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1. A personal story, and some historical analysis inspired by last night's #AllInTheFamily. From 1975 (age 7) to 1979 (age 11) I watched almost every episode, and often in unique circumstances.
2. I have vivid memories of sitting on the floor beside my grandfather watching All in the Family. He would be smoking his cigar in *his* chair to my left. My grandmother would be knitting (and probably dozing off) in *her* chair to my right.
3. My grandfather was a Republican in the 1970s. My parents kinda resembled Mike and Gloria. They had been in college in the late '60s, embraced the counterculture, were decidedly not Republicans. Like many young viewers, I lived the generational tension that the show depicted.
4. My grandfather had a marvelous laugh, a deep sonorous inhale that sounded a bit like an elephant's blast. The cues I got from his laughs were that people like Archie (and my grandpa himself, a bit) were to be laughed *at*.
5. I never heard him say out loud that my parents' generation was right. But that laugh, to me, was his way of subtly admitting that Archie (and by extension he) was kind of ridiculous.
6. What my grandfather was doing by laughing at Archie and thereby himself, I would argue, was allowing parts of himself to die with grace.
7. The brilliance of All in the Family is that it didn't try to pretend like racism didn't exist. It enacted it, not in some monstrous and murderous form like the KKK, but in a form that was all too human and all too familiar.
8. It showed black and white characters who had no truck with such racism and spoke back to it bluntly and directly...but it also sat with the sad truth that such words alone were not sufficient to wear down the rock of racist socialization completely.
9. One last thing that struck me last night (that completely went over my head in the 1970s) was the gendered way in which All in the Family depicted racism. Gloria and Louise seem totally cool with each other. It's George and Archie who have the racial conflict.
10. Most historians of white women and racism in the 1970s would say that this is, well, pretty much NOT how that worked. The idea that racial tensions were mostly between men and mostly had to do with the workplace was a story many white liberals told themselves in the 1970s.
11. Oops...meant "Edith" (not Gloria) and Louise being cool with each other. But also, in general, I don't remember there being much racial tension between the women characters in All in the Family or The Jeffersons...tho I could be misremembering that.
12. As this book and many others have shown, defending white supremacy was women's work as well as men's work in the 1960s and 1970s. indiebound.org/book/978019027…
13. It would be nice to think that women like Edith were quietly fighting the good fight against their bigoted husbands...but in most situations, that was simply not the case.
14. One last thought...the depictions of Edith and Gloria in the show play into a distinctively white, non-intersectional form of feminism in the 1970s and 80s that assumed women had a bond that transcended race...women of color rarely fell for that fantasy.
15. What All in the Family signalled to well-intentioned white women was that racism was primarily a problem for *men* to deal with, not them. It was this misperception, in part, that led to the conversation around intersectionality in the late 80s and 90s.
16. h/t to @lionel_trolling for alerting me to this. Nixon, you will not be surprised to hear, was NOT a fan of All in the Family.
@lionel_trolling 17. The longer version of this conversation is well worth listening to. A great window into the extent to which conservatives like Nixon saw homosexuality as an existential, political threat to the nation.
@lionel_trolling 18. And also, an opportunity to hear Ehrlichman say the phrase "Hot Pants" in the White House. (The context is that Nixon has just complained that all women's fashion designers are gay men who are trying to make women look bad. Yeah...it's a lot.) 
