This weekend Kathy and I finally got around to stripping our 9-foot Christmas tree of its ornaments, dis-assembling it, and hauling it down to the basement for safe storage. We also boxed up all of our Jim Shore Christmas figurines – a complicated and time-consuming undertaking – and put away just about all of our other Christmas decorations. (Our snowmen are still on display, as is a set of stackable boxes festooned with images of the Nativity and Three King – strategically placed in our foyer to cover up where our dog Bobbi has badly scratched up one of the walls.) In short, we have just completed that unhappy process of UNdecking the Halls.
So why am I writing a blog titled “White Christmas” on this rainy morning in mid-January?
It’s because today is Martin Luther King Day, an occasion when most Americans take some time to remember the important legacy of this great civil rights leader and the enormous strides that have been made because of his relentless work. But it is also an occasion in which we must reflect on all that remains to be done … and bravely resolve to continue his work for justice and equality in whatever ways we can. It is also a day, it seems to me, when we need to look at ourselves with complete honestly and openness and be willing to acknowledge how we ourselves might see the world and those around us through eyes tinted by racism or prejudice of one kind or another.
And thinking about all that reminds me of a disconcerting realization that Kathy and I made during the holidays, as we found ourselves – somewhat in spite of ourselves – becoming addicted to Hallmark Christmas movies. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any of them, but there were at least twenty of them that aired over and over in late November and December. They are always set in and around the Christmas season, and there is usually a major character who has no use for Christmas – typically because they have suffered some sort of painful loss in their lives OR because they are just too career driven to waste time on something as frivolous as Christmas. But – you guessed it! – something happens which opens their eyes to the joys and wonders of Christmas. By the way, in almost every instance there is little or no reference to Bethlehem or the shepherds or Mary and Joseph and the Baby Jesus. In these movies, the meaning of Christmas tends to be family and egg nog and holly and ornaments and sleigh rides and the like. And in many of these movies, the central events of the film play out in some small town or village – and quite often there is a rather cynical or damaged (or both) person from the Big City who only finds Christmas joy once they’ve left said city – typically against their wishes – and relocated someplace smaller where people really understand the meaning of Christmas – and again, these movies are about 95 parts Santa to 5 parts Jesus in the Manger.
It’s a rather heavy-handed formula, if you ask me – and that was probably part of what was most entertaining to me; it gave my rather curmudgeonly Inner Film Critic plenty to complain about. But I would be less than honest if I said that I only enjoyed these films because it was fun to ridicule them. The truth is that I fell under their spell. Visually, these films were stunning … whether in terms of gorgeous scenery or sumptuously decorated homes and other kinds of beauty. Quite often there would be at least one fairly well known actor or actress in the cast – like Trapper John’s Gregory Harrison or Lois and Clark’s Dean Cain or Days of our Lives’ Deidre Hall – that we hadn’t seen much in recent years. And the stories, although sappy and sentimental, were also soothing for us at a time when we were both rather desperate for anything that told us that there was still some sweetness left in the world.
What finally created a crack in my affection for these films was when Kathy pointed out something to me that had completely escaped my notice: that without exception, the principal characters in every single one of these films was white. Every. Single. One. Once in a while, there might be a close friend of a major character who was black- but never the central couple themselves. And in most of these films, you might be hard pressed to catch so much as a glimpse of a person of color in the background. The overwhelming color of the casting was white- and again, most troubling was the fact that in absolutely every single case, the central couple was white. Every. Single. Case. (The photos below are just a sampling. There were more movies than this. But it gives you an idea of what I’m talking about.)
Taken in isolation, film by film, there was nothing particularly troubling about this. (Like I said, it hadn’t even occurred to me until Kathy said something.) But once she pointed this out to me, I found that I could not watch any of these films after that without feelings of deep discomfort. And weeks after the fact (Hallmark, like most television outlets, tends to drop Christmas programming like a hot potato before the last ‘Ho ho ho’ has died away) I keep thinking about this and wondering what it says.
One thing I think it does not say is that Hallmark is racist – or that the people responsible for making these films are racist – or that the people who like watching these films are racist. Maybe a better way to put it is that I very much doubt that any of those folks were racist in the most overt sense of the word. I would bet anything that if you scoured the emails of the film division at Hallmark, you would never find anyone issuing an edict saying “and whatever you do, make sure you only cast whites in the leading roles.” My guess it that it just sort of happened, perhaps springing out of a more benign intent to create soothing, comforting films rather than from a willful intent to exclude anyone of a particular race. Still, it happened- and I’m not afraid to say that there is some sort of racism going on here – a choice to bypass any depiction of country’s Crazy Quilt of Ethnicity in favor of something much simpler and perhaps much safer. And Simplicity and Safety were two things to which I gravitated after this most recent election and all of the anger and fear stirred up in its wake, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
(I do wonder if at some point in the creative process the assumption was made by people at Hallmark that the typical Nebraska farm family would prefer to watch a Christmas film about a white couple rather than a black couple. Was that assumption actually made? And here’s another question that I won’t try to answer here: Would they be right about that?)
I want to say that I tend not to be a big fan of Enforced Diversity. I love it when it springs naturally out of free-flowing creativity and openness. When it becomes the stuff of quotas and pie charts, I grow very uneasy. I don’t want or need every single television program or film to be a faithful reflection of all that we are. But taken together? Absolutely, I want our television programs and films to be about all of us. And in the best of all possible worlds, I want all of us watching programs about each other – and seeing each other’s faces there. When I realized how “white” these Hallmark Christmas movies were, it suddenly helped me understand why there are networks like BET, designed to produce and carry black programs. But is that really what we want? For white people like me to be watching Christmas films on Hallmark and black people watching Christmas films on a channel devoted to black programming? That just hardens old attitudes about US and THEM. And if there is anything that Martin Luther King stood for, it was the importance of breaking down those kind of divides.
One other thought: I don’t mean to gang up on Hallmark -a company progressive enough to create greeting cards that connect to various ethnic groups- and for that matter, progressive enough to sell birthday cards “from your two moms” or “from your two dads” or suggest that what they’ve done with these Christmas movies is a unique transgression. This kind of onscreen exclusion happens all of the time in all kinds of ways. I’m reminded of the perfectly legitimate criticism that was lodged at the wildly popular TV program Friends back in the 1990’s. The criticism was not so much that all six ‘Friends’ were white – but rather that in those first couple of seasons, nearly every single person seen on that show, even in the background of Central Perk, was white. And for a show set in the heart of NYC, that was absolutely ludicrous. Did it bother me at the time? No. Did I even notice at the time? Absolutely not. But at some point, critics began taking notice- and the creators of the show began to make some much-needed changes in that regard. I say that to acknowledge that it’s not just the sentimental folks at Hallmark who should be mindful of this- but even the relatively hip and progressive folks who created Friends- and I also say it as a reminder that many of us have an amazing capacity to be completely oblivious to when others are not welcomed to the table.
I very much doubt if this realization about the Hallmark Christmas movies would have occurred to us a year ago – or five years ago – or twenty years ago, when we were watching Friends week after week and completely oblivious to who it was leaving out. I hope that this is maybe an indication that at least some of us might be waking up about certain issues that are truly central to our well-being as a nation. I don’t intend for this to prompt anyone to never watch another Hallmark Christmas movie again – or write them a letter of protest (but be my guest is you are so moved) …. but maybe it can just be a gentle nudge towards noticing when people are being left out of what could be and should be a fuller and richer portrait of who we are and what life is really about.
Happy Martin Luther King Day, everybody.