‘Modern Family,’ reverse microaggression

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

So, learned men and women, separately and/or together, find themselves at the forefront of something labeled “microaggression,” and the current crop of millennials and college-age kids falls into the claptrap.

Bradford Richardson, a colleague, let loose this New Age dilemma in Monday’s print and online editions of The Washington Times, and he correctly cited the University of North Carolina Employee Forum guidelines, as reported by UNC’s Campus Reform. The guidelines, you see, discourage workers from complimenting women on their footwear. And don’t suggest a “round of golf,” which could imply the person can afford the costly proposition. (Better to recommend swimming, since there are free, integrated public pools all around the country.)

The UNC-Chapel Hill campus schooled workers on gender identity, suggesting asexual terms like “partner” or “spouses” instead of traditional terms like “girlfriend” or “boyfriend” or “husband” or “wife.”

Excuse the barber. He’s closed for two days to repaint his sign that brags about haircuts for “boys” and “men.”

And all that talk about America being a “melting pot”? Forget about it. The Italians and other Europeans, and the Jews and the Africans, and the island folks who poured into America over the last century knew about crockpot cooking, for sure — the pot that held meat and the vegetables and sat on the stove, sometimes all day, until the savory flavors were just right.

Today’s crock, being fed to us as “anti-” or “-phobic” behavior, is just that — a crock.

And that’s what you have to explain to young people — young people, college students and others who just don’t know any better. You have to educate them, inform them, explain to them that there’s never anything wrong in asking a woman if she has a boyfriend. Better to ask than find out the hard way.

And it’s OK for a woman to ask a man if he has a wife. Merely asking if he has a “partner” could lead to confusion.

Look, we all understand that the times are a-changin’ — again. It’s just that if we are going to consider that living on this rich, beautiful earth makes us all victims of hatred, discrimination, bias and bigotry, then we’re doomed to a fate far greater than that of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Wanna laugh?

Have you seen the ABC-TV sitcom “Modern Family”? Feel free to blink if you don’t want the camera on your laptop at work catching you nodding in the affirmative. The show, like many of the sitcoms of the 1970s and ’80s, plays to stereotypes — in this case, of an over-the-top blended family.

If the microaggression crowd had its way, the show never would have made it on the airwaves.

This modern family consists of a bigoted dad with a Hispanic trophy wife who is mother to two sons (one hers, one his) and two adult married children (a daughter with three children and a gay married son with an adopted Vietnamese daughter).

Neither married woman works — egads, two stay-at-home moms! No, one now has replaced her dad at work. One of the gay men plays the “straight man,” and the other is as limp-wristed as they come. And the Hispanic trophy is played by the always over-the-top Sofia Vergara.

The show essentially explores and explodes stereotypes, like the popular Norman Lear shows of the 1970s, when La-Z-Boy recliners, Kentucky Fried Chicken and “family rooms” were as de rigueur in single-family homes as disco was to integrating the club scene.

Mr. Lear, who never hid his liberalness, made Archie Bunker of “All in the Family” a “typical” white suburban dad, George Jefferson of “The Jeffersons” a rising middle-class black businessman and James Evans of “Good Times” an always down-on-his-luck father of three whose family lives in the projects.

And never the ’twain shall meet.

That’s the melting pot.

And you can switch the channel whenever you want.

• Deborah Simmons can be reached at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.