In yet another surrender to the iconoclastic madness of the Floyd Riots and false narrative of “systemic racism,” HBO Max has pulled Gone With the Wind from its movie lineup, and the Paramount Network has canceled Cops, the widely popular long-running reality show that follows the adventures of municipal police.
HBO’s move came after black movie director John Ridley demanded the 1939 classic’s suspension. Cops stopped airing last week when rioters began burning and looting cities a few days after George Floyd died while police detained him.
The censorship follows the pattern of disallowing the sight or knowledge of anything the radical Left or its Black Lives Matter auxiliary have declared anathema.
Tough Times for Tara
The trouble for Rhett, Scarlett, and Mammy began on June 8, when Ridley, director of 12 Years a Slave, said HBO must temporarily remove the film from its streaming service.
“Even the most well-intentioned films can fall short in how they represent marginalized communities,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times, but “Gone With the Wind, however, is its own unique problem. It doesn’t just ‘fall short’ with regard to representation. It is a film that glorifies the antebellum south. It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color.”
It is a film that, as part of the narrative of the “Lost Cause,” romanticizes the Confederacy in a way that continues to give legitimacy to the notion that the secessionist movement was something more, or better, or more noble than what it was — a bloody insurrection to maintain the “right” to own, sell and buy human beings.
The movie had the very best talents in Hollywood at that time working together to sentimentalize a history that never was. And it continues to give cover to those who falsely claim that clinging to the iconography of the plantation era is a matter of “heritage, not hate.”
To give credit where credit is due, Ridley didn’t demand that every last copy of the film be destroyed in a 21st-century bonfire of the vanities.
Let me be real clear: I don’t believe in censorship. I don’t think “Gone With the Wind” should be relegated to a vault in Burbank. I would just ask, after a respectful amount of time has passed, that the film be re-introduced to the HBO Max platform along with other films that give a more broad-based and complete picture of what slavery and the Confederacy truly were. Or, perhaps it could be paired with conversations about narratives and why it’s important to have many voices sharing stories from different perspectives rather than merely those reinforcing the views of the prevailing culture.
HBO hoisted the white flag immediately:
“‘Gone With the Wind’ is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society,” a spokesman said. “These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”
And so a film that won eight Oscars, including a Best Supporting Actress statue for Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy, is now among the things such as Confederate statues that cannot be seen — at least not without permission and exhortations about “racism.”
Cops Gets a Death Sentence
Whether HBO will consider canceling any fare that Christians find offensive remains to be seen, but that question aside, another victim of the Floyd Moral Panic is Cops.
The program, which follows the adventures of law enforcement in real time as they chase and arrest thugs and miscreants, has aired continuously for 33 years on different networks.
When rioters began looting and burning cities after Floyd’s death, Paramount pulled the show from its lineup and, with the rest of CBS-Viacom’s cable properties, went dark for 8 minutes, 46 seconds. That was how long Derek Chauvin, the former cop charged with killing Floyd, knelt on Floyd’s neck.
But all that wasn’t enough, and so Paramount canceled the program: “Cops is not on the Paramount Network and we don’t have any current or future plans for it to return,” a spokesman said.
The riots also buffaloed A&E into pulling its weekends editions of LivePD, a bit hit for the cable network.
