Why "Mad Men" Is Afraid of Race

In the opening scene of the first season of Mad Men [2], Don Draper, sitting in a swank restaurant, gets a light from a black busboy and then strikes up a conversation about his smoking and brand preferences. As this is 1960, an older, white, waiter comes over and asks if Draper is being bothered. Draper sends the intrusive waiter away, and keeps up the conversation with the busboy, remarking, "You must need to relax after working here all night."

"Yes," the man answers, and then quickly adds, "I don't know.” Draper, the creative director of a Madison Avenue ad firm and the show’s central character, rolls into his sales pitch.

Although Draper has a gift for engaging and seeing through marginalized types—the unwed mother, the Jewish heiress, the closeted gay man—in the case of the black characters, the relationship never goes beyond shallow conversation. Mad Men takes on a number of cultural controversies, yet race is treated with politeness, distance, restraint, and a heavy dose of sentimentality. For a show that takes place in the early ’60s, as race riots are breaking out, this is a glaring omission.

Mad Men, which starts its new season Sunday night, is willing to engage the toughest issues of the time—and use them to provide an insight into our current social norms. The show unflinchingly displays the whole range of misogyny during the period—from the casual office demands to "show a little more leg" to the physical and sexual violence Don and other characters use to control their wives and mistresses. Draper sexually molests Bobbi Barrett in a power play and pushes his wife full in the chest during a physical altercation. One character—Peggy—becomes the agency’s first female copy writer and fights to be seen as an equal with the men finding themselves increasingly uncomfortable with having a lady in their clubhouse.

Other minority characters on the show give us a glimpse into life as an outsider in the early ’60sBefore a meeting with Rachel Menken, the daughter of a Jewish department store baron, Draper and his colleague Roger Sterling wonder if they should have a Jewish employee in the room to make her think they’re a Semite-friendly firm. Easier said than done.

Sterling: "Have we ever hired any Jews?"

Draper: "Not on my watch."

Draper later jokes, "Want me to run down to the deli and grab somebody?"

Menken, through sheer force of will, succeeds in making them see her as a serious client. But the relationship strays from business when she and Draper have an affair. It is through that intimate connection that Menken is finally able to confide, on screen, the way that bigotry has shaped her life.

"Jews have lived in exile for a long time,” she tells Don over lunch. “Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we thrive at doing business with people who hate us."

When Don replies: "I don't hate you," Rachel fires back, "No, individuals are wonderful."

Don’s wife, Betty, deepens our understanding of the anti-Semitism of the period when she tells Don about her first kiss with a Jewish boy named David Rosenberg. Classmates treated her differently once they found out about this kiss, she says, and then mentions how the Jewish girls in her class dyed their hair blonde when they got older.

In Season 2, the carefully constructed façades start to crack. Betty kicks Don out of the house, and then sleeps with a stranger she meets in a bar. Her friends have affairs, get divorced. Joan, the office sexpot, gets raped by her “perfect” fiancé. Peggy gets her own office. Salvatore, the closeted gay man, has his first gay encounter. The white patriarchy is breaking apart, the rush of the ’60s are upon us. But the black characters are still trapped in a romantic haze of noble, silent suffering.

Betty’s perceptiveness seems to fail when faced with her black domestic employees. Her own maid and her childhood housekeeper, whom she sees briefly at her parents’ house, are silent, stoic, and patient, always dealing with the white characters with respect and aplomb. Devoid of their own narratives, they exist solely to comfort and move the rest of the story forward. There is even a moment where Betty, coping with the impending loss of her father, rails at the house's longtime servant before breaking down and crying on her shoulder. It's a Scarlett O'Hara moment if I have ever seen one.

Like Betty’s maids, minorities are shown in glimpses around the edges of narrative. They include the two black women that are ladies’ room attendants, the black sandwich seller, the Chinese family used as a prank on Pete Campbell, Carla, the Draper's black maid, the black delivery men dropping off the copier, the elevator operator Hollis, and the Asian American waitress. For the most part, they pop up and say one or two lines. Except for Menken, none of them gets the airtime to voice what they are experiencing. There is not even an interpreter of sorts, the role Betty Draper served for Jews. Black characters remain silent enigmas, and Asian Americans are barely noticed at all.

The fullest black character we get is Sheila White, Paul Kinsey’s girlfriend. Here, the show seems to reveal some self-consciousness about its failure to explore race. In her first on-screen appearance, she is commanded by Kinsey not to speak. In another scene, contrary to the norms of the time, Shelia and Hollis, the elevator operator, can’t even make eye contact, and she stands protectively to one side of Paul. And Joan's assessment that Kinsey was “falling in love with that girl just to show how interesting [he is]” is a statement on race that rings true. The show tries out using Joan as the resident racist. She makes a series of thinly veiled rude comments, which are supposed to be seen as prejudiced. But the comments were more to needle Paul than to hurt Sheila, and the cold dismissals were in keeping with Joan's character. Honestly, she's said worse to Peggy.

Kinsey and White never have a conversation about race, only a small argument about him not going to the race riot. Kinsey prominently displays a picture of White on his desk, but the show never develops an intimacy between them that would open a space to talk about race. White mainly functions as a prop, a way to introduce a black character, but not to engage with her world. She neither suffers nor rages; she’s just a blank. Kinsey returns from the Freedom Ride simply noting that he and Shelia had broken up. Abruptly, the show backs out of an opportunity to bring up the era’s most controversial topic, and stays on safer ground.

One way that Mad Men keeps race at a distance is by harping on the idea that racism was far worse in the South than it was in the North. The characters are shown watching the Freedom Rides in the South and expressing concern with the fate of Kinsey, but rarely is northern racism discussed. During the ’60s, race riots occurred in northern and western enclaves as well—Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C., and San Francisco. By portraying northern racism as a series of rude comments and aloof detachment, it negates the reality of blacks who were threatened with violence simply for being in the wrong area after dark, or the ability of whites to take out their anger on blacks who were normally in subordinate positions.

The show is also conflicted about how to treat Asian characters. The men in the office refer to “Chinamen,” and Bertram Cooper is an old-school Orientalist, showing off his bonsai trees and saying, “Let them open the kimono.” But when Don Draper is propositioned by an attractive Asian American cocktail waitress in a cheongsam (no accent, though),he turns her down. Exotic eye candy, yes, but nothing further.

The next season, which starts Monday night, will be set in 1963. This is a year of historic events that galvanize the civil rights movement, feminism, and American life. John F. Kennedy is assassinated, civil rights reforms are in flux, four little children were killed in a bombing in Birmingham, Malcom X (two years before his assassination) was becoming popular, and Dr. King would deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech.

If the show ignores race again, then it is truly written by cowards. Would it be so difficult to show Carla crying for the little girls killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church? Would we get a different glimpse of this rarefied world if Hollis gets promoted beyond elevator boy? Could the show's writers and producers stomach having one of their characters—Pete Campbell or Roger Sterling—drop a racial epithet with the same ease which with they do misogynistic comments? Or is it, as a friend of mine summarized, that "misogynists are cads and racists are monsters?"