Harry Shearer, the voice actor behind Principal Skinner and several other popular characters on the Simpsons, has been barred from one of his roles…because of his race. The actor said that he was informed via email that he would no longer be allowed to play the role of Simpson’s family physician and longtime fan favorite Dr. Hibbert, whom Shearer based on Bill Cosby, because the character of Hibbert is painted as having dark skin while Shearer himself is white.
The show, Shearer complained, has gone woke.
When The Simpsons first started their decades-long run, Bill Cosby was sometimes lampooned for being the “whitest” black guy on TV. On The Cosby Show he portrayed a middle-class black doctor who was married to a lawyer and had a number of kids in a rambunctious, but functional, family unit.
Shearer’s Hibbert was a hit, until a couple years ago. Not long after fellow Simpson’s voice actor Frank Azaria was pressured by an Internet mob into retiring fan favorite Apu (an Hindu immigrant small business owner whom Azaria, a white man, voiced with a South Indian accent), Shearer received an email informing him that a black actor had been hired to replace him in the role of Hibbert. The producers seemed to have been afraid of the Hibbert performance being excoriated as “blackface,” a form of melodrama popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which white performers would dawn clown-like makeup and perform elaborate and usually derogatory stereotypes of black culture. Black actors, in turn, would dress in “whiteface” and give as good as they got.
The art form fell out of favor with the rise of television, and in the 2010s the term “blackface” expanded to encompass any race-bending performance by white actors.
The entire affair has led to to what the 80 year-old Shearer describes as the “stupid” situation where a black actor is impersonating a white actor’s impersonation of the “whitest black man” on American television.
