In the wake of George Floyd’s death last year, cop shows came under fire, with Cops being pulled from TV and think pieces demanding a stop to scripted police dramas. Now one actress is taking her virtue signaling to new depths by vowing, “No more cop shows for me.”
Jasika Nicole (pictured), a biracial C-list actress best known for roles in the new Punky Brewster, The Good Doctor, and Fringe, made her stance known in an op-ed published in Entertainment Weekly on April 20. Reading the piece, it quickly became clear that Nicole had taken a big swig of the Black Lives Matter Kool-Aid.
Nicole described getting wrapped up in the fantasy of television as a youngster, identifying with characters unlike herself as so many do, but she translated this as, “I developed such a strong muscle of empathy for the white characters I was introduced to on TV that the muscle for showing compassion for myself atrophied.”
She then became radicalized as an adult with what can only be described as intersectional critical race theory brainwashing:
I've spent the better part of my adulthood on a journey to untie the threads of my own internalized -isms, reworking my understanding of how white supremacy and patriarchal ideals have informed my view of the world and both prohibited and benefited me as a cis, queer, light-skinned Black actor. But I know that's not enough. With a focus these past few years on the Black Lives Matter movement and how communities of color have endeavored to rise above the institutions that have been legally allowed to dehumanize and brutalize us, our country is facing a reckoning that has been building steam for centuries. I have shared as many hashtags as my fingers could type, contributed financially to both grassroots organizations and popular political campaigns working to combat classism and anti-Blackness. I have marched in the streets with my city and had difficult conversations with friends and strangers alike about the importance of abolition and what defunding the police actually means (divesting from state-sanctioned violence, investing in communities). But what else can I do?
Activism not being enough, she began to look at her “privilege” as an actress in Hollywood. She described thinking about auditioning for what sounds like CBS’s The Equalizer starring Queen Latifah but being upset it portrayed a police officer in a positive light – they’re all bad apples, you see:
Last year, I prepared an audition for a television remake of a popular '90s film in which I was being seen for the role of a police officer. The character was smart, charismatic, and unafraid — a dream role for lots of women like me in Hollywood. But something about this character felt uncomfortable in a way that was new for me, it felt… false. I realized it was because the premise of the show wasn't focused on the complicated ways that police officers abuse their power or how unconscious anti-Black bias flavors the way that Black neighborhoods are policed by mostly white police forces. Instead, it was just a story about one cop. One "good" cop. One cop who was intentionally being cast as a person of color.
By casting cops as non-white, Hollywood thinks they can avoid inconvenient discussions about racism and power, but the truth is that you don't have to be white to uphold the tenets of white supremacy; you just have to believe in its validity. Suddenly the stakes of the role came into clear focus for me, and I couldn't imagine willingly perpetuating a distortion such as this, supporting the narrative that cops were generally well-intentioned protectors of all citizens, only occasionally lumped in with a few "bad apples."
She continued her ignorant theory that “generally” there are no “good” cops to justify her ban on appearing in cop shows. “The devastating and unending loss of Black, brown, and indigenous life at the hands of our ‘protectors’ is not occasional,” she ranted wildly, oblivious at real world statistics proving this false. “It is consistent, it is intentional, and it has no place being falsely memorialized in TV and film, not by me or anyone else.”
The truth is that the only thing being falsely memorialized in TV and film these days is BLM propaganda. Even – perhaps especially – on cop shows.
