After last week's episode of Mad Men, I joked, "At this point, it feels as if Mad Men‘s writers are trolling liberal critics of the show who want it to deal with race. 'Oh, you want us to "tackle" race? OK. Roger and Joan are going to get mugged by a black guy and Don’s kids are going to be menaced by a mammy. HA!'"
After last night's episode, I'm more convinced than ever that jest is, at least in part, true. (Spoilers after the jump.)
Over the last few seasons, critics have become more vocal with their anxieties about how Mad Men "deals with" race. The cries for more black characters grew in volume until their prayers were answered ... with the introduction of a black mugger who terrorized Joan and Roger one evening (season four, episode nine), a black secretary (season five, episode two) who would later get into trouble for helping her fellow secretaries get paid for hours they did not work, and a black, mammy-looking con artist who terrorized Don's children in last week's episode (season six, episode eight). Last night's episode inducted another member into this pantheon of classic characters (we'll meet him momentarily).
"What series of choices in the writing room and from the director’s chair has led to the black characters being subordinate, criminal, or both?" kvetched Paul Ford in Slate last week. "Because it has to be a choice. This show is too smart not to know what it’s doing."
"Mad Men doesn't seem to be taking on [race] with anywhere near the complexity and nuance as it has with gender. The black secretary who just wants to work hard and feels some resentment toward her friend who's getting married is hardly a revolutionary character type," worried Eleanor Barkhorn at the Atlantic last week.
"The awful stuff first: Burglar Mammy was horrendous, a confirmation of every harsh judgment levied against Mad Men for being too much of a white upper-middle-class historical fantasy," exclaimed Matt Zoller Seitz at Vulture. "If Burglar Mammy were a dream figure attached to a particular character, and if Mad Men had shown any inclination to go anywhere substantive with its allusions to civil rights and racial anxiety, and if it hadn’t given us a black Playboy bunny, a black prostitute, a black mugger, and other disreputable minor characters over the years, but no people of color with personal or even narrative substance, I might feel differently about her."
These complaints all echo a piece I remember reading a few years back in Slate that appears to have disappeared into the ether. Snippets of Latoya Peterson's essay remain, however, in this 2009 blog post that is half-discussion of Mad Men, half-complaining about an editor trimming her unwieldy-sounding essay into something readable.*
"At the end of the piece, I asked if it would be so hard to show some of the strain of racism, as we see Betty staring off into space in her suffocating suburban prison showing the issues in her existence, or Peggy’s constant air of discomfort. This does not call for re-imagining the show," wrote Peterson.
Fast forward to this week when Peggy's boyfriend—a caricature of a 60s radical who is always on about the awfulness of advertising and constantly decries the plight of the lower classes while doing nothing to actually help the lower classes—is stabbed by a minority** youth. After Peggy criticizes him for refusing to give the police a description—"Were they colored or Puerto Rican?"—he reacts indignantly, telling her that he doesn't want to give the pigs "another reason" to shake down the local punks who go around stabbing hard-working journalists. He warns that a revolution is coming, man, and wonders why she can't just understand, where's her class consciousness—"They were brought here on slave ships!" he yells, channeling the deep thinking of critical race theorists everywhere.
He continues making excuses for the locals after they smash in Peggy and his window before Peggy, scared that someone has broken into the house, accidentally bayonets him.
The scene was played for laughs. It certainly inspired a guffaw out of me.
I can't help but think that this is what Matthew Weiner (who co-wrote the episode, as he writes or co-writes most of the episodes) thinks of those who whinge about the show's "cowardice" when it comes to race. Mad Men's core viewers—those two-to-three million right-thinking urbanites who pore over the day-after recaps—have had their chance to shower scorn on the 60s from almost every conceivable angle. "Look at the sexism! And the littering! And the smoking! Goodness gracious, we're so much more civilized nowadays."
But they want more. They need to revel in how awful race relations of the time were. "Let us scourge the past! Let us discuss how much more enlightened we are now! Please, give us a chance to show that we are better than our forebears!"
And maybe that moment will come. For now, however, Matthew Weiner is having more than a little fun trolling all the race scolds. His message to them? "Look, I hear what you're saying. And it makes me want to stab you right in the gut."
*As an editor, I tend to side with other editors on general principle. Especially when an author turns in an essay that is eight pages when the editor asked for two. That's, um, unacceptable.
**I don't think he comes out and says this, but it is clear from his reactions to Peggy and the cop that his assailant was, in fact, a minority.