Where Does Race Fit in TV's New 1960s Stake?

Where Does Race Fit in TV's New 1960s Stake?

by Geneva S. Thomas | HuffPost BlackVoices

The success of AMC's Mad Men signals new interest in the 1960s for American television. This fall, both ABC and NBC will roll out series focusing on two iconic American institutions during the seething decade. ABC's Pan Am promises a stylish series centered on luxury travel and the historic international airline -- where "pilots were rock stars and the stewardesses are the most desirable women." Keeping with this sexy theme, NBC's The PlayBoy Club will take viewers behind the legendary Chicago club's bunny ears. Somewhat of a spin-off -- the show reprises Naturi Naughton's cameo on Mad Men as one of the nightclub's only African-American bunnies.

But with TV's new interest in the 1960s, and Naughton as the lone player of color -- exactly where does race fit, it at all?

The nostalgic '60s have proven to be a winning point of interest for TV. Not only does the time capsule secure viewers out of sentimental 40-somethings -- a cash-cow market for advertisers according to Ad Age -- but like Mad Men these shows are likely to attract the curiosities of America's youth who are in search of vintage pop culture -- lifestyle and trending swag included. If Mad Men is any indication, we can expect Pan Am and The Playboy Club's treatment of race to be sedated and barely there.



Critics slammed Mad Men -- the award-winning series set smack in the middle of 1960s New York -- for its sluggish narrative on the civil rights movement. While Mad Men offered dead-on confrontation of other prominent unfortunate '60s fixtures, like then legal cooperate sexual harassment, and drug culture, the show's eventual submission to race was swelled with subtle and allegorical representations -- mainly the Draper's muted black nanny and the Sterling Cooper building's perquisite black male elevator operator, the former earning her own satirical Twitter handle. But it was Naughton's cameo in the show's fourth season as a black Playboy bunny that brought race from under a Madison Avenue office desk to center stage when she won the heart of the agency's British partner Lane Pryce -- a man married with children. True to '60s form, when Lane's father caught wind of the affair, the elderly Londoner chastised Lane with a cane across the face.

New '60s-themed TV on the cuffs of controversy around number one box-office hit The Help should serve as a racial-GPS on what not to do. Historical inaccuracies and age-old Hollywood white-washing proves a combination clearly worthy of Oscar buzz, and lingering community outrage to tote. In this case, I'm certain black viewers would rather these shows go entirely absent of faux recollections of civil rights America. But does there exist a safe and sturdy middle ground for TV's approach to the precarious text on race? Or should we all lie in the post-primetime beds TV's '60s do-over will inevitably make -- the imagined space where blackness has no real true place at all?

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Geneva S. Thomas is a writer and cultural critic.

Mad at 'Mad Men'

The creators of Mad Men get so many things right in this period television series. Too bad they get black women so wrong.

Mad at 'Mad Men'
by Salamishah Tillet

In Mad Men, AMC's seminal series on the 1960s advertising scene, all the women are white, all the blacks are men and, well, the rest of us non-male colored folks are housekeepers and Playboy bunnies. At least, that's what one would think watching the show lauded by The Washington Post as "TV's most feminist show."

Mad Men is all about progressive gender politics -- as long as it comes wrapped in white skin. For female viewers who both enjoy Mad Men and come wrapped in brown skin, watching the show can be a frustrating experience.

For the fourth season, Mad Men, which comes to a close on Sunday, the civil rights movement serves as little more than a decorative backdrop. Now set between 1964 and 1965, the show continues to wonderfully detail the fall and the failures of its patriarch, Don Draper, while also exploring the limited gender roles that stifle white suburban housewives, like Betty Draper-turned-Francis, and the sexual harassment and gender discrimination that plague working women, like Peggy Olson and Joan Harris.

In fact, the show's creative representations of white male chauvinism and a budding white feminist movement is best captured in the ninth episode of this season, "Beautiful Girls," which oddly pits the fomenting civil rights movement against the budding feminist movement. When Abe, a white male hipster, sits down with Peggy and waxes philosophic about revolution -- particularly the upheaval in Greece and the civil rights movement in America -- Peggy quickly interrupts, "Most of the things that Negroes can't do, I can't do, and no one seems to care." Abe chides: "All right, Peggy, we'll have a civil rights march for women."

The civil rights movement, it seems, was for black men only.

Part of the reason the show gets away with such a reductionist version of the civil rights era is that for the past two seasons, there have been few references to the major battles and gains of this significant social movement. Significant moments of the '60s, from the March on Washington to the Birmingham Bombing to President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act, are either mentioned in passing or show up as grainy news footage on TV.

Black male historical figures like Malcolm X, Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte are mentioned only briefly by the show's white characters. Or they're strangely used as the shadowy metaphor for the societal oppression of white women, like Betty Draper dreaming about Medgar Evers when she is heavily sedated for her third child's birth, or when the Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston fight serves as a backdrop for Peggy Olsen's duel with her family.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root