7503: Mad Men Racism Redux.

Can’t help but think that this writer from guardian.co.uk ripped off was inspired by Latoya Peterson.

It’s still a Mad Men world
The hit TV show may make us think we’ve come a long way since the 60s, but it distorts history and trivialises discrimination

Melissa Witkowski

Mad Men is hailed as a nuanced, incisive portrait of the changing landscape of advertising and society in the 1960s, but its depiction of the workplace it is an attractive fantasy that creates an illusion of distance between our past and our present.

It accomplishes this trick through the erasure of real accomplishments by women and people of colour of the era, and by downplaying the institutional and systemic oppression in favour of presenting easier (and more salacious) targets such as sexual harassment and racist banter as the biggest obstacles facing women and people of colour in the workplace. These obstacles were real, but the excessive focus on them trivialises real struggles and achievements by ignoring other, more calculated barriers to entry in the workplace that still exist today. These trivialities replace the glass ceiling with intentionally titillating visions of nylon stocking, and industry apartheid with casual racist mockery. Furthermore, the show frames examples of racism, for instance, in such a way as to flatter its audience. The expected, self-congratulatory response is: “Look how far we’ve come!”

In Mad Men’s second series, which takes place in 1962, Roger Sterling gossips to Don Draper that he’s “heard BBDO hired a coloured kid”. This sudden demotion might have come as a surprise to Clarence Holte, a black man who, a decade earlier had been hired by BBDO in 1952 as a copywriter, with a great deal of publicity, and by 1962 was an accounts executive. Or perhaps the line referred to Georg Olden, who served as art director for BBDO from 1960 to 1963. The show doesn’t see fit to tell us, nor is it ever mentioned again. Successful people of colour like Holte and Olden have no representatives in the world of Mad Men, which is content to let their stories unfold off-screen at other, clearly much more interesting, ad agencies.

Similarly, Mad Men’s depiction of women in the workplace may have surface verisimilitude, but it doesn’t stand up to closer scrutiny. Madison Avenue in the early 1960s was not as bereft of women as Mad Men would have us believe. Jean Wade Rindlaub was the vice president of BBDO from 1946 to 1963 and one of the most influential people in advertising. Jane Trahey founded Trahey Advertising Inc. in 1960. Helen Gurley Brown, of Sex and the Single Girl fame, was one of the most highly paid copywriters in the early 1960s. Mary Wells Lawrence started her career as a copywriter in 1953, and by the end of the 1960s she was the most highly paid ad executive in the world. And Caroline Robinson Jones, a black woman, made the leap from secretary to copywriter at J Walter Thompson in 1963; by 1977 she was the vice president of BBDO. Each of these remarkable women overcame entrenched prejudice and misogyny to rise in their careers; Jones, for example, recalled later that she had to teach herself everything, receiving no support from her colleagues. Mad Men neither mentions these real women nor constructs any fictional equivalents; nor does Peggy, the show’s lone female copywriter, reflect the sheer determination and drive that any of them displayed.

Instead, the show asks us to believe that Peggy, Mad Men’s mousy secretary turned mousy copywriter who had no advertising ambitions at the time, attained her position simply by making a clever pun to the right male superior at the right time. He promptly recognises her talent and puts her on an account. The show strongly implies that no woman had ever been a copywriter at Sterling Cooper prior to Peggy, but the circumstances of her promotion imply that this was merely because no woman had ever happened to sound talented in front of a man before. Peggy rarely struggles to be taken seriously by clients or co-workers, and in the second series even obtains a coveted office merely by having the audacity to ask for one. In Peggy’s story, Mad Men implies that women’s success only occurred at the discretion of men, a prize to be bestowed from on high for good behaviour. Surely Jones and her counterparts would have been insulted!

By ignoring the successes and struggles of women and people of colour in advertising in the 1960s, Mad Men obscures the fact that we are not much further along than we were then. The advertising world is still largely controlled by white men (with white women making greater strides in increased presence than black men and women), and the exceptions are still ultimately outliers, if somewhat greater in number.

Mad Men may be lauded for scratching at the dark underbelly of society in the 1960s, but its scratches are surface deep. Perhaps because if it dug any deeper, the audience would see their own reflections staring back at them.