Somebody’s got to have the guts to do this, and it might as well be me, well, us. Introducing Project Race-Lighting.
For more than a couple of years now, I have been intending to spend at least 72 hours watching commercial TV and to record the racial and ethnic categories of the actors in the ads. I watch a lot of television and always have, but although I have felt the need for someone to do a study of the phenomenon that I believe is taking place, I have also had substantially less time to do it since Grace died at the end of February. At one point she had agreed to start the project, stuck as my wife was in a chair in front of our TV while she was rehabbing her (mysteriously) painful knee. She also had the same impression I did. Trust me, that was not always the case in other matters.
I think I first became cognizant that something strange was in the air or “going on” (“What’s going on here?”—the starting point for every ethical analysis) when “Jake from State Farm” magically turned black in 2011: it was one of the more ham-handed examples of pandering to the Obama-led movement to make affirmative action, DEI’s predecessor, a cultural norm. A decades later came the Black Lives Matter, reparations, DEI, CRT, “Great Stupid” tsunami in the wake of the George Floyd Freak Out. The trend had been subtly underway before that, as Jake indicated, but Madison Avenue attacked the white actor job market with a vengeance. Now, the way TV commercials represent U.S. society appears (I don’t have the data yet, so it all could be in my imagination) to show a nation where whites are a small minority, somewhere close to the percentage of Asian Americans (about 7.3%), and two out of every three marriages are bi-racial, meaning that most children are mixed-race.
The real percentage of whites in the US population is almost 70%: yes, white people are still a majority in the population. But they are evil, as you know, and at fault for all the ills around us, so the society corporate America pretends we live in is very different. How different? That’s why I am launching “Project Race-Lighting.”
Incredibly, the surveys I see on-line (like this one, from last year) claim that not only are whites still the majority in TV ads, their proportions are increasing. Not one article that I could find reflects what my unscientific impression has been for more than two years (Of course, Google could be burying them). Last night, I went through a streak during a re-run of “Blue Bloods” on ION in which I didn’t see a single non-BIPOC actor in evidence in 30 minutes of commercial interruptions except for Tom Selleck hawking reverse mortgages.
Who cares? What difference does it make? Well to start with, it’s employment discrimination, and pretty blatantly so, if what I think I’m seeing is happening. The fact that blacks were virtually invisible in TV shows and commercials for so long does not justify compensatory discrimination now.
In addition, misrepresenting the demographics of the nation in popular culture creates misconceptions that affect public attitudes, and public attitudes affect public policies. Many surveys have shown that the American public already wildly over-estimates the percentage of blacks in the general population, for example. So what, you ask? Funny, I am old-fashioned enough that I believe the more accurate our understanding of the world around us, the more rational, responsible, and competent our decisions will be. My view of democracy, not the ascendant, Orwellian one, is that the more informed the public is, the better.
I believe the imposing of a fanciful version of the U.S. racial and ethnic mix is deliberate progressive propaganda. The media has always done this, though not on such a grand scale and usually with more benign motives. For example, for decades TV series cast blacks as the tech wizards in shows like “Mission Impossible,” even in children’s shows like PBS’s “Wishbone,” to combat and counter negative black stereotypes. (If “Gilligan’s Island” had been made a decade later than it was, the Professor would have been black.) Recently the trend has been to cast women in those roles,better yet black women (as in NCIS). Blame former Harvard President Larry Summers, who undiplomatically said that women were not as drawn to the sciences as men, and got himself sacked for it.
Finally, I suspect that this advertising demographic gaslighting is being deliberately ignored by the mainstream media, and that researchers are reluctant to examine the phenomenon because they fear being called “white supremacists” and “racist.”
Of course, my impression may be completely wrong, but if it is, I’d like to know that. Maybe I’m imagining it all; that beer commercial purportedly set in Boston where everyone was singing “Sweet Caroline” was “of color.” Maybe I blinked when the Irish faces appeared. It’s possible.
Project Race-Lighting is simple: just jot down how many hours of TV you have watched and the relative numbers of whites vs. non-whites you see in the TV ads. See if you can get your friends to do it too. If you want to add more details, great, but there is no way this effort can be scientific; what it can do is produce sufficiently voluminous evidence to force some serious, controlled research because the implications can’t be ignored.
Send the your results in to Ethics Alarms, on any post or to my personal email (jamproethics@verizon.net). I’ll collect them and see what we have discovered, if anything. Remember, the goal is to answer the question “What’s going on here?” That’s all.
There’s nothing to be afraid of.
Ethics Alarms 
Not only are all people in commercials black (or, if not, Asian or Hispanic), they’re fabulously prosperous, happily married (very often to white spouses!) and caring for their children. Why, one might ask, do these wonderfully successful and flourishing people need reparations? I thought systemic racism was literally killing them? Instead, they’re “killing it.” Clearly not the message “reparations” proponents want getting out there.
By the way, I see there’s pressure on the Dems to make reparations an important plank in the Harris Walz platform.
It actually isn’t true that women aren’t drawn to the sciences. In over 20 years, I can count the number of science major courses that were majority male on 1 finger. That is true for the 3 universities I have taught at and the classes I took as an undergraduate and graduate student. What IS true is that women are not as drawn to the rat-race-publish-or-perish-R1-research-school professorships. Those positions have very demanding (think 70-hour week) work requirements up until you are about 35 years of age. However, feminists only care about the highest profile jobs for some reason. It doesn’t matter that the 25 teaching colleges and the 30 community colleges may be 50/50 or even be majority female if the departments at the 2 research schools are majority male.
What about commercials with narration only? I just caught a commercial during the Olympics that was a black-african-american voice.
That counts.
I have definitely noticed this too but how do you know “Jake from State Farm” didn’t audition and get the role because he was the best actor for the job? Best, Cici
What? Jake was already cast as a white guy. Are you saying they didn’t cast the black guy initially even though he was the best one for the job? What ARE you saying?
Woop! Woop! Woop!
I thought so.
I agree that the observation is fairly accurate description of what is going on. I would bet that it is probable that the myriad producers of these commercials are independently making casting decisions that actively include minorities but when they all do it it appears that they are only casting minorities.
Another possibility is that Blacks and other minorities are more inclined to use brand name products as evidence of success whereas in the past, minorities who tended to be less affluent were more economical choices. In Economics terms we call them inferior goods. Keep in mind that some brands like McDonalds cater to the young, and “hip” black voices are more likely to appeal to that demographic. I have yet to hear a young white guy sound like an urban dweller with street cred.
Commercials are designed to increase sales or change opinions. They are not to reflect what society actually looks like; they are designed to create an image that the viewer will believe as plausible for them if they buy this product. This is no different than seeing young vibrant men and beautiful women having a great time on the beach drinking (fill in the blank) as they engage with one another. Most TV ads today do more to turn me off than to cause me act. Probably because I older and know BS when I see it.
What bothers me more is the “Pharma” ads that portray the evil pharmacy benefit managers as sleazy white men. This ad particularly perturbs me because it uses women and blacks as victims of the evil insurance PBM’s. This is not how you get me to have a positive opinion of the pharmaceutical industry.
Well said.
My thought was a bit more succinct:
Some may say that my privileged white financial prosperity is indicated by my subscriptions to cenematic media which avoid commercials altogether.
I love television. I am a classic TV junkie. Right now, I am streaming “Murder, She Wrote” (the guest stars! Cesar Romero! Claude Aikens! Van Johnson! Bruce Jenner!). Mr. Golden and I are streaming “The West Wing” (where I alternate between laughing at the shenanigans and yelling at the TV) and “King of the Hill” (where I just laugh). That’s after finishing “NewsRadio” (Never the same after Phil Hartman died).
I’m also a True Crime junkie so I’ll keep an eye on ads there, too. It would be interesting to see what ads are targeted to Angela Lansbury watchers vs Joe Kenda watchers.
I am embarrassed to say that I remember that “Murder She Wrote” episode.
Bruce should be embarrassed for doing it. So should Dick Butkis. It has not aged well.
Bruce isn’t even Bruce any more!
The whole series hasn’t aged well. Grace used to make fun of Angela’s sad head-shaking: she was really phoning in her performances. Less so in the early season, when they let Jessica go “under cover” and do various characters (which made no sense at all, but Lansbury was good at it.) . It’s always been amazing to me that the show came out of the same shop as “Columbo,” which is so far, far FAR superior and holds up as well today as when the original 90 minute episodes were produced.
I give MSW credit for one thing—in a late season somebody finally said of Cabot Cove, “Why do we have so many murders? It’s a small town!” I laughed out loud at that one. I was waiting in vain for the episode that revealed Jessica to be a diabolical serial killer, the only plausible explanation for why she was always around when people turned up dead.
Yes, I still watch the stupid thing. Just saw an unrecognizable George Clooney, pre-ER, in one. The first season, they really had A-list guest stars (as with “Columbo”), but as time went on, it was B-list all the way.
Additional commercial dissonance: If all black men are incarcerated and need to be decarcerated, are they all filming these commercials and/or living these wonderful lives on some sort of work release program? Why aren’t any black guys being gunned down by white cops during these commercials?
About ten or twenty years ago, I remember being struck by McDonald’s commercials featuring black people almost exclusively. I’m not sure, but I think McDonald’s is the default black person fast food restaurant. But I think at that time, McDonald’s thought, “Hey. We can attract black people into our stores by putting them in our commercials, and our white customer base really won’t care. They’ll be okay with it.” Boy, has that worm ever turned.
I intend to participate, Jack. For how long do you intend us to gather this information?
Let’s say it’s open-ended until we get a statistically significant sample.
Afraid I can’t help much. Don’t get many ads. Get a few when I watch something through Amazon. Remember seeing some ads in Spanish. I’ll keep this post in mind next time I watch something on there.