Joe Biden made an observation recently. He noticed that most commercials have mixed-race couples in them. This, he says, shows the cultural direction of the nation. Joe is right that there are more of these commercials, but wrong about everything else.
I’ve said this before in tandem with a second; kids are always smarter than their parents (TV sitcoms and Ads), more so if the parents are white, more if a parent is white and the child is not. Second, a commercial without a mixed-race couple is rare. Not because kids are smarter or because the nation is now more open to diverse relationships.
Advertisers are terrified of what happens to them if they don’t stick to these templates.
Now! I don’t know anyone who cares a whit about the race of the person you are dating or to whom you marry. I know more mixed-race couples than I can count, married for decades in some cases. No one cares about that. Decent person, hard-working, helpful, interesting, good company, those things are of more interest.
Do I know Italians who want their kids to marry Italian? Sure. And Jews or Catholics who disapprove of marrying outside the faith, yes. But it doesn’t define them or their opinions about people of different ethnicities or religions in general.
It’s not the same thing, but Biden wants you to think it is.
Biden claimed that if you watched television for two hours, you would see two to three out of five advertisements representing mixed-race couples.
“That’s not by accident,” he said. “They’re selling soap, man. Not a joke.”
Biden cited the late pollster Patrick Cadell, who once said that watching advertising could help anyone understand the current state of American culture.
“Because they want to sell what they have,” he said, referring to the corporations.
His point is that Advertisers want to make money (they do), so they are selling to what America looks like. They are pandering to a cultural archetype; therefore, it must be true.
I contend that they are selling to what people like Biden want you to think America looks like, but in reality, they are indifferent or don’t care. Most of America outside the progressive victim-verse and the sliver of actual racists and supremacists we’ll never be rid of is colorblind and has been for a long time.
If two adults look happy to be together and love each other and care for each other, no one really gives a damn. And sometimes, they don’t give a damn if they don’t do those things.
In other words, the only thing wrong with using mixed-race couples in every commercial is that it looks like you are trying too hard. The way Hollywood has to put a gay or lesbian couple in every program or crams non-heterosexual relationships into stories where they never existed in the original.
It’s forced, like demands for compelled speech. It takes an idea and adds unnecessary tension.
The Hollywood, Media, Music and ad types are projecting their limited experience onto the pallet of the nation. In part to make it appear as if all of this is as normal as they think it is and partly because the disposition of the people who police them is – contrary to their demands of us – intolerant.
Not putting a mixed-race couple in an ad is might be more trouble than it’s worth. Not exactly the embracing worldview Biden pitches. Quite the opposite.
If you want to mix in and become part of the fabric, to be milquetoast, every day, mixed-race or gay couple (or mixed-race gay couple), good neighbor, hard workers, with well-behaved kids (or whatever), happy to babysit on short notice, neighborhood watch guy or gal, you don’t run screaming at it swinging a rainbow Katana. You don’t try to remake it in your image and then compel everyone else to say, sure, that’s normal.
A type of domestic terrorism lead by people who admit they want to undermine marriage and that culture altogether even though marriage is exponentially better for couples of all races and their kids. The in-your-face counter-culture war is marketed as a battle for tolerance when all it is intolerance and watching the world burn.
Too much of what passed for race and gender advocacy looks like that, and THAT is why people who live in that world go out of their way to pander to it.
Advertisers aren’t showing us a snapshot of America; they are bending to the will of censors to avoid the negative attention they’ll get from professional ax grinders if they don’t.
