Sacha Baron Cohen‘s outrageous Ali G character is back after 24 years — and so is the controversy.
With a new movie coming in October — Ali G: Who Iz I? — some activists are calling the Cohen’s dreadlocked wannabe hip-hop star a racist caricature and urging theaters to boycott the Amazon-MGM Studios film.
The movie is a mockumentary where cameras follow Cohen-as-Ali G as the character attempts to stage a career comeback (see trailer below).
As first spotted by Variety, NewsCord — a UK-based media-bias watchdog group — has rallied its members to support sending 37,000 emails to cinemas around the world urging them to refuse to screen the film. “Black British comedians called the character ‘an alibi for racism’ in 2000,” the organization wrote. “[British author] Jeanette Winterson asked what separates it from the Black and White Minstrels; Kazakh and Arab organisations documented the harm of the catalogue behind it. Sony Pictures UK is selling it with the line ‘He iz back. We ain’t liable.’ The screens belong to the chains, and a booking is a choice.”
While British writer Afua Hirsch wrote on Substack, “Black people don’t dress like that anymore. Even white people imitating Black people don’t talk like that anymore. Sexualizing black women and casually mocking working class women is not accepted anymore. Baron Cohen’s so-called ‘humor’ is a crude compound of all these things.”
