All smiles
Seriously now. Take a good hard look at that cover.
What is the central image, the one that jumps out at the viewer? A very conservative Muslim couple, the woman in a burqa chador and a man with the regulation full beard, with a child between them, both of them wreathed in smiles as they walk a few inches behind an apparent gay couple.
That is not the real world.
Very conservative Muslims do not beam joyously on gay couples in the park. They don’t. Secular liberal Muslims yes, but the uniform-wearing ones, no. Theocrats, Christian or Jewish or Hindu or Muslim, do not beam approvingly on same-sex couples, not even when they’re actually not same-sex couples because one of them is a trans man. They wouldn’t be tripping the light fantastic holding their child’s hands while the spawn of Satan loitered right in front of them.
Also look at that harlot just above the man, with her bare arms and hair. Not ok. Look at the little girl with the ice cream cone – why, she’s practically naked.
What’s the thinking here? That they’ll distract from the fiction of the pregnant “man” by presenting a fiction of cheery tolerant friendly conservative Muslims frolicking with the gender communiny?
Granted the cheery tolerant conservative Muslims aren’t physically impossible the way the pregnant “man” would be. But they are absurdly implausible, because believers who are that liberal don’t dress that way. The conservative dress is a marker, a marker of conservatism. Part of its job is to be a rebuke to the rest of the world.
Surely the publishers know this.
I’m going to nitpick because you’ll get crap from “progressives” for getting it wrong. I believe that’s intended to be a chador, not a burka. A burka covers the face. A chador covers everything but the face. Your point still stands, obviously.
From behind, all that couple can see is a perfectly ordinary heterosexual couple in which the woman has a short haircut.
It’s social engineering. Tell people enough times that Islam is peaceful and tolerant and wouldn’t hurt a flea and maybe they’ll believe it. Note also the knee-jerk “Nothing to do with Islam” response from politicians to any and all bad behaviour inspired by Islam.
And while on this topic, note the prevalence of white men in the picture. See any? (This is a British book, whites are still over 80% of the population.)
And, while black people are 4% of the UK population, there are pretty much no adverts on British TV these days that do not feature a black actor. Seriously, there are nearly none. A demographic amounting to 4% has to feature in every advert otherwise they would be (cardinal sin) “erased”.
(Asians, however, are not nearly so over-represented, despite there being more Asian-origin people than black people in Britain.)
Overall, black actors are now over-represented on British TV by a factor about 6. Despite this, we’re all supposed to accept how hard-done-by and oppressed they are.
Much of this is owing to Americans exporting their culture to us.
Well that isn’t the same topic though. It’s not a lie. The park could be in Brixton. Much more to the point, it’s not the substantive lie of pretending that conservative observant Muslims are friendly to same-sex couples.
But even more to the point than that, if it’s a lie it’s an amiable lie. It doesn’t endorse an ideology or a religion that’s steeped in bad ideas. At worst it’s an overcorrection.
I don’t actually see why you think that’s an issue. What harm is done by casting non-white actors in adverts? Even if there are more of them than the percentage of the population? Why is that annoying?
Noticing the same in AU.
Yes, there is a significant black population, Aborigines, Somalis, Congolese, Pasifika, Indians, and many more. We have a lot of ads, TV, print, internet, featuring black actors and that is good.
Where it fails is that almost without exception, these black actors appear to be “African American“, probably the least significant by numbers of all black people who call Australia home. No Aborigines except in a political ad, no Somalis, and few Pasifika unless in an ad for Rugby (either form).
First impression, using “rule of thirds”, I was trying to see if the person under the burqa was a pregnant male.
What harm is done by calling this one person by the wrong pronoun? Well, one thing is that it obscures reality and accustoms us to illusion. We grow comfortable with the irrational and the false, and we develop a habit of rationalizing the discordance with reality and inconsistency with professed principle. We become numb to things that should be salient.
The same is true with this. It’s an intentional, race-based hiring practice, hypocritically engaged in by people who espouse the idea that any racial disparity in outcome is conclusive evidence of racism. Defending it gets us into the same trouble as the pronouns: it accustoms us to rationalizing non-correspondence to reality and inconsistency with professed principle, putting us at risk of becoming numb us to things that actually warrant our attention.
I don’t think that’s what it is, I think it’s about doing more to represent black people in popular culture. I also don’t think it’s an illusion that there are a lot more black people around than one would have guessed from movies and tv until quite recently.
Mind you, I don’t see much British tv, so I don’t know how accurate Coel’s account is. In the US there isn’t a big shortage of white people on tv, I promise.
Thanks Somebody42! I corrected it.
Rev @5, you’re doing your country hard mate. I’ve seen glimpses of Aborigines in adds for Qantas and various State tourism promos. Less screen time that beautiful girls in bikinis of course.
Illustrations like this do tend to be replete in symbolism. Note the use of pale blue and pink in at least three places? The pregnant ‘mans’ shirt, the shirt and jacket of the blonde lesbian, and the flowers. Ok, flowers can be pink and blue, but the only flowers I’ve seen with both on the same plant were hydrangeas. The other lesbian is also wearing pink and blue, but in a deeper shade than normal. Maybe the illustrator just likes that shade of pink and blue, but given the topic of the book, I suspect there’s more to it.
As for proportionality in advertising and TV programming, if it’s going to be strictly proportional, then (1) women should get a shit more central speaking roles, and (2) every regional accent in the UK should be represented, but only in strict proportion to the population with that accent. I suspect that would have cut Coronation Street’s run much shorter (which would be a very good thing).
@Ophelia:
It’s a deliberate mis-representation of reality, and people having a wrong idea about reality can cause problems. (Leaving aside the point that, as a scientist, I like accurate accounts of reality on principle.) In particular, given the huge influence of TV, how things are portrayed there quickly becomes normative, as how things ought to be.
So, someone used to seeing 30% blacks on TV and in Brixton parks suddenly notices that “only” 5% of Company A’s employees are black and reacts with horror. (Again, 4% of the UK population is black.)
So Company A panics and declares a target of n% of employees being black, where n is way above the 4% population fraction and closer to what’s seen on TV.
If you try pointing out the 4% number and asking what the problem is you get nowhere. Lots of people aren’t interested in numbers, they operate on feelings and impressions. Their reality is TV and London parks, and they expect everything else to be similar.
The next step is that representation as “low” as the 4% population fraction gets declared to be “systemic racism” about which something must urgently be done. And what went out of the window long ago was any chance of discussing all this sensibly.
When Tony Sewell (someone who does indeed know about numbers) recently wrote his comprehensive report on race in the UK, he found that, while things were not perfect, they were pretty good, and that there was little actual evidence of “systemic racism” operating today. He was met by a wall of insults and derision from the left-leaning intelligentsia.
Television media is definitely NOT the place to look for anything resembling reality. Like anything else, critical analysis should be applied. How many people even question what they are being fed? While completely objective accounts are impossible because of the many possible perspectives, there is little effort made to present factual, complete presentations. There are things such as entertainment value, ad revenue, marketability, and time constraints, (and indeed virtue signalling) that matter more to producers than objectivity or accurate depictions. Even any “analysis” that is presented is little more than opinion, complete with (usually agenda driven) spin with forced conclusions always implied. Again, if someone justs sits there unquestioningly vegetating in front of their screen, which I think happens often, then the marketer’s and manipulator’s work is done.
Resistance is not futile, but it requires concern.
Coel @3 I have heard these observations about the dispropotionate (to the population) representation of black people on TV more than a few times. Without delving in depth, I suspect it’s more of an overcompensation for the reverse situation at earlier times, as Ophelia points out. That’s my guess too. I think you’re right though, researching the demographics easily points out the disparity. Not that it matters to me much, as I’m the only person I know who doesn’t have a television, but the interwebs aren’t much better these days either.
@twiliter:
Indeed, it is that, coupled with competitive virtue signalling.
So it starts off with the aim of ensuring that blacks are not under-represented. But once that becomes the norm, how does one then signal ones virtue? One then has to over-represent black actors. So then over-representation becomes the norm. But how does one then signal virtue? This process continues until it becomes unthinkable to have a TV advert or drama that does not feature black actors.
This process could only halt if it became accepted that blacks are not, these days, “oppressed” and “marginalised”. But that idea runs counter to the entire woke worldview, which is based on dividing everyone into “oppressors” (white, male, straight, cis, Western, able-bodied) and “oppressed” (black, trans, queer, Indigenous, disabled).
Oh, hell, not this again.
What you refuse to take into account is the lasting effects of slavery and Jim Crow and how they continue to play out. You’re absolutely certain they don’t, that all that is 100% over, and when I urge you to read books on the subject you say you don’t need to because you already know all about it.
Coel, I think you could predict an outcome like that, but along with Ophelia, I don’t see the harm. If you look at American football and other sports, maybe it leans more toward individual ability? Music is another example. I think there are several ways to look at it. As long as the disparity relative to the population isn’t an effort to expect special privelege beyond equal opportunity, I tend to think things will shake out evenly.
I’m not prepared to consider that all systems of oppression have been entirely eliminated, and there has been much progress during my lifetime, but judging by how feminism and gay rights have been assaulted by trans ideology, there is still work left to do.
As far as presenting a skewed picture of reality, as far as the media is concerned, I think it’s a matter of degree, and it’s best to apply one’s own judgement as to how much manipulation they can tolerate. For me it’s not much.
@14 I think it’s particular to the US in this regard as well. Europe seems to have made more progress re: racism., but I don’t know for sure, as I’ve never lived there. I think it depends on where you are and your personal experience. Here in Atlanta, being white, I am not in the majority (more or less depending on how one draws the regional boundaries), and again much progress has been made, but there are stark examples of the lasting effects. Population demographics vary from region to region. It shows up in people’s attitudes and preferences, and there are important decisions that are made with those biases attached.
I’ve talked about this enough for now, I’ll bow out while I can. Cheers.
@Ophelia:
First, we were discussing the UK, and the UK never had slavery on its soil nor Jim Crow. Further, the majority of blacks in the UK today are not descendants of slaves (some are, after migrating to the UK from the Caribbean, being descended from ancestors taken to the Caribbean as slaves, but they are a minority; more of today’s British blacks came directly from Africa and are not descendants of the Atlantic slave trade).
Further, books you’ve pointed me are such as Oshinsky’s “Worse than Slavery”, about how things were in the US up to ~ 1965. (Yes, things were bad in the US for blacks before then.)
What you’ve not offered me is evidence-based books on why that is having lasting effects on today’s youth, born in the 2000s. It is that that I’m disputing and asking for evidence about. Indeed, I’ve made repeated requests here for people to make the case about mechanisms by which the pre-1965 past is affecting youths born in the 2000s.
Indeed I can suggest to you books, such as Thomas Sowell’s latest, “Social Justice Fallacies”, that show the flaws in mainstream thinking, in particular in the automatic attribution to un-specified and un-examined “lasting effects” of the pre-1965 past.
I notice that pregnant ‘daddy’ has several day’s worth of stubble on his face which has to be the result of regular and ongoing doses of testosterone. Yes, it’s just a drawing for a book cover but it does raise a serious question. We know the effects that smoking, drinking, recreational drug use and prescribed medications use can have on developing foetuses, but have studies been done specifically looking at the possible effects of hormone therapy in pregnant women? Or as with puberty blockers, is it just another part of the unregulated experiment with no thought for the potential harm to the babies?
On a lighter note, what the Hell has the boy in the striped t-shirt been taking? Look at his face; he’s absolutely wasted!
“…the UK never had slavery on its soil…” — The UK consists of countries that indeed claimed “soil” where slavery was happening. Maybe you mean the continent? Even if so, there is history of serfdom, much the same thing. Maybe you mean more modern history?
OK, I’m done.
Coel @ 17
It’s not clear that you were talking only about black people in the UK in that comment.
The other book I’ve urged you to read is Rothstein’s Color of Law, which is all about the way real estate segregation made it impossible for black families to create generational wealth while white families were doing exactly that. The Oshinsky book is also (along with much else) about the ways the past shapes the present. If you’d read them you would have found that out.
That’s why I told you about them – you seem to know absolutely nothing about the subject.
@twiliter:
I was thinking of court cases such as Harvey v. Chamberlain in 1696, where Justice Holt ruled that nothing in English law allowed holding another person as a slave, and that Habeus Corpus prevailed, saying: “as soon as a negro comes to England he is free; one may be a villein in England, but not a slave”.
But yes, England claimed dominion over colonies where colonial law did allow slavery.
True, though English medieval serfdom was not nearly as bad a state as Southern US slavery. But that’s a reminder that the lives of most people prior to the modern era were dire compared to modern standards, with unremitting labour in the fields to avoid starvation, a high probability of violent death with little recourse, a life expectancy of ~ 35, and most people dying horribly of illness with no health care or pain relief.
@Ophelia:
But it’s not the case that one thing happened to all black families while another happened to all white families. More white families were red-lined than black families (though a higher fraction of black families were red-lined; still plenty were not).
And this implies that a major driver of inequality today is inter-generational wealth, dating from before ~ 1965. But the bottom half of the white distribution don’t get inter-generational wealth either. Similarly most Hispanics in the US came from poorer countries, and most Hispanic families today have not inherited substantial inter-generational wealth either. Nor have most Asian-American families, most of whom also came from poor countries.
The impression given is of white Americans inheriting wealth from their parents, and perhaps it’s like that for the top 10% or 20%. But the bottom half of the white distribution looks much the same as the bottom half of the black distribution (none of them having much in the way of stored wealth). It’s only at the top end that the distributions diverge markedly.
Besides, if we’re trying to explain things like differential crime rates or educational outcomes, the easiest thing to do is control for family income. Those studies have been done repeatedly. And it is not the case that, once you control for income, the rates for the different groups are the same, and thus it is not the case that this is all about socio-economic status. That idea has now been tested to destruction.
I know lots of Americans don’t have generational wealth but the fact remains that this one set of people were systematically imprisoned and prevented from working for themselves for many generations. You always blow that off as if it doesn’t matter, or as if it shouldn’t matter. I think it does matter.
@Ophelia:
Of the set of people who were enslaved, none of them are still alive! And we shouldn’t treat people as primarily avatars of groups, we should treat them as individuals.
Each of us has of order 200 or so ancestors who lived back then (that is, our great-great-great-great-great grandparents). For yours, do you know any of their names or what happened to any of them as individuals? Most of us don’t and most of us don’t make any effort to find out, though we’re generally aware of our heritage and culture. So it has some importance, but is not all-important.
Today’s youths born in the 2000s were never enslaved. Neither were their parents, nor anyone they know. And, as a result of that dire injustice to their 5-greats grandparents, they get something that does really matter very concretely in today’s world. They are born with citizenship of the US. All of us born in countries like the US, UK, Canada, etc have a golden ticket handed to us at birth. Just watch the Southern borders of the USA or Europe.
Thought experiment: offer today’s black Americans a deal: “We can wave a magic wand such that your ancestors were never enslaved by Europeans but continued living in Africa — and you are now a citizen of Sierra Leone”. None would take that deal.
So, no, it’s not nearly as important as is made out. All of us care much more about our generation than about distant ancestors, so unless there is some concrete consequence being claimed, such as intergenerational wealth, no it doesn’t matter that much.
People treating it as a big deal are mostly seeking a distraction from dealing with the actual reasons for things like disparities in crime rate and educational attainment. Because the fact that ancestors they’ve never met were enslaved cannot in itself be a big factor.
Here is an unsympathetic review that explains the author is a trans-identified female who became pregnant and was featured on the cover of Glamour magazine while pregnant. She gave birth not long after. In the article she talks about how pregnancy was devastating, it made her feel not like a man, and she wrote the book to promote the idea that a woman can give birth and still be a man. The article doesn’t futz around with pronouns, she is called “she” throughout.
Oh fucking hell. It didn’t end in 1865; that’s what I keep telling you. Even slavery didn’t end in 1865, which is why I keep saying you should read the Oshinsky book. Laws were made all over the south to reinstate slavery via the prison system. It was even more brutal than slavery because no capital was at risk, so prisoners could be worked to death, and they were. So that smug “Today’s youths born in the 2000s were never enslaved. Neither were their parents, nor anyone they know” isn’t as cheery as you imply. So yes, it damn well is as important as is made out.
You refuse to read Oshinsky but you could at least glance at this for 30 seconds or so:
https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2021/06/convict-leasing-system/
@Ophelia:
I readily grant that dire circumstances didn’t end in 1865. As I’ve agreed many times, it was only after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and only after about 1980 that things became relatively fair and ok (though not perfect). But even 1980 is a while ago from the perspective of a teenager today.
The idea that today’s prison system is all a plot by whites to enslave blacks (in order to get round abolition), and that blacks bear no responsibility for their crime rate or incarceration rate, because everything is the fault of whites, and blacks have no agency or responsibility, only whites do, is getting into highly contentious and highly dubious notions of critical race theory.
I reckon that most US whites would be delighted if the black crime rate and hence the black incarceration rate dropped to that of (say) Asian Americans (of the same socio-economic level), and they wouldn’t be upset that they were no longer getting to imprison them.
By the way, your link didn’t work for me.
Here??? You’ve agreed that many times here? I don’t think so. I don’t think you’ve ever said that here. I’m not being pissy; I really don’t think I’ve ever seen you say that. It would have made a difference.
As to 1980 or thereabouts, yes it’s ancient history to teenagers, but not to their parents and grandparents. Malia and Sasha Obama’s grandfather was limited to a badly-paid job with the city of Chicago because the union was all-white. Multiply them by a large number.
Your second paragraph doesn’t describe anything I’ve ever said. What I think is more that it’s a horrible spiral we can’t seem to get out of.
Sorry about the link – it still works for me so I don’t know how to fix it.
@Ophelia:
I can’t recall the wordings of everything I’ve said here, but I may well be merging in my mind things I’ve said 18 months ago here with things I’ve said 18 months ago on other blogs, but my general recollection is that you’ve repeatedly pointed to dire conditions in the post-slavery era (Jim Crow, red-lining, etc), and I’ve repeatedly replied that, yes, I agree. And I really did mean that, yes, I agree!
At no point have I said anything remotely along the lines that the abolition of slavery fixed everything and things were then fine.
And when I’ve talked about things being relatively ok, or at least good enough, I’ve explicitly talked about that for kids born in the 2000s (which is what I’m most concerned with, since most students at universities today were born in the 2000s).
Well, I do remember that you’ve responded to my urging you to read Worse Than Slavery by saying you don’t dispute claims that things were really bad in the past. But the way I remember it those responses were more “Yes yes I know all that” than they were “I’ve agreed many times.” More a perfunctory dismissal in order to move on to the present moment than the specific acknowledgement of today. I don’t know, maybe I’ll have to take a deep breath and explore the archives a bit to see if I can find examples.
Ok so I took a look and didn’t find as much as I expected. Memory-is-fallible strikes again.
The most relevant discussion is in this thread. It’s all cross-purposes. You do agree that it matters so your claim is confirmed.
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/not-so-critical-race-theory/
In case I’ve not been explicit enough I’ll reiterate this: Conditions for blacks in the USA were utterly dire long after slavery. Eventually, legislation in the 1960s began to rectify things, and since perhaps the 1980s or so things became reasonably fair and ok (though not perfect).
Why do I take an interest in this? Because discourse on two topics, US race relations and sex/gender is utterly poisoning academia, turning what had previously lauded free enquiry into “you may not dissent”. Ophelia ably documents this with respect to sex/gender.
With regard to race — to give just some examples — nearly all of academia is strongly in favour of affirmative action. But suggesting that a particular student was admitted owing to affirmative action would get you fired. And if you notice out loud that students admitted with vastly lower grades then cluster at the bottom of your class, you get fired. Failing to shout down someone saying that gets you fired. And since the Supreme Court have just outlawed affirmative action done semi-openly, this is now going to be done behind an extra layer of dishonesty.
All of this is about the huge gaps between racial groups in educational attainment and crime rate and similar indicators. “Huge” here means factor-of-ten level. If Harvard admitted solely on academic merit, the number of blacks admitted would drop by a factor of ten. And this is all about teens and young adults. (If “the kids are alright” then much else becomes less of a problem.)
This whole issue is spilling over into the rest of the English-speaking world, to the extent that when the BBC makes an educational cartoon for kids about the signing of Magna Carta, it depicts one the barons as black. Just because. Because “diversity” is their lodestar. (It used to be truth.)
So why am I not taking that much interest in the century from 1865 to 1965? It’s not that I dispute that conditions were dire, it’s that the relevant youths were not born then. Youths treat their year of birth as Year Zero, and everything before that is akin to the Ancient Egyptians. They have a hard enough time conceiving of how humans could survive without iPhones.
So why is all that history relevant to today’s youths?
One possible answer, indeed the standard left-wing one, is that as a result they lack intergenerational wealth and so are a lot poorer, and that explains the gaps in educational attainment and crime rates.
Except that we know that it doesn’t, because most of the rest of America didn’t get intergenerational wealth either, and anyhow we can make comparisons controlling for family income and the upshot is that money and socio-economic status do little to explain the gaps between races. (The left are in denial about this, but the evidence really is clear; it’s not only the right who do science denial.)
So perhaps it’s culture? Perhaps the long history of dire ill-treatment has left today’s black youths with a cultural rejection of all things associated with being “white”, including school and studying maths. And it would be entirely understandable if this were so. But if this is the explanation then we need to state that and face up to it, because we can’t fix the gaps without fixing the cause of the gaps.
The problem is that today’s “anti-racists” are doing the exact opposite of what would fix that problem. They are reinforcing it. They say, yes, math is racist. Notions of studying hard, of valuing accuracy, objectivity, punctuality, and a whole set of other supposedly “white” traits are (they say) “racist”. And it’s wrong, indeed “racist, to expect this of black kids.
So they have a vision of a future where the white and Asian-American kids are studying calculus in preparation for careers as aerospace engineers, while the black kids are making a rap video about travelling in an aeroplane.
Except that, even the “anti-racists” can see the problems with that future. So they’re now going one better. They’re now proposing that no-one should study maths! Because, every time they teach maths, that produces attainment gaps. So the only way of ensuring an equitable outcome is if none of the kids learn maths. Do Asian and white kids do better on a maths exam?, then maths is racist and we need to stop teaching it. (Seriously, this is the rationale behind what California are currently proposing.) And if school is only about rap videos, then the blacks will do best with the Asians worst. Ya-hay! Sorted!
In the modern world, deciding to not educate your kids is about the dumbest policy imaginable, but that is what “anti-racists” and Critical Race Theory are leading to.
[California is also where San Francisco have suggested reparation payments of $5 million each (yes, 5 million each), to make up for the lack of intergenerational wealth among blacks; white readers, did you receive $5m from your parents/grandparents? Didn’t think so.]
So the parents of white and Asian kids do everthing they can to flee such schools and cluster together in schools with like-minded parents, even leaving the state system. Then the left point and say “see, the blacks have to go to the low-performing schools”.
Except there’s no such thing as a low-performing school in the abstract. It’s not the buildings or funding levels or even teachers that make a school high-performing versus low-performing, it’s the intake, the kids. Study after study has shown this (again, the left are in denial). Asian-American kids don’t do well because they get to go to “good” schools; rather, schools with a high intake of Asian-American kids become “good”.
And, to repeat, American race relations is slowly poisoning the rest of the English-speaking world. We badly need an open and evidence-based discussion of the world as it is today, as experienced by kids born in the 2000s, and what mechanisms are operating today to affect teenagers taking maths exams. Slavery was bad! is accepted, as is And so was Jim Crow!, but chorusing that doesn’t fix today’s problems (it’s been tried).
The current “anti-racist” discourse is harming most the very kids it is aimed at helping; telling them that they’re not even expected to do math is disasterous for their future (just as “police pullback” most harms those it is intended to help, namely blacks who then suffer from higher crime, and then also from the lowered property values, inability to get insurance, flight of businesses, etc).
Yes, the history up to the 1980s may well be relevant, but we need to be clear on why. Those attainment gaps are not going to just go away. The expectation had been that the fixes in the 1960s would cause the attainment gaps to decline over time. That hasn’t happened. That means we had a wrong idea of what is causing them. And so long as those gaps are there, this issue is going to continue poisoning everything.
Which is way too long a rant, but there it is. I really am not trying to downplay the experience of past generations who suffered badly.
It would be good if the education thing could be presented as “show the stupid racists what you can do, they’ll hate that.”
@Ophelia:
Now that is a really good idea. More generally, a “take responsibility and show them what you can do” spirit is indeed what youths need (all youths, from all groups, that is).
Much “anti-racist” messaging is doing the opposite, telling black youths that they are perpetual victims and there’s little they can do about it, reinforcing messages that will perpetuate disadvantage, and telling them that their best prospect is to sit around and ask for welfare (aka “reparations”).