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Should streaming services edit out racist scenes from movies and TV shows?
This was a hard poll.
I am a qualified no.
Here are my thoughts.
A classic example would be Mickey Rooney's yellowface role as Mr. Yunioshi in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961).
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.
Another is the minstrel show scene from "White Christmas" (1954).
But there's some real moral hazard to doing this.
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 think the better option is to let these "classics" fall into the memory hole of history.
Blake Edwards, the director of Breakfast at Tiffany's, knew exactly what he was doing in 1961. His masterpiece is tainted. Too bad!
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.