Here’s a hilariously sanctimonious Slate column with the click-baity title “Breathe Easily, White America” that tackles the dastardly ‘white privilege’ lurking in the CBS show Blue Bloods:
Blue Bloods is currently the most popular network television show on Friday nights—though you may be forgiven for having never heard of it, given that the median age of its viewers is older than 60…
Like most of us, the Reagans think of themselves as good people, and in many ways they are: They believe deeply in the ideas of justice and equality, they always try to help people and do the right thing, and they stand up for their beliefs. But despite all their nobility and good intentions, like all white people, the Reagans exist within a system that is rigged to favor them, and to erase the problems experienced by people who don’t look like them…
… Blue Bloods has a habit of depicting people who speak up against the police as malicious, manipulative, or deceptive—and a lot of those people happen to be minorities…
In Blue Bloods, accusations leveled at police by citizens are almost always revealed to be fraudulent, and concerns about racial bias are almost always manufactured, deceitful, or overblown. These parables perfectly buttress the way much of the show’s older, mostly white audience feels about the police in America in 2014—and how they feel about the people who challenge those perceptions.
