Okay so I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now.  I’m a die hard fan of ‘Mad Men’ and have been since the Donald Draper’s “true identity” was revealed in Season One.  Over the show’s four award winning seasons, there has been a growing chorus of folks writing articles asking, “Why are there no black people on Mad Men?”  Please. Just. Stop.

My answer was always, “This show is about white advertising executives in the 1960s.  Black people were simply not a part of their reality.”

I got a lot a flack for saying this, but now over at The Root, John McWhorter (who I don’t normally agree with about…well…anything ever) writes a persuasive piece making the same point, that black people cannot be included in a reality they were simply not a part of at the time.  They cannot simply insert a black character into the world of Donald Draper and Peggy Olson, if in the 1960s they wouldn’t have been there.

McWhorter writes:

“The absence of blacks in Mad Men is a standing condemnation of the people the show depicts, not of the show’s creators. That is, it is a slap in the face to the real people of the early 1960s. It was such a modern era in so many ways, and yet even literate, liberal whites so often thought of black people as semi-competent aliens, knew few of them and liked it that way.

All of those beautifully coiffed people on the show whose trials and tribulations grab us for 13 glossy episodes each year would have been nauseated at the prospect of their child dating a “Negro.” All but a very few of them would never have done so themselves. Imagine Betty Draper, for example, having an affair with a black gardener the way her Julianne Moore equivalent did in 2002′s film Far From Heaven. Betty would rather have died.

I have always assumed that this was what the show’s creators intended as the race message in the show, and that we were to be relieved that America is past that situation, just as we are past the heavy smoking, whiskey guzzling and womanizing as norms.

To be offended that black people hover at the margins of the Mad Men world is to view the show as something I’m not sure Matthew Weiner and his crew intended it to be: a dramatic documentary of the ’60s as a whole. Certainly there were lots of black people doing things much more interesting than cleaning houses and mugging people in 1965 in New York City. But Mad Men is about people in the advertising business and their families and associates.”

Exactly right.  It’s silly to get all worked up over there being no black character walking the halls the Sterling Cooper Draper Price.  The show prides itself on accuracy and a random black character in a board meeting with Don, Peggy, and the executives from Lucky Strike just wasn’t happening back then and it shouldn’t be portrayed on the show.

If you want to a show filled with complex black characters portrayed by exceptional actors write an article complaining about there being no show like that since The Wire was canceled and stop hatin’ on Mad Men.

Related posts:

1. How to actively Set Black People Back: Soulja Boy, Tell’em.
2. [LIFE] Dear Black Men: Let’s…Just…STOP
3. Need more Black people?
4. TWiB! Season 3 Ep#10 – Black people & White people are different.
5. NEXT WEEK in BLACKNESS: “Black People Go Bye-Bye” Says the AP