The campaign to stop a new Ali G film from reaching British cinema screens has grown significantly since the trailer dropped earlier this week, with tens of thousands of emails sent to major chains urging them not to show the film.
According to Variety, NewsCord, a news comparison and media monitoring platform, launched the effort on Wednesday after the release of the trailer for Amazon MGM's "Ali G: Who Iz I?," a new mockumentary starring Sacha Baron Cohen's long-running character. As of Friday, NewsCord claims to have been instructed to send more than 36,000 emails on behalf of people who registered with the campaign.
The backlash centers on the trailer, in which Ali G is shown wearing fake dreadlocks and a Rastafarian hat while discussing his desire to be an "absent" father. Critics on social media have called the character "outdated" and a "racist" caricature. NewsCord's campaign accuses Cohen of using satire as a "cover for enforcing racist stereotypes."
The character was originally created by Cohen in 1998 as part of Channel 4's "11 O'Clock Show." Ali G was written as a dim-witted white man imitating urban British hip-hop and Jamaican culture, with the joke being that his deliberately offensive nature mocked his own ignorance and cultural appropriation. But criticism is not new. A newspaper report from 2000, just two years after the character first appeared on British television, featured Black British comedians arguing the character served as an "alibi for racism."
That 2000 article included remarks from comedian Felix Dexter, who argued that the character "allows the liberal middle classes to laugh at Black street culture in a context where they can retain their sense of political correctness." Writer Jeanette Winterson was also quoted in the same piece: "I don't know what the difference is between him and the Black and White Minstrels." Both quotes are now being circulated as part of the NewsCord campaign, 26 years after they were first published.
British writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch added her voice this week in a new Substack post. She described finding the character offensive in her youth, writing "I just knew he was mocking us," and argued Ali G is now out of step with today's culture. "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," she wrote. "Baron Cohen's so-called 'humor' is a crude compound of all these things."
NewsCord claimed an early victory when it posted a reply from Picturehouse Cinemas stating, "We currently do not have any plans to screen this film on its release." The campaign interpreted this as a refusal to show the title, and the claim was picked up by the U.K. press. However, Variety reports that this interpretation appears to be untrue, and the statement did not amount to a confirmed decision to pull the film.
The film's release date has not been confirmed in available reports, and Amazon MGM has not publicly responded to the campaign.
