Here’s the 1984 TV Episode That Dealt with Blackface While Northam Was Moonwalking
The blackface scandal involving current (for now) Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has focused attention on racial attitudes from 1984, and renewed interest in a 1984 episode of the Nell Carter sitcom Gimme a Break! that dealt with the issue in searing fashion.
Northam now denies he appeared in the medical school yearbook photo depicting a blackface-adorned white person sharing a beer with a klansman, oddly explaining that he’s innocent because he clearly remembers donning blackface for a Michael Jackson costume, but not the other one.
At a bizarre press conference, Northam also briefly considered moonwalking for the assembled press, and shrugged off the nickname “coonman” that was printed under his name in the yearbook.
In the wake of the Northam scandal, that old Gimme a Break! episode has been circulating on social media as evidence that even in 1984, people knew blackface was unacceptable. But the full episode is something of a mixed bag in terms of assessing the culture’s attitude at the time.
The plot of the episode is that the youngest daughter, Samantha, becomes jealous of the attention that Nell gives to Joey, the youngest child in the household, and tricks him into performing in blackface at Nell’s church:
Naturally, all hell breaks loose, and when Nell finds out it was Samantha, she confronts her in raw fashion:
Carter’s work here is spot-on, but the show’s treatment of blackface as a trivial plot device, played for laughs to the live studio audience, more accurately mirrors the time. While 1984 wasn’t exactly 1954, it was also no age of enlightenment.
This was the year MTV had to essentially be blackmailed into playing Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” video, and it was still acceptable for the president of the United States to defend Jesse Helms for accusing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of being a communist.
Watch the full episode above, which features a knockout gospel performance by Nell Carter and a guest turn by future fictional POTUS Dennis Haysbert.
[Featured image via screengrab]
