On Mad Men and Race

by Latoya Peterson

So, the Double X article is finally up. The last time I wrote something for Double X, intrepid reader jvansteppes dropped by to add a provocative note to the fannish comment thread:

Being a regular reader of yours at Racialicious, Latoya, I’m a bit surprised you haven’t mentioned the racial undertones in Twilight, although perhaps you haven’t wasted the time to read it. I did unfortunately read the first 2 books for a paper about teen fiction, and the racial undertones hit me pretty hard. While the racialization of vampires, originally linked to projections of Jewish monstrosity, has certainly evolved to the inclusion of characters like Blade, I’ve long associated vamps with a whiteness fetish, and Stephanie Meier doesn’t deviate from that trend. She takes great pains to emphasize the Cullen family’s pale demeanor, linking both Edward and Bella’s alleged beauty to their white, translucent skin over and over again. While I don’t imagine she’s conscious of this theme, it’s ever-present in her less than creative descriptions of vampire beauty or the purity of white Bella.

Contrast perfect Edward Cullen with Jacob Black however, and the race narrative gets even more obvious, even without a deconstruction of her shaky use of Indian myth as a plot device. Meier uses the phrase ‘russet skin’ so often to describe her Quileute characters that a drinking game could follow suit. Her exoticized, shallow accounts of each Indigenous character’s skin color are so over the top they left me wondering why an editor didn’t say anything. While white, refined Edward is a testament to abstinence and self control, russet Jacob is a werewolf unable to control his emotions, who ultimately forces a kiss on Bella. Edward is cold and beyond human weaknesses, while animal Jacob’s body constantly overheats, as do so many portrayals of uncivilized people of color. Edward struggles for control and ultimately we never doubt his ability to maintain his control of mind over body, while Jacob’s body, too big to be anything but dangerous, takes precedence over his mind. I could go on and on.

As could I. I actually did read the first two Twilight books and the chapters of Midnight Sun posted online. And I noticed the race issues in Twilight, starting from the first discussion of Jacob’s “exotic beauty.”

But the tough part of selling your work for publication means it is no longer about what you want to say – it’s about what your editor wants to publish. And it’s up to the writer to then shoehorn their original idea into the editors vision. When it came time to write about the treatment of race in the context of Mad Men, my original draft came in close to eight pages. My editor had something closer to two in mind. And thus, the cuts began.

I don’t blame my editor for this. Most editors are used to working with a strict word count, with the prevailing idea that shorter is better. And here…well, you all see the length of what we write. (A word of advice to aspiring writers: do NOT turn in articles longer than the word count your editor recommends, they hate that. Since we were figuring things out, I kind of just ran with my thoughts – normally, your editor will not want to read anything that’s more than a hundred words over.)

So, while I am ultimately satisfied with what appeared on Double X, that isn’t the full view of what I wrote. Take, for instance, my original thesis:

Draper, the creative director of Madison Avenue based firm Sterling Cooper, is testing out a theory he has about cigarette branding on the waiter. After all, as Paul Kinsey will note later in the series, “consumer has no color.” However, in the Mad Men world, blacks and other non whites serve as little more than window dressing for the actual events occurring in the 1960s. The scenes with Draper and the black waiter reveal how Mad Men will discuss racial prejudice throughout the course of the series: the subject will be treated with distance, restraint, and is always told through the eyes of the white characters. In all that has been said and written about Mad Men since its stunning debut in 2007, critical race analysis remains elusive. While there have been articles noting the attention paid to details about environmental awareness, child safety, and pregnancy health, incisive commentary about race relations in the 1960s has so far escaped the withering gaze of the writers.

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