Calling Alfred E. Newman

 One of the best educational advantages boomers enjoyed in their youth was exposure to the old Mad magazine. It taught its readers, among other things,  that a lot of commercial advertising was shifty, silly, dishonest stuff aimed at fools,  deserving of ridicule,  and not to be taken seriously.  Much of it still is.

The latest inane trend is woke advertising. Sometimes it is explicit as when viewers or readers are told that the XYZ company not only makes darned fine crotch itch ointment but honors LBGTQ and BIPOC communities, is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and is striving to remake the world in service of those things.  More often it is less direct. It sometimes is done by the selection of the models and images in the ad on the basis of race, as  though seeing a black person in a commercial is supposed to make a viewer think the advertised company is in the vanguard of something or other. Black people make up around an eighth of the population of the country but lately seem to be about half of the actors in TV commercials, and probably more than half of the so-called authority figures such as people playing doctors or scientists or executives in commercials. This is good news for black actors, but one has to guess many of them might feel a little patronized by people who had little use for them in the past becoming interested only as they became handy symbols.

One place black people are “under represented” in commercials is in ads for things such as burglar alarm companies. There one can be pretty sure the crooks will be white guys – often oddly enough white guys dressed like Nancy’s boyfriend Sluggo but with a mask.  Indeed  in the world of commercials, white men are life’s losers. The clueless ones, the stupid ones, the ones who never get the word usually will be white men. In a commercial featuring a white man in a domestic setting, he probably will be washing, cooking, cuddling a child and generally coming across as a good little homemaker. If there is an unlikeable or out of touch guy in a suit in a commercial, he usually will be white. Women and black men may be portrayed as strong and independent, but mainly not the white guys.

  Many conservatives find this depiction of white men wrong, insulting, utterly unrealistic, and demeaning. They are right. It is, but it’s usually not worth getting too worked up over. It is just a fad, and one that does little real harm since few take its implications seriously (and it is not as though people in other groups have not been given the same treatment and worse at various times). I think it is better most of the time for white guys to ignore it or laugh it off.  Of course if ticked off enough or if the insults are presented as something to take seriously, they also can refuse to buy the product being advertised. A few more cases of get woke, go broke might shorten the fad’s duration.   They certainly would serve some people right.