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Watch an NFL game this fall. Watch each commercial. If there is a couple, do the same analysis. I’d wager that the interracial coupling far outstrips the base rate.
I would say it is upwards of 50% in commercials. And then forget the pairings, just generally there won’t be a white man in a commercial.
Personally when something is that frequently out of whack it goes beyond “natural” to something else.
And yes, I see it way more in commercials compared to other media.
I feel like you're exhibiting the same "representation fallacy" that a lot of left-wing idpol people do. Imagine we're in a spherical cow world where the main cast of every piece of media (be it a commercial or a movie) is 10 people and Hollywood produces 100 high profile movies/commercials in a year, and you're evaluating all of the media produced in the past year for its representativeness of the general population, across a variety of identity categories.
It is going to be trivially true that the media is not going to reflect the general population, either on a case by case basis or taken as a whole. It's just a huge coordination problem. If LGB people are around 5-10% of the population, then to get "accurate" representation, every other movie would need to have a gay person in it. But if their gayness is going to be a relevant trait, then two of our 10 cast members probably need to be gay (so they can be in a gay relationship together), and that is already going to create a wonky balancing problem when it comes to movies that aim to portray gay people.
And the problem only deepens if you consider movies like Moana, which would have 10 polynesian characters in it (thus accounting for 1% of the total characters in spherical cow world's yearly evaluation), when polynesians are around 0.5% of the total population.
I think the "rounding error" problem is always going to be present when it comes to representation in films. I also see it being an issue for panel discussions. I have a female friend who was indignant that professional conferences don't try to have a 50/50 split of males and females on panel discussions, but even ignoring the demographics of certain professions like STEM fields being majority male to begin with, you're always going to have the problem that when putting together a panel discussion, you're presumably prioritizing goals other than equality (such as, "Wouldn't it be nice to have someone who wrote a book about this topic recently?" or "We want to balance the panel with opposing viewpoints, so lets try to find the most prominent person who believes ~X, and see if they're willing to fly out and participate on our dime"), and large professional conferences are also operating under constraints of who will actual attend and who actual wants to be on a panel in the first place. Add in the fact that an odd-numbered panel number will always result in an imbalance of some kind, and I think it's completely unreasonable to want more women (or more anyone) on a panel discussion.
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