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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

But that hasn't been a thing since before I was alive. We've had a strong run of popular sitcoms depicting black families on all of the major TV networks since the '70s. Many times they've led the ratings.

And I watched them. Maybe you didn't?

Edit: Heck, "I Love Lucy" aired in the early 1950s and the show's entire plot was about an interracial marriage. And that show only started two years after commercial TV in most homes was even a thing. It was the very first sitcom to be a #1 rated show.

The "bad times" scenario you're depicting is largely a fiction. What was that Jennifer Lawrence quote? “I remember when I was doing 'Hunger Games,' nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn't work — we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead,”

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I remember watching The Cosby Show as a kid and also a bunch of white family sitcoms. Now I see shows that don't feel so categorized or partitioned as either a black show or a white one, which feels like an improvement.

And yet interracial relationships were a major plot point of both All In The Family and its spinoff The Jeffersons way back in the 1970s. And the topic was treated with some level of seriousness, unlike what you would see today.

My own experiences in a mixed family looks a lot closer to how the topic was discussed back then then it's portrayed on TV now.

Yes both those things happened in the 1970s and they were such rare exceptions that they were a big deal and controversial and you're still citing them 50 years later.

Now it's just a thing that happens and doesn't stand out as rare or controversial or serious/groundbreaking, (to most) which again is an improvement.

But today's portrayal is totally unrealistic and sucks all the oxygen out of the room for having grounded discussions in public around the issue.

I know very few people of mixed background where that isn't a source of family strife somewhere. I am not arguing that anyone should be against it but a) most people don't want their children to suffer, b) mixed children are still unfortunately almost guaranteed to encounter strife in their lives from their background, and c) those mixed children deserve the conversation in public rather than have their lives portrayed on TV as if they should be perfect when they aren't.

The last sentence irks me a bit. Lawrence can't be that ignorant of female action star heros

What dude didn't want to kick ass like Ripley in aliens.

As the age old saying goes...

She protec, she attack,.but most important of all she uses large mechanised exoskeleton to fight aliens.

She was clearly expressing a sentiment that she felt to be true at the time, even though it isn't backed up by the data -- much like this similar scenario.

> She was clearly expressing a sentiment that she felt to be true at the time,

Is that clear? She's a professional actress; if she were reading a line written by some PR hack that she didn't really believe was true, how can you be sure you could tell?

Maybe she believed it, or maybe she was told to say this sort of thing to promote the movie. Since she's a professional actress, I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. She probably wasn't totally ignorant of her own industry.

Or maybe it came out wrong like she said. People commonly say ever when they mean hardly ever.

Now that you point it out.. I think this might be the most likely case.

Lucy and Ricky were both Caucasian. I don’t believe an interracial marriage would have been permitted on TV in the 1950s. (The idea that your “race” is determined by your accent or place of birth is pretty recent.)

DESI ARNAZ: Nobody wanted me to play Ricky. The network. The sponsors. Nobody. Who the hell believes this Babalu fellow is going to be married to this typical American girl?[1]

I don't know what words people used then. And the public accepted it more than executives feared. But they didn't see him as white like her.

[1] https://theplotthickens.tcm.com/content/uploads/2021/11/TPT0...

Ask somebody over 80 if that was controversial back then, because it was.

If I understand you correctly, you’ve retreated from your position that the marriage was “interracial”, but maintain that nevertheless there was something controversial about it at the time. What was the controversy? Can you support your claim, other than by asking me to search for octogenarians and trust their memories?

Pretty sure it would have been considered interracial back then. Definitions change or whatever, and you can just make up your own definitions too.

I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been. What were the two races? Note that they had the same skin tone, or very close. Is Cuban a race?

Spanish, Southern European, Cuban, take your pick. Definition of race is different depending on the country, time period, and politics.

> Note that they had the same skin tone, or very close.

Maybe under makeup and the right lighting. Many pictures show not.

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