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Twitter Reacts To 'Kindergarten Cop' Screening Being Canceled For Being Too Pro-Police

August 05, 2020

Portland, Oregon has been under siege by police brutality against Black Lives Matter protesters and abductions from Trump's secret police force. So, some have suggested maybe now isn't the best time to screen Kindergarten Cop for the Portland public?

The 1990 comedy, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as a police detective working undercover as a kindergarten teacher, was scheduled to launch Portland's Northwest Film Center's Cinema Unbound Drive-in Theater on August 6.

The idea was to mark Kindergarten Cop's 30th anniversary and celebrate "its importance in Oregon filmmaking history," as the movie was shot in Astoria, Oregon. However, considering the troubled climate between cops and civilians right now, staff and community members reconsidered the planned outdoor screening. Ultimately, they opted instead to screen Good Trouble, the recently released documentary about the late Civil Rights leader and American congressman John Lewis.

Portland author Lois Leveen remarked on the decision on Twitter, writing:

"National reckoning on overpolicing is a weird time to revive Kindergarten Cop. IRL, we are trying to end the school-to-prison pipeline. There's nothing entertaining about the presence of police in schools, which feeds the 'school-to-prison' pipeline in which African American, Latinx and other kids of color are criminalized rather than educated. Five- and 6-year-olds are handcuffed and hauled off to jail routinely in this country. And this criminalizing of children increases dramatically when cops are assigned to work in schools."

Leveen expanded on her concerns in a message to a local news outlet, explaining, "It's true Kindergarten Cop is only a movie. So are Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, but we recognize films like those are not 'good family fun,'" she wrote. "They are relics of how pop culture feeds racist assumptions."

She has since locked her Twitter account. The response from other Twitter users makes it easy to guess why.

There were also a lot of transphobic jokes because of the Kindergarten Cop scene in which a small child says, "Boys have a penis. Girls have a vagina."

I planned to include tweets from both sides of this debate. However, in a flood of slams against PC culture, SJWs, snowflakes, and trans people, I found no support of Leveen's point. Which doesn't mean they don't exist. It may mean those tweets were drowned out by outrage over a local screening cancellation that won't impact most people in any way, especially because Kindergarten Cop is easily accessible online. Yet the narrative being pushed in tweets like those above is that liberals are the ones overreacting.

Some final food for thought:

Source Williamette Week

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