What caused the decline of black sitcoms in the 90s and early 2000s?

[u/icey_sawg0034]

So this post on Twitter tells us that black sitcoms in the 90s and early 2000s were so popular that that became a part of many people’s childhoods of all backgrounds and then after that, they just stopped being made. I want to find out what could have caused black sitcoms into stopped being made.

[u/WeFightTheLongDefeat]

Ah yes, the 90s and 2000s, the heyday of anti woke YouTubers….before YouTube was even around. 

[u/Norwalk1215 → u/WeFightTheLongDefeat]

There have always been anti-woke “crusaders” in every decade, in some form or another… and they always had something to rail against. Howard Stern, Dogma, Ellen coming out, D&D, Twisted Sister and John Denver, Elvis and The Beatles.

There is always some book that needs to be burned, movie to be protested, show to boycott.

[u/WeFightTheLongDefeat → u/Norwalk1215]

You’re just talking about conflicting standards that are common in open societies. “Woke” and the reaction to it are distinct things and can’t just be copy and pasted onto different contexts. 

[u/Norwalk1215 → u/WeFightTheLongDefeat]

I want you to define “woke” for me. So I know where you’re coming from.

[u/WeFightTheLongDefeat → u/Norwalk1215]

It’s a notoriously difficult thing to define.

Both the right and the left get it wrong so often. You’ll hear right wing people call something woke just because it has a female/gay/both protagonist, which gets pilloried by the left, and then they’ll make the same exact  argument, for example “Star Trek was always woke because interracial kiss/the trills are an allegory for trans/etc.”. But Star Trek was liberal/progressive, not woke. Star Trek was about openness, cooperation, equality, fairness. 

“Woke”, so called, is often described as “awareness to social injustice” but it goes far deeper. It’s more akin to Maoism with American characteristics. Coming out of the Frankfurt school, the thinkers like Horkheimer and Adorno there realized that capitalism “delivered the goods” so to speak. Meaning that it made people comfortable, therefore making them unable to achieve “liberated consciousness.” Therefore, they realized that the working class and labor class would not be their key to power, so they abandoned them for the corporations and academia. 

There they developed the idea from Marxism, which believed that the bourgeois had a special kind of property called “capital” that they used to suppress the proletariat, and instead made the arguments for race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. 

People like Herbert Marcuse then proposed “cultural Marxism” which, for instance, saw white people is having a kind of property called “whiteness”, that they used to oppress those were not white. So when white people Would play the music of a minority class, it would be called “cultural appropriation”, Which is an economic term applied to culture. They advocate that you need to take the cultural power from white people and redistributed and emphasize those who are on the margins and center them while you decenter “whiteness”.

So going back to Star Trek, it was a show about openness, cooperation, and fairness. Giving everyone a chance, whether they are different from you or not, to prove themselves if they are capable. Whereas an example of “woke” would be to center a person who is not of the majority class, so as to redistribute whatever “property” the person of the of the majority class has and to create equity, even if the person being centered did not demonstrate the same capability. This comes from the idea that humans are essentially blank slates and products of society and our context; and there is not such thing as human nature. We are interchangeable widgets, so if you center a historically marginalized person, because you’ve placed them in this new context, you should get the same results. 

[u/TheCinemaster → u/Norwalk1215]

Woke us when someone weaponizes concepts of tolerance for political, social, or financial gain, forces dogmatic and unproven ideologies on audiences, and cancels or de-platforms anyone with a dissenting or critical view.

It’s basically an Orwellian manifestation of social Justice culture.