I have also been watching a show called American Pickers on the History channel, which has been on television for several seasons. This show, while not being overly political or menacing on it’s surface, has fascinated me not only because of it’s subject matter—these two guy drive around the country buying old junk and meeting eccentric people—but also because of how swiftly and deftly it re-writes American history in such a casual tone. I hope to examine it in a way similar to that of Kent, breaking down some of the problematic aspects of the show. 

 

These two guys, Mike and Frank, are the middlemen between the junk in the yards and barns of America, and the auction houses or antique shops on main street. Sometimes people call them, other times they simply roll up to someone’s house if it looks like they have a bunch of junk in their yard. The show’s intro plainly describes what the two men do, buy junk and try to make a profit, but the message isn’t so much one of business and swindling people out of their “junk,” which these guys will turn around for big bucks. They take on this mantle of saving American history by taking it off the junk heap and returning it to circulation. Mike, the show’s creator, says through a voice over: “Each item we pick has a history all it’s own. And the people we meet, well they’re a breed all their own. We make a living telling the history of America, one piece at a time.” So there it is, these two guys are re-patching the quilt of American history,                                     one house at a time.

 

The show wants to portray values that are at the heart of American culture, but it does no work towards filling in the diverse history of the United States, blemishes, scars, atrocities and all. The show is not diverse, with the overwhelming majority of people visited being white men over the age of 60. White women appear regularly, either as the wife who’s pushing their husband to sell their “junk,” or someone who is just as, if not more committed to collecting (they choose their use of “hoarding” very carefully in the show) than their husbands.

Besides that, I’ve only seen one Black man on the show, no black women, and no other people from any other minority. The show therefore participates in a sort of silence, never evaluating it’s diversity and never challenging it’s own role in “the telling of American history.”

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For me, there isn’t a simple fix here, like “if the hosts were of a different ethnicity then the show would be fine.” The greater offense is that the show allows those who already see American history as being detached from race (and probably a few more things like gender, violence, etc.) to continue living with their veil of white privilege fully over their face. This is usually the point where the question of agency comes into play: “They aren’t *trying* to do it, it just so happens that they only visit white people.” Okay, I’ll give you that for the sake of this essay, let’s say the genuinely didn’t notice that they were white washing American history (my eyes roll hard as I type that sentence). I’m more interested in the affect of such a show. This is not the first show to white wash American history, and it’s definitely not the only one currently on TV that does so. But what does it mean that in 2017 there’s still shows that can do that and not receive any criticism (or realize what they’re doing themselves). 

 

Recently Dear White People came out as a TV show on Netflix, and through my job I had to keep track of a few social media posts that were showing the trailer for the premiere. One of the most common negative responses from white people was: “If they made a show called ‘Dear Black People’ then there would be riots in the streets. This is racist against white people.” Now, had these people watched the original movie, they’d realize the statement “racist against white people” is fundamentally impossible, but I digress. I connect these reactions to American Pickers because they involve two iterations of white privilege: Omission of race and playing the blame/comparison game. 

 

The system of white supremacy (not in the neo-nazi sense of this term, but in the “whites on top of the racial hierarchy” sense) in the United States allows for white privilege to shield those who do not understand the concept of race, and America’s terrible relationship with race, from even before the U.S. was founded.