I’ve had the opportunity to watch the first season of the old Barney Miller show. I remembered it dimly from my childhood, and thought it might be fun to review. I didn’t remember—because I was barely aware of—the heavy, heavy race consciousness with which it was written.
Barney Miller was from the Norman Lear era, and it shows, sometimes painfully so. I can understand that simply employing a multi-ethnic cast was something unusual at the time, but the approach is awkward, and the result is really, really corny from the lofty heights of what is supposed to be post-racial America. It’s a squad composed of token minorities: a black guy, a Japanese guy, a Polish guy, a Puerto Rican guy, and a Jewish guy, led by a Jewish captain.
And yet, despite the show’s eager desire to portray everyone as “just folks,” it depends on stereotypes for its humor: it’s the Polack who’s the dumb one, the black guy who’s all fly and calls people “brother,” the Puerto Rican guy who’s always chasing the chicks, the Jewish guy who’s an old curmudgeon. The gay purse-snatcher is not just gay, nor even just queeny, but openly lecherous towards every male in earshot. The jokes are often wince-inducing, as when Sgt. Yemana blames his poor performance at the shooting range on his slanty eyes.
We as a culture have learned that one of the most effective ways—perhaps the most effective way of defusing racial epithets is to embrace them. “Black” was an insult, the preferred euphemism being “colored,” until Reverend Jackson and company began telling us “I’m black and I’m proud!” “Gay” was an insult, until gays began using the word themselves, as if to say, “Yeah, I’m gay. So?” But I don’t think Barney Miller was operating with that level of sophistication. At best it was groping toward that epiphany; at worst, it was simply perpetuating racial stereotypes even as it sought to dispel them. Notably, when the 12th precinct busts a prostitution ring, the prostitutes comprise the same racial mix, and match off with the detectives by race…and age.
Despite Obama’s election, we are not yet a post-racial culture. Race has been America’s great stumbling block since its founding, and there’s a long way to go yet before we’re color-blind, especially since we’ve reached a point where addressing inequality serves to reinforce a sense of division as much as help us break down inequality. Still, progress is being made. And for those who wish to focus on the positive, it is not necessary to go back to the great watersheds of Emancipation and the Civil Rights movement. Outlawing slavery was a big step, as was the elimination of “separate but equal” from our legal vocabulary. But the small steps count, too, the ones that drift quietly into the backs of our minds where they’re hardly ever noticed. The shockingly primitive quality of Barney Miller’s portrayal of race and other demographic divisions are a testament to that: if what was then aggressively egalitarian now seems horribly chauvinistic, our cultural measures of how sharp a distinction can be before becoming offensive must be narrowing, and if no one is even aware of that narrowing, so much the better.
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