All in the Family
Posted on April 6, 2014 by debmeier
Dear readers, friends, and all,
A story about “All In the Family” caught my eye. (New Yorker, The Great Divide, by Emily Nussbaum, April 7, 2014) It retells an anecdote that I’ve used many times, but somewhat differently. She recounts how this clever satire by liberal Norman Lear intended to defuse and ridicule racism may well have fueled it by reassuring many Americans that you could be a racist but also loveable—in fact more so than the righteous liberal son-in-law.
What she doesn’t mention—as one of its side-effects—how the students in our high school (or at least the Latino and Black students) were influenced by it. I was chiding them once—about 25 of them—on their perhaps over-reaction to sometimes subtle, nuanced or even misinterpreted racism. No one, I said (naively) would be baldly racist on prime time. That’s some sort of progress, I contended. Hands went shooting up. What????? The most popular prime time TV show is blatantly racist, one after another claimed. Again, I said indignantly, “name on!” With nary an exception they all pounced on “All in the Family” and Archie Bunker as obvious refutations. They were completely unwilling to even consider my claim that the producer, Lear, had meant it as an attack