The next time you are watching TV or streaming some video on-line and an advertisement comes on, I want you to pay very close attention to what the people in that ad are doing. Odds are, they are going to be dancing.
As a 51-year old white guy, I don’t do a lot of dancing. At my age I’m attending more funerals than weddings now. Not that I ever went to “the club”, but DJ’s aren’t firing up many disco hits before my bedtime at 9:00. And it’s not too often that I’m hanging out in my kitchen or walking through the living room and I suddenly feel the urge to bust a move.
But in many commercials today, that is all anybody is doing. And if you are a person of color, that’s almost the only thing you are doing in an ad.
Both Hollywood and ad agencies are fully embracing the diversity push in our society today. But they seem to be struggling over what to have those “people we didn’t see before” do.
When I log onto the Washington Post app to do the daily crossword, I must first sit through an ad for Verizon. In it, a Rainbow Coalition of people of different races, genders, and body types “break it down” for 30-seconds. Nobody has spoken lines. Nobody tells me about the packages Verizon is offering. Nobody testifies to amazing nationwide coverage. All they do is dance–while words move about the screen.
The makers of Jardiance are featuring plus-sized models dancing and singing to a catchy jingle extolling the benefits of lowering their A1C–backed by (again) multi-ethnic dancers perfectly choreographed despite the fact that they are supposed to be people shopping at the farmers market or working in the office.
The same is true for a number of other products and sponsors, including NFL apparel, auto insurance, and food delivery. There is also a local credit union that promotes its home mortgages by showing an inter-racial couple that appears to be moving into their first home, and what are they doing? Telling us about their great rates? Explaining the ease of the application and approval process? Nope. they are dancing.
I started really noticing this after reading a New York Times Magazine article back in March by Kabir Chibber questioning how mainstream media is shoehorning people of color into nearly all things now. Much of the focus is on how movies and TV shows set in the past portray characters of all colors living, working, and recreating together in ways totally incongruous with the realities of those times.
Chibber contends that a Black girl touring Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory in steampunk London, a Black Norse God in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or an Asian portraying David Copperfield in Elizabethian England actually does a disservice to historic struggles of people of color in both Europe and the United States. While studio executives and community activists would be quick to point out that those are all fictional characters–and that anyone of any color, gender, body type, and nationality can portray them–Chibber argues that it distorts our current view of the way things actually were. He calls it the “Magical Multiracial Past”–where there are no social divisions, stereotypes, or hatred portrayed in any ways.
Chibber challenges Hollywood not to just put minorities into what was once just a “white world” but to rather tell the stories of those minorities set in the same time period. Black American history is not being the suitor of a well-to-do Boston socialite in the 1880’s, or a sheriff in a southern state.
If you wanted to remake Saving Private Ryan today, Tom Hanks would probably be leading a multi-racial unit of soldiers onto the beaches of Normandy under a hail of Nazi gunfire. That would be historically inaccurate–as the only Black unit that took part in the Allied invasion that day was the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, which provided protection for the ships moored offshore. (The Nazis themselves would still be all white–because multi-culturalism should only be portrayed in a positive or heroic light.)
So which is more “inclusive”, pretending that people of color effectively barred from nearly all front-line action were actually there–or making an entire movie about the Black men that were there? And also telling the story of discrimination that forced them into mainly support and service roles? A perfect example is Hidden Figures, an historically-acurate movie about the “human computers” used in the early days of NASA’s Mercury program, that included a number of Black women that did trajectory calculations by hand.
And those putting together the advertising messages of today need to meet the same challenge. Find roles for minorities that carry more weight than just “background dancers”–a rainbow flag that just serves as a signal–and not an actual measure of progress.
