
You know what you loose with that reasoning? Memory. You know what you're condemned to when you forget the errors of the past? Yeah... I can't subscribe to those 1984-style revisionisms, because they just pave the road to hell.
as someone who was shocked and upset by that portrayal, I would hate to see it erased. It's an important part of our history and a marker of where we've come from. It's also powerfully referenced in Dragon where Linda laughs and then realises it's offensive and suggests that she and Bruce leave.
So I guess I'm a qualified no too. Our history is important, no matter how dark and uncomfortable.
Having rewatched this just last year, he does. He triggers the final police raid, don't know how that would make sense without him. (Not that any of the film is big on "sense" but still...) Do you know the podcast @ScreenTestOfTime ? They've thought this stuff through more than anyone should have to.
I'm a strong no on this because you can't erase history just because it's uncomfortable
the only way to learn from the past is to recognise the problems of the time & learn from them by accepting that they happened, not erasing them to avoid dealing with discussions around them
society changes & what was acceptable then, isn't now & what is acceptable now wont be in 25, 50, 100 years
you can only judge things by the standards of their time & hold yourself up in your time to do better
Anyone who doesn't understand that society changes over time, and things that were once acceptable have changed, will never be satisfied.
I fully agree that a note like "hey, this was made in a different time and you may find ... " is fine, but anything else actually tries to 'edit history' and I think that's a mistake.
These are opportunities to see how we have changed and evolved and hiding that is a huge mistake.
Just like 'security through obscurity' is a mistake I think obscuring the history is a mistake as well.
Use it as a jump of point to have a productive discussion 😀
Sorry for anyone in this thread who may have gotten swarmed by racists. I think if you add those domains to your personal or instance blocklist, you'll get rid of the worst of it.
Also, racists and homophobes use a relatively small set of trigger words, so if you're willing to type a dozen slurs into your Mastodon filter settings 😕, you can cover a lot of bad posts in the future.
The problem with efforts around lists and hashtags like these is that they are crude, deaf to nuance and context and unforgiving. In the absolute of it, once you're on the list, for whatever reason might there be, legitimate or not, deserved or not, you're an outcast.
It's good as a short-term solution, but for long-term, it might wreak havoc on the fabric of the Fediverse itself, leading to excessive amounts of balkanization and stratification of the network. We need something else, and it seems to me that this shall be a network design level solution.
I tagged you to discussion on the matter under this post
I would love to ask the official opinion of @Gargron@mastodon.social about the whole Fediblock situation and people who abuse it on both sides of the "trenches".
@drq I disagree. I think more and better filters -- by address, by keyword, Bayesian, collaborative, semantic, commercial -- are the best way to do it.
What if you overfilter? What if every other server ends up on a blocklist for every little slight? Or hell, just by association? It's not like it's not happening.
kechpaja
•beforewisdom :vegan:
•penryu
•My answer leans closer to "No" the more integral to the story. An example front and center in my mind is "American History X" - remove the racism and you remove the magnitude of the character's redemption.
Evan Prodromou
•I was more thinking of racist depictions of Black, indigenous people, and people of colour. So, the racism occurred behind the camera, not on the screen.
penryu
•Morten J. Zölde-Fejér
•Evan Prodromou
•Morten J. Zölde-Fejér
•Sasyecat 😷
•Remove all the books talking about racism from schools too? Pretend it didn't happen? Because the Republican party fear they'll feel guilty? Republicans have proven they feel no guilt. They'd love to drop the N word on the regular and even bring back slavery, just ask Lindsey Graham when he's stinking drunk. 😡
Lyle, a walking haunted house
•On one hand, pretending that media was better than it was about such issues does a disservice to the people that lives through it.
On another, people *now* shouldn't have to continue to live through it.
I think it depends on who is asking for the removal, and why.
All that to say, I don't have a good answer, which makes it a good discussion question
Evan Prodromou
•Daniel Howard 🌻
•Evan Prodromou
•Sentient Mortal
•Evan Prodromou
•Sentient Mortal
•Evan Prodromou
•Jeff Moe
•For example, the Hollywood Hays Code censorship regime would prevent movies from showing non-racist couples. No scene can be clipped/removed to fix that. Decades of censorship of "mixed" couples is racist itself, by omission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code
American film studio self-censorship rules (1930–1967)
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Evan Prodromou
•Bernard Marx
•zeitverschreib [mastodon]
•No thanks.
Evan Prodromou
•mav :happy_blob:
•Community 2x14 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - one of the best episodes of the entire series. The entire episode is literally about how being a hateful bigot is bad, and it got pulled from Netflix because of a joke at the beginning where one of the players appears made up as his _fictional character_.
30 Rock 5x10 Christmas Attack Zone - yes, it's a dumb joke, but the entire point of Jenna and Tracy's characters is that they're *bad people* with occasionally redeeming qualities. Actually, I suppose that's the point of literally every character on 30 Rock. Everyone's a shithead except Milton Greene
Evan Prodromou
•Should Netflix have just removed Ken Jeong's drowface scenes and shots and run the rest of the episode?
mav :happy_blob:
•Daniel Howard 🌻
•Civil Rights documentary: leave the racism in
Old sitcom: skip the episode that has blackface or whatever other racist baloney may be triggering to a person of color who is just trying to relax before bed
one person's "culturally authentic light entertainment" is another person's "didn't need that nasty spike in blood pressure I've already got hypertension thank you."
Daniel Howard 🌻
•- Less Racism (0 votes)
- Racist Cultural Authenticity in Old TV Shows (0 votes)
Poll end: 1 year agoDarwin Woodka
•Charles U. Farley
•@overflow 🏳️⚧️
•…might work for coffee…
•https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TKKG
I think 3 episodes did not get rereleased. https://minkorrekt.de/mi227-kinetischer-impaktor/
IMHO they are important time documents.How acceptable shifted.
So produce by current high standards,put older stuff into context,but do not edit blindly.
There are differences as well,see violence vs nudity EU vs USA
German youth literature
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)bedknobs and bootstraps
•mcfedr
•Evan Prodromou
•Adrian Cockcroft
•Evan Prodromou
•catjungle
•rail enthusiast wife Daria
•Nelson Chu Pavlosky
•We regularly see director's cuts and fan edits that improve or change previously released media in interesting ways, and people usually don't get upset, so long as the original is also available. I think that's the key, to allow improvements so long as history isn't lost, but can streaming media pull that off?
Sandy Warnstaff (he/him)
•Dave Neary
•Evan Prodromou
•lizzard
•A Stream of Sand :v_enby:
•moggie
•Aljoscha Rittner (beandev)
•There are basically two types of racist depictions in films. Those who show them from their racist understanding, and the series that want to document racism because it is (still) commonplace.
In my opinion, the former should not be broadcast (anymore). The latter must be sent uncut.
Evan Prodromou
•I am a qualified no.
Here are my thoughts.
Evan Prodromou
•https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._Y._Yunioshi
It might be technically possible to excise the Yunioshi scenes from the film and still have something that holds together narratively. It's been a while since I've seen the movie and I can't remember if he's got any crucial plot role.
fictional character
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Evan Prodromou
•https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(film)
1954 US film directed by Michael Curtiz
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Evan Prodromou
•First, it's letting ourselves have the nice parts of the film without confronting the very bad parts.
Second, the edited films would have no people of colour whatsoever. There's something dark about that; dealing with racism in media by eliminating everyone except white people.
Evan Prodromou
•Blake Edwards, the director of Breakfast at Tiffany's, knew exactly what he was doing in 1961. His masterpiece is tainted. Too bad!
Evan Prodromou
•For example, Lizzo removed an ableist slur from her 2022 album based on online criticism. She acknowledged the problem, apologized, corrected it, and learned from it.
If creators can do something similar when new film and TV comes out, great.
Streaming media gives us the option of updating contemporary films in real time. That's pretty amazing.
Myk
•Aljoscha Rittner (beandev)
•Yes, I agree.
Btw., Hollywood is constantly making new adaptations of old movies or movies that aren't American enough for audiences (without meaning that judgmentally). If such classics of the narrative seem important enough for our time, they can be remade. But then without racism.
…might work for coffee…
•It creates a "winner writes history" timeline, and alas US is projecting a lot of culture to the world.
Schindlers List and others are not even possible in this context, or you introduce a thin line pushing it arbitrarily.
Furthermore think about the open allowed hate speech in USA that is banned in Germany due holocaust denial. All no problem according to US norms.
I am much more for putting it into context.
…might work for coffee…
•We should not forget, that certain stuff in history can only be explained by the climate in society back then. The cultural works are an important part of this.
Think about the MASH discussions. Which war to pick, having mandatory ER time per episode etc pp. But again, some other stuff can only be understood cross generation if you know their culture.
Evan Prodromou
•…might work for coffee…
•It will become unavailable. Libraries have become less and less important here (Germany) and assuming people will try to do the extra mile of going to a library or just get some stuff on the go during their normal cultural consumption.
We have plenty of BBC, Public Broadcast productions that will become streaming service.
I have witnessed "All the President's Men" screening in American History class being turned off by the principal in highschool due to cursing once.
Juju&Baba&Yoyo🌈
•Evan Prodromou
•Jeff Moe
•Lyle, a walking haunted house
•The thing I keep trying to balance that against is not perpetuating the experience on future generations. Either being the target of casual racism, or seeing people behave that way without consequence.
Fifi Lamoura
•This is also just a lot of TV made about idealized White people back in the day so it would also leave some of the most erasing and racist media on the "ok" shelf. White supremacy is also TV shows and movies that only show White people (as you are getting at!).
Evan Prodromou
•Christopher Neugebauer
•Jake
•That’s the first movie that has the song “White Christmas” in it.
1942 film by Mark Sandrich
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Evan Prodromou
•Jake
•Fifi Lamoura
•I'd add in, IP (and the pretty ridiculous timeframe it spans now due to corporate interests becoming more important than public or artists' interests) and the need of streaming services to sort of firehose content distorts how long things remain "commercial" now so things don't fade out of sight nearly as organically as they did in the past (many artists who were massively famous in their time are mere footnotes in history now because things fall in and out of public taste/favor). Not that this is relevant on the ethical side of things but it does influence what we're exposed to and how we're exposed to it.
Rui Seabra
•Evan Prodromou
•Daniel Yeo
•It's also powerfully referenced in Dragon where Linda laughs and then realises it's offensive and suggests that she and Bruce leave.
So I guess I'm a qualified no too. Our history is important, no matter how dark and uncomfortable.
priryo
•Do you know the podcast @ScreenTestOfTime ? They've thought this stuff through more than anyone should have to.
Evan Prodromou
•Chris
•the only way to learn from the past is to recognise the problems of the time & learn from them by accepting that they happened, not erasing them to avoid dealing with discussions around them
society changes & what was acceptable then, isn't now & what is acceptable now wont be in 25, 50, 100 years
you can only judge things by the standards of their time & hold yourself up in your time to do better
DrJekyll
•I fully agree that a note like "hey, this was made in a different time and you may find ... " is fine, but anything else actually tries to 'edit history' and I think that's a mistake.
These are opportunities to see how we have changed and evolved and hiding that is a huge mistake.
Just like 'security through obscurity' is a mistake I think obscuring the history is a mistake as well.
Use it as a jump of point to have a productive discussion 😀
Evan Prodromou
•I was able to clear up the worst of it by using https://rapidblock.org/ 🙏 as well as blocking domains in this post:
https://troet.cafe/@baddadda/109644887742976187
Sorry for anyone in this thread who may have gotten swarmed by racists. I think if you add those domains to your personal or instance blocklist, you'll get rid of the worst of it.
The RapidBlock Project — Home
The RapidBlock ProjectJeff Moe
•I see how to do it one at a time, but that looks tedious. Thx.
Evan Prodromou
•Jeff Moe
•ニルス・スキニール
•If get shitposted, report and block
Evan Prodromou
•Evan Prodromou
•Dr. Quadragon ❌
•It's good as a short-term solution, but for long-term, it might wreak havoc on the fabric of the Fediverse itself, leading to excessive amounts of balkanization and stratification of the network. We need something else, and it seems to me that this shall be a network design level solution.
I tagged you to discussion on the matter under this post
https://mastodon.ml/@ZySoua/109649689079348964
Gnosyz (Classic edition) 🖖🇪🇪 (@ZySoua@mastodon.ml)
Mastodon.mlEvan Prodromou
•Dr. Quadragon ❌
•Evan Prodromou
•- If you overfilter, you will miss things that you want to see, so don't do that.
- If we all blocklist each other for minor infractions, we stop communicating, so let's not do that, either.
Ultimately, this is a social problem with social solutions.
We can use better filtering technologies to lighten the load, but we have to set priorities, and those will likely be personal.
nev
•Here's another good worst-of-the-worst list—a lot of overlap but might catch a few more: https://github.com/federater/blocks_recommended/blob/main/federater.csv
blocks_recommended/federater.csv at main · federater/blocks_recommended
GitHubScanner
•