The Battle Over Jane Austen’s Whiteness
It began, as things sometimes do on social media, with an emoji. A pineapple emoji to be exact.
Fans of Sanditon, an eight-part Jane Austen adaptation currently airing on PBS Masterpiece, have been deploying the icon on Twitter as a shorthand for their esteem and support of the show, which padded out the surviving chapters of Austen’s last, unfinished novel and turned them into a full-blown Regency romance. But if the scenes of sex and male nudity were not enough to set off paroxysms of controversy, the emoji certainly did.
“The fans decided it was a cute little thing they could use to promote Sanditon, but I thought it was a bit racist in the context of the show,” said Amanda-Rae Prescott, a Caribbean-American social media manager who lives in New York.