How Mad Men Turns Black Characters into Real People

I showed up at the front steps of 138 Mountfort Street, home to BU’s African-American Studies Department, on Tuesday afternoon to attend Professor Deborah L. Jaramillo’s lecture, “Black Stories/White Series: Finding the African-American Narrative in Mad Men.” As a sequel to her lecture last year on depictions of Mexicans on American television, Professor Jaramillo prefaced her lecture with a short discussion of the sordid relationship between race and TV, then used Mad Men as the antithetical example of a program with sincerely written black characters. Ultimately, I left 138 Mountfort with a newfound respect for the subtlety, sincerity and skill with which Mad Men brings its African-American narratives to life.

Despite this conclusion, I can’t remember whether I showed up to the lecture expecting either little or nothing. Mad Men, a show about 1960s Madison Avenue advertising executives, is oppressively white. Not only was advertising dominated by both whites and men, but the show occurs in pre-Civil Rights America—I could count the number of black characters on one hand. How much of an African-American narrative can there be in a story virtually devoid of African-Americans? Even further, I’ve already seen every season of the show, so Professor Jaramillo couldn’t even show me anything new!

Surprise: I was wrong. She began with the first scene of the first episode of the first season where the first character onscreen is a black waiter. In this first scene the central character, (m)ad man Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm), has a conversation with a different black waiter. Jaramillo explained that the show only places blacks in positions of labor, such as waiters, maids or elevator operators, and because of this the viewer is only allowed glimpses of another world ignored by the story-world. The audience only sees blacks as they interact with whites, framing their characterizations from the white perspective.

In this same vein, Jaramillo also presented scenes including Carla (played by Deborah Lacey), the Draper family’s maid. In these scenes, a black woman is depicted in the service of whiteness, silent and subordinate. Professor Jaramillo pointed out that the character of Carla is a replications of the 60s-era images of maids—her scenes seem to be an attempt to give a life and identity to this hackneyed image. These attempts are successful, especially in scenes where Carla is confronted with anti-Civil Rights rhetoric and must stay painfully silent. Throughout the series she is depicted with an authenticity and humanity that is absent on most other programs.

Professor Jaramillo began her lecture with the lamentation, “Blacks are over-represented in television, in terms of population; the quality isn’t there.” She then proceeded to show how, at least in one case, this is (fortunately) not at all true. Even if they do not have a starring role, the black characters populating the show’s world are not caricatures, stereotypes or strawmen. They are real people, with their own problems, dreams and lives. That Mad Men treats all its characters with respect is admirable; that it takes the time to develop subtle African-American narratives throughout a white-dominated story is cause for celebration.