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‘Ted 2’ Racist? Critics Slam Sequel For ‘Roots’ Comment, Racial Jokes

By Jonathan Franks
Published on: 11:00 PST, Jun 27, 2015

Critics slammed Ted 2 this week in numerous reviews leading up to the Friday premiere of the highly anticipated sequel.

A common statement that many of the negative reviews address is that the Seth MacFarlane-directed film has a lot of racial jokes and racially insensitive comments.

During one controversial moment in the film, for instance, Ted compares himself to the Kunta Kinte — an African-American slave who is brutally beaten and whipped in the 1977 miniseries Roots.

Manohla Dargis, a chief film critic for the New York Times, targeted this particular moment in great detail within her review of the film.

“Mr. MacFarlane aligns Ted’s struggle with enslaved black Americans… Ted jokes that he’s just like the brutalized slave. The joke is absurd, weird and unfunny, and it exemplifies Mr. MacFarlane’s reliance on surface shocks as well as his assumption that engaging with race is merely a matter of putting black people on-screen.”

Dargis further wrote that Ted 2 is “a particularly blunt example of the white appropriation of black lives” which includes “everything but the burden.”

Mark Feeney with the Boston Globe explained the progressive chain of reactions that moviegoers may have when it comes to some of the controversial references made in the film — including comments about Ferguson and Dred Scott.

“When Ted sits on his couch watching a clip from ‘Roots’ and compares his situation to that of Kunta Kinte getting whipped, you may want to sink into your seat. When the names ‘Ferguson’ and ‘Dred Scott’ come up…you may want to crawl under that seat. Smirking offensiveness, MacFarlane’s speciality, becomes offensive cluelessness.”

Another scene of Ted 2, which was shown in part within the film’s trailers, occurred when John Bennett (played by Mark Wahlberg) and Ted visit a sperm bank.

John reportedly ends up covered in the rejected semen of men that were diagnosed with sickle-cell anemia. As a joke, Ted teases John by stating that he is “covered in rejected black guys’ sperm,” adding that he is “like a Kardashian,” according to HitFix.

Critics were not the only people that slammed Ted 2 for its crude humor and racially insensitive references. Quite a few people have shared their similar reactions and responses on Twitter since the theatrical release of the film.

Some people on Twitter were on both sides of the fence when it came to their tweets reviewing Ted 2. For instance, many admitted that the film was funny but still uncomfortable because of the racial comments.

The first film of the Ted franchise made over $549 million at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing film in 2012 for Universal Pictures.

Even with the negative criticism and backlash circulating online from its racial jokes and references, Ted 2 is still expected to become another box-office hit for Seth MacFarlane.

[Image Credit: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images]

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