# Was there a lot of racism directed towards Desi Arnaz? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 10, 2013, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343 "2013-04-10T18:14:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![YogSothoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@YogSothoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YogSothoth)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/1 "2013-04-10T18:14:00Z")
I’ve heard of stories against black actors in that era, how when James Baskett was not allowed to attend the premier of Disney’s Song of the South in Atlanta because of segregation. I Love Lucy wasn’t filmed too long after that. Were there any widespread racism towards Arnaz? Any significant objection to a minority marrying a white woman? Were audiences, maybe in certain parts of the country, hostile to the idea of interracial marriage? I noticed that Loving vs. Virginia didn’t happen until well after the run of the show in 1967. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/2 "2013-04-10T18:22:28Z")
Wasn’t he a white guy? ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/3 "2013-04-10T18:32:14Z")
A light-skinned Cuban, still almost a decade before Castro’s coup turned “Cuban” into a bad word? Doubtful. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/4 "2013-04-10T18:36:55Z")
John McGraw tried to pass off a black baseball player as “Cuban” to break the color line, and there were[Cuban baseball players](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolf_Luque) in baseball long before the color line was broken. Cubans were just not the target of racism the way Blacks were. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/5 "2013-04-10T18:59:33Z")
In some episode of I Love Lucy, Arnez calls a 40 year old Black Conductor “Boy”. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a587f6/32.png) [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freddy_the_Pig)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/6 "2013-04-10T19:04:48Z")
CBS executives [certainly worried about it:](http://www.lucyfan.com/hispanicarticle.html) > [@](#): > > (W)hen Ball insisted on doing the show with her real-life bandleader husband, the network suits balked. “CBS wanted no part of this,” says Geoffrey Mark Fidelman, a Lucy historian and author of The Lucy Book: A Complete Guide to Her Five Decades on Television (Renaissance Books, 1999, $19.95.) “In the eyes of many, Lucille and Ricky were an interracial couple. That had never been shown. In the movies, César Romero flirted with Betty Grable, but they never got married or had sex or children. So this was a very big deal. CBS said, ‘Who would ever believe that an all-American girl like you would be married to a Cuban bongo beater?’ ” Of course, once they decided to go ahead, the show proved wildly popular, so it couldn’t have been _too_ big a deal to the country at large. At this time, obviously, a show involving a black-and-white couple would not have aired. > [@](#): > > Cuban-born Alex Abella, a CBS creative consultant on the I Love Lucy 50th Anniversary Special, says, “If Desi were black or had black blood, he wouldn’t have had any success or been allowed on the air. Americans could accept him because—like it or not—he was white.” ---
**Author:** ![Kimballkid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b5a626/32.png) [@Kimballkid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimballkid)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/7 "2013-04-10T19:13:39Z")
Luuuuucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do! ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/8 "2013-04-10T21:06:54Z")
J. Edgar Hoover kept a [200+ page file](http://vault.fbi.gov/Desi%20Arnaz) on Arnaz, though he did that with pretty much everybody of any fame. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/9 "2013-04-10T21:14:01Z")
Well, his wife had red hair. Perhaps Hoover took that as a sign of Communist sympathies. ---
**Author:** ![Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a587f6/32.png) [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freddy_the_Pig)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/10 "2013-04-10T21:17:19Z")
> [@Sampiro](#): > > J. Edgar Hoover kept a [200+ page file](http://vault.fbi.gov/Desi%20Arnaz) on Arnaz, though he did that with pretty much everybody of any fame. Well, of course. He had to document his lousy fashion sense! (Am I remembering right? Is Arnaz the guy whom Hoover and Tolson mocked at the race track in _J. Edgar_)? ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/11 "2013-04-10T21:19:31Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > Well, his wife had red hair. Perhaps Hoover took that as a sign of Communist sympathies. She was also a registered Communist in the 1930s, which caused more than a little headache for them in the '50s. (Her grandfather, whose house she grew up in, was a leftist and it was largely to appease him.) ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/12 "2013-04-10T21:21:21Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > Well, his wife had red hair. Perhaps Hoover took that as a sign of Communist sympathies. See post number seven. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/13 "2013-04-10T21:25:46Z")
> [@jayjay](#): > > A light-skinned Cuban, still almost a decade before Castro’s coup turned “Cuban” into a bad word? Doubtful. It’s interesting that “I Love Lucy” featured a Cuban-American married to a woman of European descent, and another big hit of the same period featured an Arab-American actor (Amos Muzyad Yakhoob Kairouz aka Danny Thomas) whose character was married to a woman of European descent. ---
**Author:** ![Rachellelogram](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rachellelogram/32/8689_2.png) [@Rachellelogram](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rachellelogram)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/14 "2013-04-10T22:02:05Z")
I wasn’t alive back then, but was his ethnicity even widely-known at the time? Anyway, he looked totally white on black-and-white film. And Arnaz isn’t a common surname. I don’t think people would see it and think, “that’s a brown guy.” As opposed to Cuban surnames like Díaz, López, García, Fernández, González, Gomez, etc. ---
**Author:** ![IvoryTowerDenizen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ivorytowerdenizen/32/17937_2.png) [@IvoryTowerDenizen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IvoryTowerDenizen)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/15 "2013-04-10T22:05:03Z")
They referred to his being Cuban many times on the show. ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/16 "2013-04-10T22:09:13Z")
> [@IvoryTowerDenizen](#): > > They referred to his being Cuban many times on the show. Including at least one episode of how they met in Havana. ---
**Author:** ![Biffy\_the\_Elephant\_Shrew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e47c2d/32.png) [@Biffy\_the\_Elephant\_Shrew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/17 "2013-04-10T22:23:42Z")
Plus there’s the fact that he would occasionally open his mouth. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/18 "2013-04-10T23:18:32Z")
> [@Biffy\_the\_Elephant\_Shrew](#): > > Plus there’s the fact that he would occasionally open his mouth. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Bijou\_Drains](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bijou_drains/32/2814_2.png) [@Bijou\_Drains](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bijou_Drains)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/19 "2013-04-10T23:41:16Z")
Wonder what Lucy would say if she knew that Star Trek was still around today. Her studio, Desilu, produced the original Star Trek in the 60s before she sold out to Paramount. She was alive for the first batch of Star Trek movies and the start of the next generation series. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2013, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343/20 "2013-04-11T00:14:04Z")
> [@Bijou\_Drains](#): > > Wonder what Lucy would say if she knew that Star Trek was still around today. Her studio, Desilu, produced the original Star Trek in the 60s before she sold out to Paramount. > > She was alive for the first batch of Star Trek movies and the start of the next generation series. There’s an alternate history about this “That Wacky Redhead” [That Wacky Redhead | alternatehistory.com](http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=220395) Summary: Lucille Ball doesn’t sell Desilu to Paramount - affects history of Star Trek, eliminates the Brady Bunch, and has rippling further effects down the corridors of time (I haven’t read it all yet) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-there-a-lot-of-racism-directed-towards-desi-arnaz/655343.md?page=2)