A Word on Seinfeld

The things you notice when you rewatch, rather than cancel, old sitcoms.

- By Lauren Michele Jackson

White sitcoms have of late united, disavowing the misbegotten race play of television’s recent past. Contrary to prior negligence, shows such as Scrubs and 30 Rock have pulled episodes featuring blackface from streaming platforms as a way of making amends. Even episodes like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s “Dee Reynolds: Shaping America’s Youth,” which cracks wise about the absurdities of racial performance, got the ax. I was something akin to relieved upon my Seinfeld rewatch to find Michael Richards’s scorched visage, grinning like Sambo, still intact on the episode “The Wife.”

Exorcisms are boring these days—that is, exorcisms of a PR sort, which give the impression that race arrives only when we perceive it and evaporates with every redacted slur. After all, the American sitcom, like so many national institutions, has an earned reputation for segregation. There are the vaunted Black classics and then there are the shows that are containers for white stories, which present an urbanscape—usually New York City— whose multiculturalism goes unseen.