Defending Racism in "All in the Family"

In class on Wednesday, we watched a clip from the popular 1970s sitcom All in the Family in which bumbling patriarch Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) has Sammy Davis, Jr. over to his house. He's impressed – even starstruck – by Mr. Davis, but that doesn't stop him from using racial slurs and making insensitive, off-color comments. It seems to escape Archie's grasp that he's being offensive, but it doesn't go over the heads of Sammy Davis, Jr. – or Mr. Bunker's son-in-law, Mike (Rob Reiner). They combat Archie's racism with logic and quips of their own, but the biggest laughs come from Archie's use of words like "colored" and insistence that he isn't prejudiced right before he says something extremely prejudiced.

All in the Family's producers defended the show's racially insensitive content by arguing that Mike's logic prevails over Archie's prejudice. But that didn't change the fact that Archie was the show's most popular character, or that Mike was known better by the nickname that Archie bestowed upon him – "Meathead." It's not as if listening to speeches by a guy called Meathead made audiences feel guilty for laughing at Archie making a joke about a Jew and a bank. It's as though the show thought it could get away with anything as long as there was a postscript explaining that what they just said was wrong.

This isn't the only instance of such a phenomenon. In Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, his character calls Asians "zipperheads" and blacks "spooks," earning plenty of laughs along the way, but eventually ends up saving the life of a young Hmong boy from his neighborhood. Since he does this, the ninety minutes of racism that precede it are suddenly much more defensible. There's countless other examples, and all of them apologize for racism that was funny and acceptable just moments before.

I don't know whether this is fair or not. I love Gran Torino, and I think All in the Family is easily the best TV show from the '70s. I just think it's interesting that racism becomes easier to stomach when it's presented in a humorous way, and when there's an implied apology for it. Perhaps if I weren't white, I wouldn't be as comfortable with such entertainment.