Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer 2008 | Page 46

42 Popular Culture Review One final aspect of the episode that I find to be fairly typical of other oldstyle talk shows is its construction of racism as a moral and emotional issue—in other words, racism is hate, which is immoral in and of itself. In this episode, the hateful, angry Stephanie (KKK mom) is contrasted with the endlessly patient and loving Rev. Watts. Donahue keeps prompting him to testify that he does not hate Stephanie, despite her hate for him. Donahue constructs a hypothetical scenario: a house is burning. Stephanie’s child is inside. He asks the Reverend, “Would you give your life to save her child?” The Reverend says he would. Donahue then asks for an example from the Reverend’s life of the kind of suffering he has faced from people like Stephanie. We learn that, despite the bombing of the Birmingham church, despite even the fact that his child died due to willful neglect by racist white nurses, he does not hate racists. The Reverend says his religious beliefs explain this. He cannot hate Stephanie because he is a Christian, and she is “sick.” There is an extended debate about the immorality of hatred, based on Christian teachings. Several members of the audience assert that the racist panelists are not true 6