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When “Those People” Became One Person · Infinite Threads with Bob Barnett

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: welcome back to Infinite Threads.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Bob.
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  SPEAKER_00: Yesterday,
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  SPEAKER_00: we talked about Archie Bunker,
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  SPEAKER_00: about the way that Norman Lear kept showing us that the loudest,
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  SPEAKER_00: ugliest part of a person is not always the whole person.
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  SPEAKER_00: Today, I want to look at another way television taught empathy.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not by stripping away the mask all at once,
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  SPEAKER_00: but by making people live beside each other long enough that
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  SPEAKER_00: the category stops working.
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  SPEAKER_00: That, that is what happened in Chico and the Man.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ed Brown begins as exactly the kind of person you might expect to have
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  SPEAKER_00: a fixed picture in his head of someone like Chico.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ed is older, bitter, set in his ways, and well, openly prejudiced.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then Chico walks into his garage.
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  SPEAKER_00: At first, Ed doesn't really see Chico.
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  SPEAKER_00: He sees a type,
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  SPEAKER_00: a younger man,
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  SPEAKER_00: a Mexican-American man,
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  SPEAKER_00: somebody who does not belong in the world that Ed has built around himself.
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  SPEAKER_00: But Chico does something very inconvenient.
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  SPEAKER_00: He stays.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that matters because prejudice Often survives by distance.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's easier to have a simple opinion about those people when those people remain abstract.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then one of them becomes Chico.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now the category has a voice,
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  SPEAKER_00: a sense of humor,
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  SPEAKER_00: a way of annoying you,
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  SPEAKER_00: a way of helping you,
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  SPEAKER_00: a way of becoming part of your day, And slowly the category begins to fail.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is what I find so interesting about the premise of this show.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first episode itself is built around Chico persuading
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  SPEAKER_00: a cranky bigoted garage owner to let him work there and stay in the old van in
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  SPEAKER_00: the garage.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ed resists him.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then Ed keeps encountering the actual person Instead of the picture
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  SPEAKER_00: that he had already created.
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  SPEAKER_00: And guys, that's where things start to move.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not all at once.
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  SPEAKER_00: That would have been less honest.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ed does not suddenly become enlightened because Chico is charming.
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  SPEAKER_00: He still says things that he definitely should not say.
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  SPEAKER_00: He still falls back into old habits.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the relationship Makes those habits harder to maintain without contradiction.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because now,
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  SPEAKER_00: well now Ed cares about someone who belongs to the group that he has been prejudiced
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  SPEAKER_00: against.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's a problem for prejudice.
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  SPEAKER_00: It likes clean categories.
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  SPEAKER_00: Human relationships make a mess of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I think that was one of the quiet lessons Television kept putting in front of us.
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  SPEAKER_00: You can hold an idea about a group of people for years.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then one person walks into your life and refuses to fit the idea.
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  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't automatically change everything, but it creates friction.
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  SPEAKER_00: And friction can create thought.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the first step Toward empathy is not a speech, but rather a relationship.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think we saw a version of that in the Jeffersons, too.
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  SPEAKER_00: George Jefferson could be prejudiced in his own way.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was especially uncomfortable with Tom and Helen Willis,
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  SPEAKER_00: an interracial couple whose daughter Jenny eventually married his son Lionel.
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  SPEAKER_00: George had an idea about them.
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  SPEAKER_00: But then they became neighbors.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then family.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then people he had to keep dealing with whether he liked it or not.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that changed the situation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not because George became perfect, because he didn't.
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  SPEAKER_00: But television kept forcing him into contact
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  SPEAKER_00: with people his assumptions could not fully explain.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's There's an episode called A Case of Black and White,
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  SPEAKER_00: where George tries to impress a business contact by pretending Tom
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  SPEAKER_00: and Helen are his close friends.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, that's funny on the surface.
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  SPEAKER_00: But underneath the comedy is something revealing.
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  SPEAKER_00: George wants credit for being less prejudiced than he really is.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the people he has reduced to props, they refuse to cooperate.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that is important too.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because empathy is not only about discovering the person you prejudged as human.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's about discovering that the other person has the right
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  SPEAKER_00: to define themselves instead of existing inside the role that you've assigned them.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that is a harder lesson too.
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  SPEAKER_00: And
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  SPEAKER_00: it is one I think that those shows talk remarkably well, especially Norman Lear shows.
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  SPEAKER_00: They did not make prejudice disappear by giving us perfect speeches.
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  SPEAKER_00: They made prejudice are awkward.
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  SPEAKER_00: They made it inconsistent.
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  SPEAKER_00: They showed The audience that a person could say one thing about a group
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  SPEAKER_00: and behave very differently once one particular human being mattered to them.
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  SPEAKER_00: That contradiction is worth paying attention to.
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  SPEAKER_00: It teaches us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because I think most of us have some version of it.
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  SPEAKER_00: We may believe something broad about people that we don't know.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then we meet someone.
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  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly, the broad belief has to compete with a specific person.
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  SPEAKER_00: And specific people are harder to dismiss.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is why I keep coming back to the phrase that we used recently on Infinite Threads.
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  SPEAKER_00: The stranger is somebody's person.
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  SPEAKER_00: Television did something similar to that.
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  SPEAKER_00: It took the other and gave them a name.
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  SPEAKER_00: A job, a family, a personality.
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  SPEAKER_00: After a while, the audience was not watching a category anymore.
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  SPEAKER_00: They were watching Chico.
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  SPEAKER_00: They were watching Helen and Tom.
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  SPEAKER_00: They were watching people.
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  SPEAKER_00: That changes the emotional equation.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I think that mattered to me growing up.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't remember sitting in front of the television thinking,
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  SPEAKER_00: this is teaching me how prejudice works.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's not how it felt.
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  SPEAKER_00: I was watching funny people,
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  SPEAKER_00: complicated people,
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  SPEAKER_00: people who frustrated each other and cared about each other anyway.
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  SPEAKER_00: But looking back, I think those relationships taught something deeper than that.
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  SPEAKER_00: They taught me that a person does not stop being human just
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  SPEAKER_00: because somebody else has put them in a category.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they taught me that sometimes the best way to challenge a prejudice is not
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  SPEAKER_00: to argue with it from across the room.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you put two people in the same room and make them stay there long enough
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  SPEAKER_00: to discover each other.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what Chico and the Man did.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ed Brown did not need a lecture on diversity.
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  SPEAKER_00: He needed Chico to keep showing up.
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  SPEAKER_00: He needed to be irritated by him,
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  SPEAKER_00: helped by him, surprised by him, and eventually attached to him.
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  SPEAKER_00: That attachment complicated the prejudice.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we watched it happen, guys.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was an amazing show.
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  SPEAKER_00: Check it out.
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  SPEAKER_00: Again, that doesn't excuse Ed.
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  SPEAKER_00: The prejudice was still wrong.
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  SPEAKER_00: But once you understand the human mechanism, you can see why contact matters.
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  SPEAKER_00: Distance allows imagination to fill the gaps.
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  SPEAKER_00: Relationship replaces imagination With information.
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  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't always fix things.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some people meet others and cling even harder to prejudice.
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  SPEAKER_00: Human beings are capable of that too, but familiarity can create an opening.
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  SPEAKER_00: It gives the mind something real to work with.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is one reason that I think stories matter so much.
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  SPEAKER_00: A television show Can create a relationship between the viewer
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  SPEAKER_00: and someone they might never have met in real life.
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  SPEAKER_00: Week after week, you sit with that person.
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  SPEAKER_00: You hear them joke.
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  SPEAKER_00: You watch them struggle.
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  SPEAKER_00: You see who they love.
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  SPEAKER_00: Eventually,
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  SPEAKER_00: your brain stops processing them as an example of a group and starts processing them
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  SPEAKER_00: as a person.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's empathy practice.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not perfect empathy, but practice.
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  SPEAKER_00: And maybe,
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  SPEAKER_00: maybe that was one of the great things classic television did when it was
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  SPEAKER_00: at its best.
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  SPEAKER_00: It introduced people to one another.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not literally, but emotionally.
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  SPEAKER_00: The person who seemed unfamiliar on Monday Could feel oddly familiar by the end of a season.
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  SPEAKER_00: And once a category has a face, the category gets harder to use as a weapon.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's one of the reasons that I wanted this week.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because these old shows did not just entertain us.
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  SPEAKER_00: They made us spend time with people.
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  SPEAKER_00: And time, time can do something that argument often cannot.
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  SPEAKER_00: It can make a person real.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow, I want to look at another trick that those shows used.
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  SPEAKER_00: They made us laugh first.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then, while our defenses were down, they showed us something painful.
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  SPEAKER_00: Poverty.
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  SPEAKER_00: Grief.
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  SPEAKER_00: Prejudice.
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  SPEAKER_00: Loneliness.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is what great comedy is.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes does.
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  SPEAKER_00: It opens the door with a joke.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then something human walks through.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, guys.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to me this week.
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  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I love you all very, very, very much.
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  SPEAKER_00: And you know what I need you to do, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: Go out there and pass that on, okay?
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  SPEAKER_00: Later, Gators.
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  SPEAKER_00: See you tomorrow.
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  [music]