Hacker Cinema
The Dukes of Hazzard
1979 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 7 seasons
Created by Rod Amateau, Gy Waldron
ActionAdventureDramaComedyCrime
Cousins Bo and Luke Duke and their car "General Lee", assisted by Cousin Daisy and Uncle Jesse, have a running battle with the authorities of Hazzard County (Boss Hogg and Sheriff Coltrane), plus a string of ne'er-do-wells often backed by the scheming Hogg.
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12 comments on Hacker News
I’m talking about a completely different generation that grew up decades later. Dukes of Hazzard was not a white supremacist TV show. It was a top rated prime-time show on CBS.
> Thanks again for continuing this conversation! I'm enjoying it. Also, can you recommend me a book or two to read on this subject? Thanks in advance.
Hey sorry for my late reply, I really didn't mean to waste your time, I just got super busy and spun a bit responding. Honestly I haven't read as much as I'd like to after discovering the internet around 1995, so this is mostly what I've picked up online.
To me, wokeism is fundamentally about stuff we can't unsee. It's like being friends with someone in an abusive relationship, where the other partner takes us aside and tells us that if we knew what they knew about our friend's behavior, we might not want to be friends with them anymore. The more we learn, the more that America's origin story becomes a twisted fable of revisionist history, written by the winners to cover centuries of oppression and violence. These stand out to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_slavery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_(1781_ship)#/media/File:Slaveshipposter.jpg
I went to South Carolina a few years ago and stood on a small plantation cotton field they keep preserved for tours. It was suffocatingly hot, felt like 100% humidity under intense sun, and not even the hottest time of the year. I just imagined people forced to pick cotton all day, every day, their entire lives. It was soul-crushing.
Then the tour guide called the Civil War the Northern War of Aggression and my eyebrows raised. Reality shifted and I suddenly saw the feelings from that time still running strong today.
Maybe I can relate my experience better through pop culture references..
I grew up on movies like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, Do the Right Thing, Glory, Schindler's List and Amistad, to name a few. I never read Black Like Me and never saw Soul Man. I think I may start with these, regardless of if they aged well, to get an impression of where my head is at now vs then.
This search brought back a memory, that in Short Circuit (one of my all-time favorite movies), I didn't know that Fisher Stevens wore brownface to play Indian engineer Ben Jabituya until maybe the 2000s:
https://ew.com/movies/short-circuit-fisher-stevens-regrets-playing-indian-role/
This just goes to show how ignorant people were (including myself) as recently as a couple of decades ago. I think that the makeup in Soul Man is forgiveable because it's explicit and the subject of the film, much like Dustin Hoffman dressing as a woman in Tootsie. Whereas Short Circuit did it for convenience, without considering that it might be offensive.
I also grew up playing with the toy car with the rebel flag on it from the Dukes of Hazzard, completely oblivious to any racist connotations.
And sexual harrassment was so prevelant that we had never even heard of it until Anita Hill vs Clarance Thomas in 1991 before he was appointed to the Supreme Court. I remember that we were really appalled by that, because it was so obvious that he was guilty of the harrassment, even if that didn't bar him from being appointed. This was just after the Rodney King beating and LA riots, but a few years before the OJ Simpson case if I remember right. Racial tensions were running high, but also there was a feeling that minorities were being kept from positions of power, so there was a lot of cognitive dissonance. There was no Me Too movement and we didn't have a words like cancel culture yet. I didn't feel at the time that he should have been appointed, because he gave me creepster vibes. I think his decisions in the time since have shown that he is very, let's just say tempted by financial favors.
> This is sort of like the concept of "original sin", isn't it? The notion that certain people have a debt that is so big that it is impossible to ever be paid back, and so they must forever remain burdened with the guilt of the sin that their ancestors committed. The scale can never be zeroed. The guilt can never go away. The transgression can never be forgiven, because the effects linger down to our day.
Ya that's a good point, I hadn't considered that. It reminds me of how young people in post-WWI Germany felt that it was impossible to pay back the war debt that their elders faced when they lost the war. So they felt oppressed by who they viewed as Jewish elites in banking, eventually using them as scapegoats and starting WWII against the countries whose loans they were defaulting on.
Which has eerie similarities with the dissilusioned feelings of young men in America today, who due to wealth inequality can't earn the level of income needed to provide for a spouse or family, as they watch women and minorities rise without them. Blaming liberal and Hollywood elites, as well as immigrants, for bruising their egos instead of the real culprit, late-stage capitalist patriarchy.
I think what we're talking about is: how can the rights of individuals be upheld when our debts to previous generations are so high that we'd lose ourselves in an attempt to pay them back?
I guess my only counter to that is, if winners and losers resulted from the inequities of previous generations, leading to the vast wealth inequality we see today, then what would healing look like? Letting it go without making ammends, or going too far with violence as a result, both seem extreme.
I feel that affirmative action and taxing the wealthy are two solid approaches. But I don't feel that either have been tried to a degree nearly approaching reparations. Because if they had, then Congress might be 50% women, we wouldn't have such a large national debt or high poverty rate, etc.
> In the case of the LA fires, and for the additional reasons you've given, I agree, DEI was not to blame and is being used as a scapegoat. I wonder, if the fire chief were instead a straight white male, and if there was no firefighter that "looked like you" but instead, was capable of saving your life, would people still have blamed DEI, or would they instead shift their focus towards the "real problems" that you mentioned? Perhaps if these people weren't in these highly visible positions to begin with, DEI would not have been undermined as it was.
Ya, DEI probably wouldn't have been blamed had the people involved in the response fit prejudiced notions of what they should look like.
It seems that we both agree that DEI wasn't the cause of the fires. But maybe we should ask if putting such priority on DEI is undermining the cause of reaching equality. With so much political manipulation happening these days, it makes for an attractive scapegoat for those wishing to distract us from the real issues.
I don't know the answer, or if DEI should be put on hold temporarily. What I do know is that with controversial issues like gun control, we can find ourselves on hold indefinitely. So I am suspicious of calls to halt DEI when the problem of discrimination in hiring still exists. It feels too opportunistic IMHO.
> preface: I would like to think that everyone on the board has in mind the good of the entire company, and that the men don't just have in mind the considerations of men, and that the woman is not the only advocate for all the women of the company.
> Given the above, what injustice is there? Assuming that everyone earned their seat on the board fairly, without nepotism, sabotage, or shady backroom deals, why do you consider there to be an injustice happening here?
> The only way I can see there being an inherent injustice in a board room like this is if my initial assumptions aren't true, and that the men aren't advocating for the concerns of the women. But that would be to assume the worst of people. That sort of thinking is racist and sexist. That leads to tribal thinking, where people think that people from other demographics are similarly only looking out for "their own group".
Ya good point about the dangers of tribalism, since that is the single greatest threat facing the US today. We've grown so divided and provincial that we can't seem to work together, and that's undermining our credibility in the eyes of the world.
And I agree that people don't just work towards their own best interest, and that assuming they do is putting them in a box.
What concerns me though is that some people only respond to authority, not what society deems common decency. So without a law in place, they will return to discriminatory practices.
Trump just issued an executive order revoking Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, promoting affirmative action in federal contracting:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/23/trump-revoked-equal-employment-opportunity-order/
Even though this move claims to encourage merit-based hiring, it will undoubtedly have the opposite effect. Because authoritarian-minded people will no longer be forced to practice nondescrimination. So they will hire candidates who appear to fit their own projections and stereotypes, causing them to overlook similarly-qualified candidates from other demographics.
When the laws aren't there, companies have a track record of accepting a certain level of human cost if it raises profits. Seatbelt laws, pollution laws, etc reflect the need for those regulations.
Now, we can argue whether the free market would take care of discrimination on its own. But in these times of little or no antitrust enforcement, often workers have few alternative employment options, so are at the mercy of employers. I'm not seeing politicans in favor of deregulation also calling for antitrust enforcement, so they are having their cake and eating it too, making this argument suspect.
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There is Cooter from the original Dukes of Hazzard TV show, a man: https://dukesofhazzard.fandom.com/wiki/Cooter_Davenport_(Ben_Jones)
Fun fact: the actor playing Cooter was elected a US Congressman.
I don't like "Dukes of Hazzard" because they destroyed and crushed at least one '69 Dodge Charger per episode.
They do crash real cars in movies though. The Wolf of Wall Street saw an actual Lamborghini Countach with a VIN get crashed quite a lot, John Carpenter's Christine went through like twenty Plymouths and The Dukes of Hazzard TV series destroyed hundreds of cars ("an estimated 309 Chargers were used").
* hazard
Hazzard is a fictional county in Georgia that's the setting for the TV show “The Dukes of Hazzard”.
Or, at least in the U. S., "summer reruns". The show would still be parked in the same time slot, but since production didn't run year-round, episodes from the last season would be rerun over the summer before the fall T. V. season started.
But that was the last chance before you had to wait 25 years for the Dukes of Hazzard DVD box set.
“In all things I yearn for the past. Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased. I find that even among the splendid pieces of furniture built by our master cabinetmakers, those in the old forms are the most pleasing.”
Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), Yoshida Kenkō 1330 - 1332 AD
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/28169/what-is-the-oldest-authentic-example-of-people-complaining-about-modern-times-an
Congrats on joining the long, proud, ancient history of saying society is going to hell.
—
But as to contemporary TV: it ain’t junk. You want to see junk? Go back to the 1970s. Three’s Company? The Love Boat? The Brady Bunch? Any of the awful cheesey variety shows? Modern TV is vastly, hugely better than what it used to be, in terms of acting, cinematography, and music. And I’d argue more intellectually challenging—so many of the hit shows have long, ongoing arcs, instead of standalone episodes, that require viewers to get invested and understand the plot threads. Takes a lot more brainpower to keep track of what’s going on in Watchmen than The Dukes of Hazzard.
I just sold an internet product I built that contains both “Whitelist” and “Blacklist” rules.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I added the names a few years ago.
However I also grew up in the 80s and Dukes of Hazard was still a popular enough television show that I was specifically not allowed to watch it by my mom for reasons I did not understand at the time. [1]
As far as changing language of the rules in the product I built, or would build I have no problem using something neutral.
Software developers are used to deprecated language. Function and class names are changed for any number of reasons, sometimes just because they are inconvenient to spell.
If some people feel that Master Slave, or Blacklist Whitelist constitute micro aggressions, then why put up a fight to switch to neutral language?
Just deprecate the syntax and return the narrative and focus to problems developers can overwhelmingly agree are getting in the way of establishing a more inclusive developer community. [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-dukes-of-hazzard-reall_b_7725078
Dukes of Hazzard was my second-favorite TV show as a kid, (next to CHiPs.) It saddens me that the symbol was foisted on me and millions of other kids throughout history and not just from the TV show. Turns out there was never a time that that flag stood for anyone's "heritage." It always was a symbol of hate. I don't know why people would do that to children.
Now memories of my childhood are darkened, and millions of adults are confused and don't know why. Because people who are long dead thought it would be great fun to raise a generation of f3cking racist kids who would grow up and raise another generation of f2cking racists. It f8cking sucks to be in this situation.
Thanks for nothing, ancestors.
It's amazing to me how attitudes have shifted so critically.
In the 70s, 'Hogans Heros' was a hit tv show. It portrayed the Nazis as bumbling idiots, but still it was a topic that was featured prominently in the show. I bet today people would be fearful to say they watched such a show.
The same thing is true of the 'Dukes of Hazzard'. Imagine it: A tv show where two wild young men drove a car that had a Confederate flag on the hood, and the horn played 'Dixie'. (Even though the show famously portrayed African Americans only in a positive light.) Today, people are ashamed to admit they watched the show, had t-shirts, etc. Yet the show was wildly popular back then. (And race relations seemed like they were better at the time, TBH.)
It's good to make progress in calling out evil, but things feel a little odd in this area.
I agree with you. Serious question: I wonder how far you take that. For example, for me, the Confederate US flag represented a favorite TV show as a kid (Dukes of Hazzard), the south (which meant cool accents and hospitality). Until 5 or so years ago I didn't know anyone still associated it with slavery. When will it be cleared for use again?
In other words, what is the bounds where a tainted symbol can or can't be used? Geopolitical border?