Is Michael Scott both a racist and a good person? Thoughts on re-watching all of "The Office" on Netflix

While suffering through a lecture on gender roles in Renaissance literature--the most painful class I took in graduate school--my professor made an off-handed remark that has always stuck with me. She said the writer we were studying--I forget who it was now--exhibited such ingrained prejudices surrounding class in her writing that she suspected that we, in reading her, would find her to be "a classist, much like we would now think of someone as a racist."

What she meant was not just that we would find her assumptions about class to be anachronistic; we would actually find them evil, the way we find racism to be evil. We would find her prejudices to be inexcusable. She feared that we might be so put off by how ugly her thoughts on lower class people were, we'd be unable to see value in anything else the writer had to say.

I don't recall what I thought of the writer. I hated both class and professor, so I assume I hated the assignment, too. But what stuck with me about that comment was how easily I knew what she was saying. Our age finds racism to be so heinous a crime that anyone guilty of it is written off as altogether unredeemable. It's what makes trying to label a politician a racist such a powerful and divisive claim. Who would vote for a racist, even one who had a plan to fix schools and the economy? Being a racist in 2018 (or 2002, when I was in that class) is a tenuous step above being a pedophile in the hierarchy of public enemies.

Can a racist be in any way redeemable? You'd probably get a mixed answer to that question, depending on whether the person answering has had enough personal experience with a variety of racists to be able to distinguish between them. You'd get less of a split, though, on this question: Can a racist be a good person? I'd wager there'd be a pretty sizable split on that question, with the overwhelming majority saying no.

Michael Scott of the 1970s

This was a question pop culture made people ask when I was very young. The show All in the Family featured Archie Bunker, who was clearly a biggot, but also could show flashes of a rascally charm from time to time. The New Yorker ran an interesting article a few years ago about how All in the Family did not accomplish its goal of getting viewers to examine their own prejudices through humor. The article quotes Saul Austerlitz: “A funny thing happened on the way to TV immortality: audiences liked Archie. Not in an ironic way, not in a so-racist-he’s-funny way; Archie was TV royalty because fans saw him as one of their own."

I remember reading a Reader's Digest--that paragon of conservative mores--that was strategically placed by the toilet in my home when I was a teenager. An opinion piece within it noted that even though Archie was a biggot, you couldn't deny that Meathead and Gloria were living in his house and mooching off him.

Nussbaum saw All in the Family as the show that launched the "bad fan," the person who unambiguously likes the character meant to be ambiguous and partly hateful.

Michael Scott of Dunder Mifflin 

Watching the entire nine seasons of The Office forces the viewer to consider it as one large work of art, with the entirety of the series operating as one extended narrative cycle. (Okay, I see it as seven seasons with a two-season spin-off by the same name once Steve Carell leaves.) While individual episodes and seasons certainly have a self-contained meaning to them, the series continues narrative threads from one to the next, and so it asks us to consider it as a unitary whole.

A quick non-sequitur 

The first thing that struck me watching the series in 2018 was something I'm sure others have noted, but I'm not even going to bother to Google. Michael Scott is a white man who has succeeded in business in spite of having almost no sense, no intelligence, little education, and being a generally irritating person. He is racist. He is sometimes a terrible friend. He ogles the secretary and makes comments on how attractive women in the office are. Yet, he is somehow a gifted salesman with the common touch who can make people like him if he shuts up long enough to let them. I will just say that in 2018 that...reminds me of someone.

The narrative arc of Michael Scott

Michael grows as the seasons go by, influenced by the people around him. But at the beginning of the show, Michael is pretty clearly a racist. Season one is the status quo for Michael as the curtain raises, letting us see what he is like before the events of the show begin to change him. He is clueless, stupid, racist, and sexist. We laugh at him because he is what is wrong with the American workplace. He is not a good person with flaws so much as an incarnation of all that is bad. This montage captures most of him at his his worst:

After the short season one, the creators realized that unlike the British version of the show, this one was going to try to stick around for the long haul. That meant they couldn't leave Michael relentlessly awful. So Season Two starts to give us a more complex view of him. We see that he is a good salesman who was pushed into a position that isn't right for him. This alternating Michael--the terrible, tone-deaf racist and the sympathetic, goofy guy who just needs to be surrounded by better people--is carried into season three.

Season four is where the real change in Michael's character takes place. Is it possible that his relationship with overbearing Jan is the impetus? That her terrible treatment spurs a change in him? Michael's fundamental weakness is his need to be liked. But in Season Four, Michael, possibly learning from his mistakes in failing to stand up to Jan, manages to stand up to Stanley even though he risks not being liked because of it. If all of the first seven seasons are one narrative arc for Michael, then Season Four is something of a crisis point. Having gone through the climax of learning from Jan makes him ready when Holly comes along.

The show then goes on a three-season-long denouement, in which we wait for Michael and Holly to get together. Michael backslides for our amusement often, which makes it difficult, sometimes, to follow his narrative path. For example, Michael is sometimes extremely loyal, insisting on sticking with Ryan in spite of Ryan's obvious character flaws, or refusing to say his employer is a bad place to work even when it costs him millions of dollars. But he will also be suddenly and disturbingly disloyal to his faithful henchman Dwight when the writers need a joke. There is then a second climax of development for Michael when he goes off with Holly. Right before he goes, he manages to get rid of Packer, a far viler man than Michael ever was who has had a terrible influence on Michael. It shows that Michael's judgment has improved at least a tiny bit.

So how do we answer the questions? 

Is Michael a racist? At least as we define these things in 2018, I think he's absolutely a racist. Although he's not, by the end of the show, what he was in Season One, he still shows some signs of racism. He is still afraid on occasion that Darryl will physically assault him based partly on Darryl being a large black man, even though Darryl has shown his good sense and trustworthiness over and over.

One might claim that Michael isn't racist, he's just ignorant. It's okay to laugh at his racism, because it's based on him being a rube who doesn't know better rather. He actually believes that he is enlightened, as a matter of fact.

Granted, there is a difference between Michael assuming things based on assumptions he isn't bright enough to question and a KKK Grand Wizard who quotes from dozens of books of racist theory he's consumed. One has been educated into hating others, while the other inadvertently hurts others through a lack of education. But we tend, in 2018, not to forgive this kind of racism via ignorance. Archie Bunker's racism was also ignorance-fueled, but we are less likely to overlook it now. Furthermore, Michael's racism through ignorance is, at times, pretty profound, and he never seems to learn from it or apologize for it. When confronted with the fact that his actions are racist, he stubbornly refuses to change his mind: "When Chris Rock does a routine, people call it edgy and groundbreaking, but when I do the same routine, I get called racist?" he says, speaking of a bit Rock did criticizing black people and using the N word liberally. So I think you have to say Michael is a racist.

Is Michael a good person? Well, it certainly seems that viewers like him. (The surest sign that fans have taken to him is the number of people I know who still do the  "That's what she said" bit at every opportunity. I'm one of them.) Does this mean we're being bad fans? I don't think so, as long as we "like" him in the ambiguous way the show presents him to us. I definitely found myself cringing and
even shouting at Michael during some scenes I'd forgotten about. But when I'm shouting at him, it's because I've seen enough to know he can do better, and I'm disappointed when he doesn't. But I can still laugh at his failures.

I don't think I'm a bad fan for liking him, unless all of Michael's subordinates on the show are bad people for liking him, too. They've certainly been given more reason than anyone to dislike him. But they send him off with a loving Broadway-style tribute song they wrote for him, Why? Well, at the end of the day, most of us don't get to pick our co-workers anymore than we get to pick our family. You can end up with anyone. The employees of Dunder Mifflin/Sabre are wise enough to know that given all of the people out there you could end up with, Michael Scott, weighed in the balance, isn't the worst you can do.

Racism isn't a special genus of defect that should be privileged above avarice, hubris, sloth, indifference, ignorance, fastidiousness, or any of the other flaws we ridiculous humans show. While it can be especially insidious when it manifests itself at a macroscopic social level, in individual humans, it shouldn't be a hammer to smash the scales of character pluses and minuses we would otherwise weigh character with. Racism is not a special class of human wickedness. It is not different from the other vices. It is at times shocking and terrifying and at other times so absurd one can only laugh at it. In that, it is like humanity itself.