Why Are The Commercials So White?

My wife and I record the TV programs we like and watch them the following night so we can fast-forward through the commercials. Still, this is an imprecise exercise, and it's still possible to be slow to initiate the fast forward or stop it too soon, so you still see some, which continues to convince me that the commercials alone on TV will lower your IQ by 20 points. (This reminds me that once on a plane, surrounded by a family with screaming kids, I gently reminded the mother that "studies show that if you allow your children to scream, it lowers their IQ by 20 points." She became very flustered and immediately began to shush them.)

Anyhow, trying to fast-forward through the commercials last night, I inadvertently glimpsed several. It suddenly dawned on me that, save the very occasional token African-American, everyone on every commercial was white. And not just sorta-kinda white, uber white, Aryan white, blonde, clear-skinned, trim, prosperous, and smiling with perfect teeth. And it also dawned on me that this is the wokest epoch in US history in the wake of George Floyd, and black lives matter more than ever.

Except commercials -- and make no mistake, advertising is integral to the media monolith -- are whiter than ever. Not only that, but figures like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben have been purged in this latest surge of wokeness. Where, for instance, is the 2021 version of O J Simpson, a high-profile black spokesman for a major national brand? There are black spokesmen for items like athletic shoes, but those are products heavily favored by blacks.

The most successful US black politicians in history, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, are of mixed race and trace no descent from US slaves. In effect, they're tokens twice removed. Meghan Markle married into the UK royal family, but again, she's not all that black to start with, and rather than marrying in, she seems more intent on pulling her husband out, despite every indication that the royals were more than happy with her.

And of course, the US president and first lady are also about as white as you can get, indeed, stereotypically if not pathologically obtuse, with Biden rising in politics as a southern-state segregationist. The press secretary is a white woman, but not just white, upper-class white from Greenwich.

I can't offer a whole lot of explanation here, except a lot of this isn't necessarily new. I went to high school in Bethesda, second only to Greenwich as an upper-class enclave, and the schools there were segregated in the 1960s, a decade after Brown v Board of Education. Many of my schoolmates made careers in government, law, and the academy and took their attitudes with them. If anything, the events of 2020 have marked a return of the old elites -- the post-Civil War robber baron elites, if you get down to it -- to power.

The comnmercials are just a strange data point.