Some people are crying “racism” after NBC aired the all-black musical, The Wiz—but not for the reason you’d think.
Apparently, during Thursday’s three-hour live broadcast of The Wiz Live, liberals on social media were up in arms—because there was a sole white dancer in the background of the otherwise “diversity”-filled show.
The Wiz, which first debuted on Broadway in 1975, is an R&B adaption of The Wizard of Oz, and famously features an all-black cast. It was later made into a movie with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.
When NBC’s version aired on Thursday night, the cast was predominately black as well: starring Queen Latifah, Shanice Williams, David Alan Grier, Elijah Kelley, Mary J. Blige, Common, Uzo Aduba, and Ne-Yo.
But there was one white man in the cast: a background dancer named Chris Silcox.
And liberal activists, who resented this apparent “microaggression,” expressed their anger on social media:
One Twitter user posted a picture of Silcox with the rest of the cast and fumed, “How the hell did THIS GUY sneak on set?”
While another—YouTube comedian GloZell Green, who once controversially interviewed Barack Obama during his first term in office—complained, “That was a White Man in The Wiz … um … who do I report this to?”
The Wiz, which received far more favorable reviews than NBC’s previous live musical outings, garnered over 11 million viewers—but, unlike previous years, managed to attract some minor controversy from just about everyone.
Earlier in the evening, many others had complained on social media that The Wiz had an all-black cast—seemingly unaware that was how the musical was written in the 1970s, and that NBC was just faithfully adapting it—before being corrected. But it looks like cries of “racism” went both ways after the live holiday musical.
