Shane Gillis, who is one of today’s funniest stand-up comics (if you have not seen it, take a minute to watch him do his bit on Trump reporting the liquidation of an ISIS leader), has a another great bit in which he talks about how to recognize the signs of early-onset conservatism. One symptom, he says, is finding oneself frequently asking the question “Why are black guys in every commercial?”

I was already a conservative when I began to notice this new rule some years ago. More recently, the phenomenon has metastasized—it seems there no piece of the visual popular culture that is not touched by it. A glance at the online sites for my bank, my mortgage company, my health insurance company, my credit cards, and seemingly everything else on is required to deal with to navigate life now typically reveals images on the welcome page of people who do not look like me in relationships that are quite dissimilar to those with which I am familiar.

It is not a matter of trying, in some more or less demographically precise way, to reflect what America actually looks like in these images. One could easily agree with that principle. But that would mean, for example, that approximately three of every twenty images would include a black person, and around one in every 100 married couples would portray a homosexual relationship. If you have been paying attention to this trend, you know just what I know, which is that the percentages go far beyond these numbers.

So, what precisely is American elite media culture trying to tell us?

They are suggesting that not being white and not being heterosexual are, in fact, the new norms in American society, or at least that they are more admirable and desirable.

Who are the people looking for downpayments on a home? Why, didn’t you know? They are mostly black fathers hula-hooping with their white children.

Who has car insurance? Gay black male couples cooking dinner together are the main representatives of that population.

Who uses an HSA to pay medical bills? Mostly families consisting of a white female, her black husband or partner (please don’t assume they are participating in the antiquated and sexist institution of marriage), and their apparently Asian child (how that worked out genetically is a mystery for the ages).

I noticed a new area into which this part of the cultural revolution has extended this past year, when my oldest daughter was applying to college. CommonApp, FAFSA, SAT, and every single other website that is part of the application process illustrates their pages with pictures of students. In every case where there is a picture of just one, it is never a white student, and generally it must be a black student. If more than one student is pictured, the majority are almost always non-white (though, interestingly, never majority Asian—even though that is a common enough sight on most actual college campuses). There was not a single outlier.

The racial statistics indicated in these images are, of course, wildly removed from reality. While I do not have the figures on the demographics of auto insurance customers before me, one can safely bet one’s entire retirement account that gay black male couples make up a very small minority of those people. And when it comes to higher education, whites are clearly the majority of all degree holders from the bachelor’s degree upward, and blacks are never more than 13 percent in any category.

Nevertheless, if one were transported here from another planet  to form one’s understanding of college racial representation based on these images, one would think whites only seldom go to college and that the overwhelming majority of those enrolled in institutions of higher learning are black and brown.  

Informally, I surmise approximately the following informal new rule now in all representations of random human individuals.

You may (though of course you are not required to do so) show someone with white skin if there are at least three individuals presented, but if any fewer than three are present, they should all be non-white. If only one individual is present, it must be a black skinned individual. No matter what number of individuals you are representing, white skins must also always be a clear and tiny minority. The human default is always non-white, and especially if you’re talking about or representing a society—such as this one—that is (for the time being, at least) majority white.

A friend asked me the other day if I think the middle-class white heterosexuals who vote consistently on the left notice this trend. I told him that I suspect they do notice, but they’re either 1) too terrified of being called a racist and a homophobe to make that noticing a public matter, or 2) foolishly confident that they can with impunity continue to ignore the broader cultural revolution that is driving this, and that no negative long-term consequence can possibly affect them. 

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-commercial-cultural-revolution-is-upon-us/