I watched this all the time when i was a kid. Weird to think i was watching a black and white tv show. Was it ever done in color. I can't recall. Every character in the show was good fun.

When Maher used it and Ice Cube came on to tell him how wrong he was I did sort of feel like its divisive power was perpetuated by the double standard it seemed to represent - black people can use it, white people can't. Honestly I thought it was all a bit hysterical (not hilarious), not that I doubted the authenticity of people taking offence, just that there was an obsession over the word rather then Maher's intent that only furthered the divide between black and white.

Now I think I missed the point. Naively I believed the end goal was to sterilize the word through usage, that the fact a word can cause offence is a sort of aberration. Recently I was made to understand that the word is venomous for good reason. It should be offensive because it represents not just a terrible history of slavery, but also of the continued oppression, both overt and insidious, that blacks experience.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and often I think that is how us whites use it. Mostly our intentions are good, we want to be part of that group... but we never will be because we will never experience that word the way a black man or woman will. I don't think I was a racist (well, so far as any of us are free from bias) when I used it before but I think it was ignorant and wrong of me. To only care for your own intent and ignore a word's symbolism is lazy and self interested.

I'd like a future where the word truly does lose contemporary meaning, but I don't think we get there by ignoring what it still represents to others.

$0.02

Where did these white people get that idea about "nigga" being a term of endearment?
Black people.
This is what you get for fostering a double standard. Telling a black child to hit white children if they use a word, but not hit a black child if they do....who's the racist?
When the black child says nigga, expel them, then maybe you'll get somewhere.

This dude probably thinks he's fighting against racism by being pretty damn racist. All he said was "white"..."black"....."black"...."white"...."white". I get his anger, but you cannot fight injustice by suggesting injustice, you cannot fight racism by dividing people by race for separate treatment.

Rule of thumb, if those you find to be disgusting sub humans would be wrong to use your words with black and white reversed, you're being a racist.
If you become what you despise in your fight, you lost.
Those who fight monsters must be ever vigilant against becoming one.

https://videosift.com/video/WHITE-PRIVILEGE-A-Message-to-Young-Black-and-white

Couldn't agree with ya more, Bob!

My guess would be for the same reason it had an old spot light housing with a tv antenna for a head...it's what they had lying around to work with.
The entire budget for this movie was $50k, most of which went to 3D black and white film. With that budget, you use what you can find.
Amazingly, this made a million at the box office, quite a bit in '53.

Racism isn't seated in your bones...it's in your mind.
There is a racist mind in his body.
It's clear to everyone which side of this white power struggle he's on, there's no question at all. He is firmly in the camp of the people that believe reverse racism is a bigger problem than racism. He's in the camp of people who stand for preserving statues of traitors to the United States because they also stood for racism. He's in the camp of people who stand arm in arm with violent Nazis holding torches and shouting hate speech, but he calls them peaceful quiet protestors calmly preserving their heritage.
He doesn't seem to understand that racism comes in shades of gray, not black and white. You don't have to wish all black people were dead to be racist, believing they all have less self control, intelligence, and/or morals does the trick just fine.

I tend to view the stigmatisation of a word to this degree as counter-productive since it shifts the focus away from the real problem - i.e. chronic inequality of income between black and white communities through poor public services that feeds a lack of opportunity for income mobility. Time spent discussing the degree to which users of the word should be shunned, whether it's said by a comedian, other black people, actual racists, is time not being spent discussing those material issues.

The base case of racism, i.e. the perpetuation of the view that black people are somehow genetically inferior or deserve to be subjugated in rights still certainly exists. What I suspect is more prevalent nowadays is discrimination founded in economic inequalities - the view that because black people are more likely to be poor, making the reflexive assumption they are more likely to resort to crime, and therefore are more dangerous and should be implicitly subject to harsher penalties. Which comes back to my main point, the best way to fix that is to actually narrow those economic inequalities.

Interesting that Ice Cube says that he hears venom when white people use it. Doesn't segregating language like that only grant it a degree of power when it is used subversively? Dunno if it should be as black and white (pun not intended) as that. but then who am I to say what should or shouldn't be.

So the black and white images are what London will look like post Brexit?

I totally expected to be off put, since I love the original and don't want to see it messed with, but that wasn't bad. If they did a whole episode I would be second guessing my memory of it being black and white.

Apparently the pilot was in color but it never aired.....

Wow, turns out that the world isn't as black and white as "people who like islam" and "people who don't like islam"

Whodthunkit?

In that video, Milo helpfully defines pedophilia, AND YOU STILL GOT IT WRONG. Stop lying, please.

Now to what he was actually talking about: criminal law has to have a stark, black and white line to define an age of consent. I don't see what's wrong with arguing that line is imperfect and some younger people are capable of giving it. I wouldn't go so far as saying that would justify breaking the law. But morally, there is no difference between screwing a minor a day before they turn 18 and the day after. In reality it might very well be completely legal in the next state over.

He is an idiot for even touching this third-rail topic and his jokes about the Father are tone-deaf but maybe that has to do with his British upbringing.

Is it that hard to agree with me?

Your just rewording exactly what I said. Your just rewording exactly what Bill Burr said. Trump didn't win by bringing out a whole bunch of brand new racist voters that stayed home when Obama was running. It was Hillary's failures, and her party's failures that were the difference in Trumps win.

I know that leads to a more uncomfortable reality were we don't have the black and white ability to blame everything on the evil racists who voted Trump in, but it is the reality. Clinton and her party LOST the votes of too many people, the numbers on the Republican side show pretty clearly it wasn't extra votes Trump gained by courting racists that turned the election.

That reality though demands a lot of self reflection from the Democratic party about how they failed and why, and they have to do it at the time when the country needs them as a counter balance the most. The trick is, if they don't get back the voters they lost they can't be a counter balance.

Here's part of the problem: people blaming Trumps win on racists voting for him, or choosing to believe that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist. That's just not the reality that is confronting you guys in the US. Most voters in this election, like all the past elections, voted their party ticket as they and their grandpa always have. That's the one of the biggest influences on how folks vote. Surveys also show that given the choice between a ideals and jobs, people choose jobs. The democratic party was promising carbon taxation at the same time as Trump was promising to bring back coal and oil jobs. Now all the counties that rely on coal or oil have a very different reason to vote for Trump outside of his racist remarks.

Oh, and check out Bill Clinton's remarks on Robert Byrd. Does that association to the KKK make it hard for racists to choose between Trump and Clinton?

People don't trust politicians in general and assume them all to be evil, corrupt and untrustworthy so dismissing some of Trumps worse parts came a bit easier for many.

I think part of the problem here is semantics Definitions.

What does "hacking our election" mean?

It is widely acknowledged that there is no evidence that the Russians accessed our voting machines to change votes. If your definition of "hacking" is interference with computers and their outputs, then yes, there is no hacking by Russians.

But if you are a person who isn't careful with original meanings of words, and use words in a new way to speak in short cuts -- then you will use the word "hack" to mean mess with. Change. A life "hack" for example. And there is plenty of proof that there was a concerted effort on the part of the Russians to plant false stories, fake news, to try and influence the election. That Americans were doing it too, for either political purposes or just to make some sweet easy advertising money, doesn't change the fact that there was this specific effort.

As for "confirmation bias" -- yeah. You got some, enoch. Every time anyone sets up an argument in such black and white terms, that is evidence of confirmation bias.

The world is gray, and messy, and not black and white. To try to make it so is deepening a manufactured divide.

And both sides do it. And have done it for a long time.

Because sound bites work. Slogans work.

Fight back against black and white thinking.

I think Maddow's argument "We're about to find out if the new President of our country is going to do what Russia wants once he's commander in chief" is utterly moronic. Implying that withdrawing a few thousands troops will mean he's Russia's puppet is intellectually dishonest. No mention of other actions he could take like reversing sanctions or undoing Obama's punishment of specific Russians after that latest reports that would show that. Or other possible justifications he would have for withdrawing the troops. No, just a black and white yes/no based on one action.

It calls to mind the endless repetition of Republican talking points on fox news. They don't expect their viewer to think at all just absorb a few basic scraps of info and come to a firm conclusion that they can easily repeat like a mantra and block all opposing views because they are so sure they are right.