some white guys begin spray painting the word “nigger” on a black character’s car but get stopped partway. At the end of the episode, after everyone’s learned their lesson, they go back to the car and find someone finished the graffitti (signifying there’s still much to be done on the road to understanding; a great bookend to the story).
That clip actually popped up in my YouTube feed some time ago, and I was actually impressed with how they handled that back in the day. Didn't they get things sorted with the initial jocks who tried spray-painting it? I can't remember, but from what I recall they avoided the the kind of woke race-bashing that we see these days being levied against White characters.
These days, they wouldn’t even dare to show the start of word, let alone the full thing,
That's the other thing. Shows are so afraid to even address the topics they're preaching that they lose all semblance of effect and poignancy due to being as toothless as you pointed out.
To their credit, I remember there was a Boston Public episode that addressed a black guy who had a White friend who he called "nigga/nigger" (one of the two variations of the word), and a bunch of other black people chimped out about this black guy calling his White friend that. And so the episode was about the empowerment of words, meanings, history, and why some people are okay with it and others aren't. I think the teacher in that episode got in trouble for having a class about it, but he was trying to reason that nothing would change if they didn't tackle and discuss these topics head-on, which I thought was interesting at the time.
It’s been a long time since I saw the show (when it first aired!) but obviously it was good enough for me to remember it fairly well 30-something years later. I recall that the white jocks spray painting the word on the character’s car was prompted by an escalating argument over something else. That felt much more realistic than these days, where it would just be a bunch of racist whites running around trying to terrorize blacks unprovoked. Also, the show made a point of how even the black characters had prejudices. At one point, both the whites and blacks are locked up (jail cell? campus holding?) and one of the blacks accosts the (white) cop (campus security) as being racist. At that point the cop shut him down by saying that he marched for black rights in the 60’s. You definitely don’t see that sort of thing these days.
That clip actually popped up in my YouTube feed some time ago, and I was actually impressed with how they handled that back in the day. Didn't they get things sorted with the initial jocks who tried spray-painting it? I can't remember, but from what I recall they avoided the the kind of woke race-bashing that we see these days being levied against White characters.
That's the other thing. Shows are so afraid to even address the topics they're preaching that they lose all semblance of effect and poignancy due to being as toothless as you pointed out.
To their credit, I remember there was a Boston Public episode that addressed a black guy who had a White friend who he called "nigga/nigger" (one of the two variations of the word), and a bunch of other black people chimped out about this black guy calling his White friend that. And so the episode was about the empowerment of words, meanings, history, and why some people are okay with it and others aren't. I think the teacher in that episode got in trouble for having a class about it, but he was trying to reason that nothing would change if they didn't tackle and discuss these topics head-on, which I thought was interesting at the time.
It’s been a long time since I saw the show (when it first aired!) but obviously it was good enough for me to remember it fairly well 30-something years later. I recall that the white jocks spray painting the word on the character’s car was prompted by an escalating argument over something else. That felt much more realistic than these days, where it would just be a bunch of racist whites running around trying to terrorize blacks unprovoked. Also, the show made a point of how even the black characters had prejudices. At one point, both the whites and blacks are locked up (jail cell? campus holding?) and one of the blacks accosts the (white) cop (campus security) as being racist. At that point the cop shut him down by saying that he marched for black rights in the 60’s. You definitely don’t see that sort of thing these days.