
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.”
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