The Golden Girls and Gilmore Girls haven’t aired in their original runs in years, but hardly a day goes by that I don’t see a new story online about one or the other. I’ve recently been revisiting the former and watching the latter for the first time, and I’ve noticed that the two shows with female-centric themes and “Girls” in the title — two shows that were separated by eight years — dealt with race in very era-specific ways.
Gilmore Girls mostly ignored it by creating an almost entirely White Connecticut world, while The Golden Girls confronted it with humor, sometimes hitting the mark beautifully and occasionally fumbling. Years after they left the air, the shows are still dealing with fallout from their different approaches.
Last year, Hulu announced it was pulling a 1988 episode of The Golden Girls from the streamer’s rotation because of a scene in which the faces of two White characters were covered in mud. I remember that third-season episode titled “Mixed Blessings” well. Dorothy’s son Michael pays the ladies a visit and announces he’s marrying a Black woman who is not only much older than he is but pregnant, too.
In one scene, the fiancée’s family arrives at the house for the first time, and Rose and Blanche emerge from the kitchen wearing mud face masks. Rose delivers the punchline, saying, “This is mud on our faces. We’re not really Black.”
LOL, right? Well, maybe in 1988, but those were such different times. If you’re Black in a post-George Floyd world, what may have been funny 33 years ago doesn’t necessarily inspire gut-busting guffaws now. Being Black no longer feels like appropriate fodder for a joke.
Whether that scene actually constituted blackface is a matter of opinion, but perhaps we should be less hung up on semantics as we often are when people talk about race. We debate whether something is “racist,” as if the label we attach to it is more important than the thing itself.
Even if Blanche and Rose weren’t technically wearing Blackface in that scene, a joke in which a White woman has to explain that even though she’s wearing mud on her face, she is indeed a White woman feels particularly tone-deaf. Maybe in 1988 it wasn’t, but it definitely is in an age where we are constantly hearing about men and women being killed by police because of brown they can’t just wipe off.
The Golden Girls is one of a number of old sitcoms with episodes and scenes that networks and streamers no longer air due to similarly questionable racial content. Others include 30 Rock, Community, The Office, and Scrubs. Whenever news like this is announced, some predictably throw up their hands, sigh, and sniff, “They’re coming after everything.” They completely miss the point.
That’s so easy to say when the joke isn’t on you, or when the joke is on you but you aren’t offended. Just because these bits seemed funny years ago and maybe still do today doesn’t mean everyone was laughing. And even Blacks, like me, who may have laughed in the past, might not be laughing now.
Racial and homophobic humor can easily be excused as being just a joke to people who have never had to deal with racism and homophobia, but funny means different things to different people. We need to stop telling others what they should just laugh at and shrug off and respect them enough to listen to them and try to understand why certain types of humor might make them uncomfortable.
While Hulu’s actions may have seemed like splitting hairs or performative and counterproductive to some, I applaud any attempt at good-faith reevaluation, as long as it inspires doing more than just revising old episodes of classic sitcoms. There’s no reason why we can’t double task and address seemingly minor issues like a scene in The Golden Girls while tackling the larger ones that are a greater and more immediate threat to the Black community.
The Golden Girls remains my all-time favorite TV show, but I’ve written several articles about how uncomfortably some of its humor plays today. Yes, those were different times, which is the excuse I make when I come across questionable material on shows like The Golden Girls and Three’s Company, but that doesn’t exempt them from reevaluation today.
We have a generation of Black and LGBTQ kids who did not grow up in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, and when they watch these shows they see them through a modern-day lens. They might not get the joke.
I have a 15-year-old niece who is mercilessly bullied by White classmates who freely toss around the N-word. She spends all day at school being othered by kids who learn racism from parents who grew up with these shows. I know her mother is very careful about the type of entertainment she watches, lest something triggers her unnecessarily. I don’t have kids, but I’m certain that being a Black parent in 2021 is challenging in ways it may not have been when I was growing up.
In 2018, Megyn Kelly lost her ABC talk show over a comment she made about blackface. “Back when I was a kid that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character,” she said. Even if that were true, something being OK in the ’70s or ’80s doesn’t mean it’s OK in 2018, or 2021.
At one point in history, women were the property of their husbands. The men of the house could basically do anything they wanted to do to their wives, including beating and raping them. This was considered normal 200 years ago, but it’s unacceptable today, and if those old husbands were alive, they would deserve all the retroactive condemnation they’d probably get.
The world is constantly evolving and society has to keep up with it. We should never stop reevaluating our past to determine how it brought us to our present. We should never stop evaluating our present to determine how we can stop it from bringing us back to our past.
People who haven’t watched The Golden Girls or any show with pulled content in years may still react the way they do whenever anyone dares to desecrate such hallowed White Hollywood classics like Gone with the Wind or It’s a Wonderful Life with criticism. Deal with it, I say. If the mud-face episode of The Golden Girls is so important to you and you don’t have the third season on DVD to enjoy whenever you want to, you’ll just have to find something else to watch and deal with the new reality.
For those who don’t know how that’s done, there are plenty of us who have spent most of our lives with the old reality and have perfected the art of dealing with it. We would be more than happy to show you how that’s done.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeremy Heligar's work on Medium.