A CBS military procedural with an (intentional) lesson on white privilege? Whoa.

Cafe Society
1

I had to pick my jaw up from the floor.

I happened to catch an episode of CBS’s new Jason Boreanaz vehicle, Seal Team. It’s the first time in well over a decade that a “lead in” actually worked on me (in this case Survivor), because I was testing my new HD antenna and got sucked in.

I really couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. Googling a day later, the only critic or blog or anything that seems to have picked up on it is a right wing site. That makes sense, as there probably aren’t too many liberals watching at this point (the critics presumably only got the first three or four episodes).

So ignore the ranting of this blogger and just watch the video of the scene, and/or read the transcript.

Crazy, amirite?

CBS takes a lot of (mostly deserved) flack for being “so white” and sort of tilting toward Red America. So they deserve all the more credit for a move like this. This might be the best explanation of white privilege I’ve seen, and it’s embedded (without the phrase itself) right in the sweet medicine of SEAL team action, working its effect right in the heart of the heartland.

2

The website seems to have missed the point.

3

Here’s an interesting essay explaining white privilege.

4

Oh, certainly. I just used it for convenience as my initial plan was to film the TV screen, upload the video to Twitter, then hope it wouldn’t get taken down. Instead, this has a nice embedded video and a transcript. It is notable that no media/blog sources on the left have picked up on it, because the show is so outside their wheelhouse (and it’s a kind of flukey thing that I happened to see it). But this deserves to get some attention from people who can actually appreciate it.

I do think the website not only missed the point with the whiny right wing commentary, but even with what was highlighted in the transcript. What I found the most powerful would be highlighted more as follows:

People pointed out a similar double standard in politics regarding gender. Bernie has wild, unkempt hair, rumpled, ill-fitting suits. And people love it, eat it up. Imagine Hillary or any woman trying to get by with that! She would be seen as a crazy bag lady or worse.

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I noticed it. No, I don’t give them credit for it because it’s utter bullshit, especially in the military.

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Meaning what exactly? I fully admit to having no experience with the military (my dad was a Marine but that was years before I was born).

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The military has historically been far, far ahead of the rest of society when it comes to integration. Hell, I was in back in the early 90s and there was exactly zero racial tension or judgment of soldiers based on their race.
Sexism? Sure, 100% there was, but that’s a different story with a different root cause. The military has always had a streak of machismo and that’s not going away very easy.
But racism? Not for a long time. Everyone is green when you’re in.

8

Well, if by “historically far, far ahead” you mean “about twenty years ahead starting in 1948”.

During the two decades between Truman’s formal integration of the Armed Forces and the 1968 Civil Rights Act, the different branches of the service seem to have integrated rather cautiously, avoiding situations like assigning black officers to white or mixed-race units, for example. And of course, soldiers on leave in the civilian world were still subject to all the segregationist laws and culture common to the rest of the US. The military wasn’t some kind of racial-egalitarian Narnia where you come through the portal and leave all the more familiar world behind.

I’m not denying the reality of your experience, but I would also like to hear what a black servicemember has to say about it.

Remember, this dialogue isn’t about deliberate racial discrimination or oppression so much as about more subtle aspects of racial privilege.

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Very important point. And in particular, what happens when you go past the broad military into the elite of the elite (not just making a SEAL team, but becoming the leader of one). It strikes me as plausible that a white guy might get by with bedhead and an untucked shirt, while with a black guy that would never fly.

10

Enough horse manure in this to fill the Grand Canyon. Thank God we still have intelligent men like Thomas Sowell who points out the if you advocated equal treatment for everyone 50 years ago you we a radical, 25 years ago you were a liberal and today you are a racist.

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Which just proves if you look for racism everywhere, you’re sure to find it.

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Tue dat; we have a guy here at work who was complaining about a lack of advancement opportunities, and ascribing it to racism.

Then he got his “bump” to assistant supervisor (grooming him to move up in the 1-2 year time frame to full supervisor at another, much newer/nicer facility) and under his new workload (with about a 40% pay bump, no weekend work, an extra two weeks vacation/year, plus other bennies), he’s ascribing all the extra stuff (it’s all admin/paperwork/desk-jockey stuff) he now has to do to racism.

:smack: