How My Favorite 90s Sitcom is Still Schooling Us
In season 3, episode 9 of one of my favorite childhood sitcoms, Smart Guy, the writers of the show tackle racism; racial profiling in stores specifically. Yvette, one of the main characters, and a young Black woman in high school is hired to work at a clothing store along with her friend Nina, a young white woman from the same high school.
The manager of the store is Ms. Hendra. We find out not too far into the episode that Ms. Hendra has been asking Nina to follow around the Black customers who enter into the store. Nina feels extremely awkward about it, but she goes along with it until Yvette notices and confronts her. When confronted, Nina tells Yvette of Ms. Hendra’s orders. Nina tells Yvette that the way Ms. Hendra justifies her position is with six words:
“Black people steal. They just do.”
Yvette decided to talk with the manager in a conversation that proved very unfruitful, and revealed more of Ms. Hendra’s ideology. As Yvette brings up the issue of following Black customers with Ms. Hendra, Ms. Hendra defends her position and essentially tells Yvette that she’s one of the ‘good ones,’ which is why she hired her.
After that conversation, Yvette takes matters into her own hands and stages a scenario at the store. She plants a camera and asks her brother’s friends, Moe and Mackey to help her. Moe is Black, and Mackey is White. Yvette has them both shop at the store at the same time while Ms. Hendra is working. Moe’s role is to be a regular shopper, and Mackey’s role is to be the thief who eventually takes the store’s clothes out of the shop (before returning it a few seconds later). As Yvette predicted, Ms. Hendra was much more focused on Moe and did not even pay attention to Mackey, who was the one stealing.
Yvette then shows this footage to Ms. Hendra in an attempt to get her to understand how wrong her position is. The dialogue continues as such:
Ms. Hendra: This proves what?
Yvette: That if you only follow around Black customers, that’s all you’re ever going to catch. I have 50 hours of tape here, and you know what? All races shoplift.”
Ms. Hendra: Do you have 19 years of tape? Because that’s how long I’ve been in retail. And that’s where I get my information.”
Yvette: But wait a minute. The retail industry itself says that the average shoplifter is a middle-aged White woman not unlike yourself. You are stripping people of their dignity because of their skin color, and it’s wrong.”
Ms. Hendra: Yvette, I’m sorry you feel this way. And I understand if you chose not to work here anymore.
Completely defeated and distraught, a crying Yvette sits in the kitchen room of her house where her father finds her. She tells him what happened with Ms. Hendra, and the fact that despite all of the facts and evidence presented, the manager was unmoved. Her father says to his daughter one of the most important lines of the whole episode. He says:
“In this world, honey, there’s always going to be people that can take logic and facts and twist them to their own point of view.”
This, to me, is the most telling part of bigotry. It is rooted in confirmation bias. Despite the statistic that Yvette shared with Ms. Hendra about middle-aged White women being the average shoplifter (which was true in the 90s), MS. Hendra based her actions on her own experience. And you know something? Ms. Hendra’s experience could have very well been that most of the shoplifters of her store were Black. Smart Guy is a show based in Washington DC (or the DMV area at least), and there are a lot of Black people in that area. And because this is a fictional story, let us, for the sake of argument, add in that Ms. Hendra was taught as a child to be racist by her parents. We could easily see that Ms. Hendra’s line of thinking is skewed and causes her to see what she wants to see, which is why Yvette says “if you only follow around Black customers, that’s all you’re ever going to catch.”
Anyone in their right mind will watch this episode and come to the conclusion that Ms. Hendra is a racist, and Yvette was in the right. Many reading this may be aware of Ms. Hendra’s arguments and justification for her racism. It doesn’t take a race relations expert to dismantle the faulty premise that ‘Black people steal.’ Even if the person introducing the premise has 19 years of experience to back them up.
A reasonable person can make the argument that though there may be areas where more Black people steal than other racial groups, that those thieves only account for a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of the Black population in America. In other words, criminals and bad actors don’t represent the whole group. Again, a reasonable, normal human being can understand that; thus the conclusion that Ms. Hendra was a racist is a valid and true one.
All of this is very easy to grasp to the average person; yet it seems to suddenly become slippery when applied to Jews. Why is it an issue that Jews are ‘overrepresented’ in Hollywood. Jews make up less than 3% of the US population, and make up a considerable amount of Hollywood, yes. Jews also make up about 0.2% of the global population, but also over 20% of Nobel Prizes.
Indian Americans make up 1.2% of the US population, 6% of the workforce, yet Indian Americans are highly represented in the tech and medical industry.
Black American males make up 6% of the US population, yet over 70% of NBA players are Black American.
Asian Americans make up 6% of the US population, yet 20% percent of physicians are Asian American.
If I were to posit in this article, that somehow, those statistics I just listed prove that there is something wrong with the listed ethnic groups, I would be met with serious rebuttal, explanation, more context, and even condemnation for making such a claim; and those responses would most likely all be correct and valid. Indians don’t dominate the tech industry because there is some secret cabal of Indians wanting to control the world. Asians aren’t highly represented in the medical field because they want to control it and engage in nefarious activity. Black men aren’t highly represented in the NBA because they want to take over the sports industry. But somehow, Jews are highly represented in Hollywood because of all of those things. And to those already convinced of some secret Jewish conspiracy, they will look to any Jew in the film or music industry and say “see?!” They will look to a shady Jewish manager and say “you see?! YOU SEE?!” As if shady White, Black, Hispanic, Arab, or Asian businessmen do not exist. They will look at a racist Jew and say “SEE?!?! Jews hate Black people!” As if the one racist Jew represents an entire people.
A lie that harbors a few facts is still a lie; and it is just as wrong and prejudiced to perpetuate these false narratives about Jews as it is wrong to do so about any other ethnic or religious group.
A lot of people, Black, White, left and right are revealing themselves to be Ms. Hendra, the racist manager from Smart Guy, which is very unfortunate, because there are many evils in the world that deserve our attention, but too many of us are preoccupied keeping the spirit of Pharaoh from the book of Exodus alive with this “there are too many Jews” argument.
To those of us with this preoccupation, I respond a revised quote from the beloved sitcom:
“If you only follow around [Jewish] customers, that’s all you’re ever going to catch.”