Why didn't a studio audience lynch Desi Arnaz for miscegenation?

The 2025 NYT is baffled by the 1951 racial status of the co-star of "I Love Lucy."

The achievements of the husband-wife team of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball in creating modern American television in the 1950s are so extensive that it’s not important to argue over who was the real genius of the pair. There is plenty of glory for both.

It’s hard to reconcile the fact of how popular Desi and Lucy were from 1951 onward with current stereotypes about how racist white Americans were before the Civil Rights Era. Why didn’t the whites in the studio audience charge the stage and lynch Desi for defiling Lucy?

21st Century America has managed to socially construct the concept of a Hispanic/Latino race rather than an ethnicity comprising multiple races and their admixtures. So now our forgetful journalists are projecting today’s concepts back onto a very different age, as in this example from the New York Times opinion section:

Hollywood Couldn’t Imagine a Star Like This One

May 18, 2025

By Todd S. Purdum

Mr. Purdum, a former Times correspondent, is the author of a forthcoming biography of Desi Arnaz.

… The movie star was Lucille Ball, and the bandleader, of course, was Desi Arnaz. In 1950 a glimmer of hope appeared for the couple: CBS intended to transfer Ball’s radio show, “My Favorite Husband,” to the untested new medium of television. But there was a problem: Ball wanted to make the move only if Arnaz — who’d helped start the conga dance craze in nightclubs in the 1930s and fueled America’s demand for Latin music after World War II — could play that husband on TV. The network and prospective sponsors believed the public would never accept a thick-accented Latino as the spouse of an all-American girl. “I was always the guy that didn’t fit,” Arnaz would later tell Ed Sullivan. …

Racism was a fact of daily life even in Arnaz’s adopted hometown, Los Angeles, where some restaurants still refused service to Latinos.

Was prominent bandleader and movie star Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III of aristocratic Spanish descent refused service in Hollywood restaurants? Really?

Desi’s 1949 movie “Holiday in Havana”

The term “D.E.I.” did not yet exist, but Arnaz’s gambit amounted to a bold push for diversity, equity and inclusion in the white-bread monoculture of a dawning mass medium that was sponsor-driven and cautious to a fault. …

White-bread …

Actually, late 1940s TV was highly Jewish rather than “white-bread.” For example, I can recall reading in the L.A. Times in 1981 that NBC was celebrating finally not having to pay one million dollars per year anymore to Milton Berle because the 30 year / million dollar per year contract NBC had signed with the then-superstar in 1951 had finally expired.

Why had NBC made such a disastrous deal? Because TV rolled out after WWII first in the biggest cities, which were heavily Jewish. Early affluent TV-owning urban audiences loved Uncle Miltie, who reminded them of their own uncles.

But as TV spread across the country in the 1950s, the new audiences found, to the surprise of New York TV executives, that a little Milton Berle went a long ways for most Americans.

(In contrast to Milton Berle, “I Love Lucy” is showing in reruns somewhere right now.)

At a time when so many universities, cultural and business institutions are retreating from formal efforts to increase inclusion and the federal government is working to discourage and erase diversity efforts in all areas of life, Arnaz’s tactics offer an instructive example for performers and institutions alike.

Arnaz’s differences — the very elements that made network chiefs hesitant to feature him — became his greatest strengths … He was the one TV star who did not look or sound like any other — he was forever telling Lucy she had some “’splainin’ to do” — an immigrant who became the all-American man. …

Behind the scenes, Arnaz rose to become the most prominent Latino entertainment executive of his day and one of the most prominent Latino creative forces in the history of Hollywood.

Desilu Studios was a huge maker of TV shows. When the couple divorced in 1960, Lucille Ball took charge of the studio. She greenlighted, for example, Star Trek.

He remains the rarity that proves the necessity — indeed, the essential Americanness — of diversity.

He looked and sounded nothing like the preconceived notion that the entertainment business had of a successful star. So he changed the way Hollywood did business and whom we can imagine as stars. Anyone who can’t understand that has some ’splainin’ to do.

Okaaaay …

Well, actually …

Paywall here. 1,350 more words after the break.