Another green shoot of hope: HBO Max pulls "Gone With the Wind" from its catalogue

These are starting to feel less small as we go along.

As reported by The Huffington Post:

HBO Max apparently does give a damn.

The new streaming service announced Tuesday that it was removing “Gone With The Wind” from its playlist, but said it would eventually make the 1939 Civil War drama available uncensored with an explanation of its historical context and a condemnation of its racism.

″‘Gone With The Wind’ is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society,” HBO Max said in a statement, per Deadline. “These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”

GWTW routinely places at or near the top of inflation-adjusted lists of all-time box office champion films, and has been criticized for years for its racism, but television broadcasters and streaming services have always ignored those criticisms, or explained them away as something which black viewers were just expected tolerate because of the film's "classic" status... until now.

Even more noteworthy is the fact that HBO Max is pulling the film from its brand-new, and relatively content-poor, streaming service. HBO Max is owned by Warner Media, and were clearly planning to offset their service's lack of new content with Warner Brothers' extensive catalogue of classic films, including the all-time box-office heavyweight. HBO Max needs films like GWTW in their lineup; that they're willing to do without it, even temporarily, is a clear indicator of just how much, and how quickly, the conversation about racism has evolved.

The idea to pull the film originated with John Ridley, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of 12 Years A Slave, who denounced the film on social media for "glorifying the antebellum South."

“It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color,” Ridley wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

He urged HBO Max to omit it for the time being until perspective and perhaps a disclaimer could be provided. Emphasizing that he was not advocating censorship, Ridley asked HBO parent company WarnerMedia to respect the national outcry against racism following the police killing of George Floyd.

WarnerMedia agreed, and acted with alacrity to make this right. Here's hoping that other content providers do the same with the problematic movies in their libraries, as well, because GWTW is far from the only movie to have these sorts of issues when it comes to depictions of racism and negative racial stereotypes.

And here's a hearty good job to the HBO Max team. Huzzah.