Blacks have been a growing presence on television for decades. This reflects their huge and positive impact on the most visible aspects of American life—the arts (especially music), entertainment, religion, politics, and sports. Black leaders and stars achieved this even though they often faced discrimination and their group today is still only 13 percent of the population.
But that is not enough to satisfy today’s identity activists. From 2018, advertisements on television changed sharply. The actors in them had been mostly white, presumably because over 60 percent of the population is white. But now suddenly most of the whites vanished, replaced by actors of color, especially blacks. And most of the remaining whites were women. Identity politics had completely taken over. A survey by the Geena Davis Institute confirms that characters of color in ads grew sharply in recent years, reaching 46 percent in 2019, or well above their share of the population.
A friend in the advertising business explained that the companies funding the ads had demanded that the ad industry show more “diversity” on the screen. The pressure came from “Free the Work” and other activist groups. They contended that women and minorities had been excluded unfairly from leading roles, not only in the ads but in the business behind the camera. So producers have scrambled to make amends, although except on the screen industry leaders remain largely white and male.
The ads do give a highly attractive image of an integrated America. They typically show men and women of all races, and also children, interacting amicably as they display and recommend the advertised products. And the whites who still appear ignore race entirely. If a multicultural America really was this harmonious, everyone would cheer.
But the ads vastly over represent the minority presence in the society. They often depict minorities as outnumbering whites, who remain a large majority of the population. And the impression they give of a sudden minority advance is entirely artificial, the result of a mandate from on high.
The change reflects the crudest kind of social engineering. The research behind the demands, done at UCLA, defines equity solely in terms of groups, not individuals. These studies say that the share of a group hired must at least equal its share of the entire population, not simply of those who applied, let alone the most qualified. Anything short of equal group representation is taken as proof of discrimination. In this calculus, only gender and race are even considered.
The Biden administration is leading America down this path. Of all appointments to Biden’s Cabinet, 40 percent were white men; of earlier presidents, only Obama named so few. The woke vision imagines an America where all visible positions are divided up by gender and race to enforce equality. As in the ad industry, advocates will hound all firms to produce equal group outcomes, regardless of the merits.
Norms of equal opportunity have been totally trashed here. To date, white leaders have not resisted. They even confess their own racism, even though few if any of them can believe it. None of them dares to defend white men, for to do that would invite angry charges of racism or sexism. It is like the show trials in Communist Russia in the '30s, when senior apparatchiks were not only condemned but forced to admit fictitious crimes. But if preferences escalate, white men are bound to resist.
The emerging regime, however, is equally insulting to those favored by it. Women and minorities will get more and better jobs than before, but they can no longer take pride that they were hired on the merits. Maybe their role is only to satisfy a quota. Some of the production companies who generate ads for television are already owned by blacks. They are ambivalent about the new demands. After all, they got where they are without preferences. The effect of the new regime is inevitably to demean their accomplishments.
Blacks would do better to rely on the individual achievements that have already made them leading creators of American culture. They did that on their own, and they should keep doing it. Progress that way will be slower than the instant transformation promised in the ad world, but it would be much more real. The building of a freer, more integrated society cannot occur overnight.
—Lawrence M. Mead is Professor of Politics at New York University and the author of Burdens of Freedom: Cultural Difference and American Power. He’s also host of the “Poverty and Culture” podcast.