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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29773 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Evidence has emerged that the office of Major of London considers a photo (PDF, page 47) depicting a group consisting of: a man, a woman, a boy and a girl, all of whom are of European ancestry, to not "represent real Londoners".

Looking at the ethnic breakdown of the capital of United Kingdom, showing Europeans (still) account for over 50% of the population, it seems premature to declare media depicting them to be unrepresentative.

But even if the natives were succesfully reduced to a minority, one would expect that they should be overrepresented. This would consistent with the mainstram present narrative around representation. That the fractions of ethnic groups in media shouldn't mirror those of the general population, but since people exhibit racial ingroup bias, minorities would be less happy if they didn't see people who look like them.

Defenders of this branding guide have claimed this has nothing to do with race of the people in the image, but I have to wonder if they would thought so, if a photo depicting what appears to be family of four Pakistanis would be caption as "Doesn't represent real Londoners." in a branding guide of a rigth-wing anti-immigration politician.

Especially in light of darwin's description of working enviroment of advertising companies. He claimed that anti-white jokes were common and that even he made them.

Reading the whole brochure as a Londoner, the most interesting thing is just how much of a personality cult the Greater London Authority is trying to present itself as. The name "Greater London Authority" is only used on internal-facing documents - to the public, the brand is "Mayor of London", and the mayor is photographed at every opportunity while his staff and other politicians are unpersoned. The key aim of the brand guidelines is that GLA publications should create the impression that Sadiq Khan is solving every crime and fixing every pothole himself, or at least hands-on supervising the front-line workers who are. Unfortunately, I think this was the intention of London's Scottish colonial rulers when they set up the GLA - I have heard lots of serious people saying that the secret to fixing local democracy (i.e. getting voters to vote on local issues) is to personalise it. And the previous mayors were Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, so Khan has to do a lot of PR-mediated cult of personality stuff to compete with their media personas.

Specifically on the race issue, there are plenty of pictures where Khan is the only non-white person in shot held up as good examples, so I don't think the intended message is "fewer white faces". Interestingly, a lot of the white faces in the examples are police - there are good reasons given the politics of policing in London why if I were the Mayor, I would choose my PR shots to make the Metropolitan Police look more diverse than they are, but showing the police as almost-all-white doesn't bother Khan's PR team. I do worry that someone seems to think that the only person in London over the age of 50 is the Mayor.

We don't really know what their actual intention was, and there isn't a lot to go on. But even if their actual intention was that PR photography shouldn't contain all white people, I have no problem with it. Using a brief google search, it seems like 59.8% of London is white, so that still leaves 40.1% of other colors and ethnicities. The mayor of London is a politician and therefore wants his brand to portray him as representing everyone of all ethnicities in his city. Adding people of different ethnicities in PR photos accomplish that better than just having white people in those photos.

Ok, I understand the desire to view this charitably... And we probably should, to be honest.

But reverse the variables here. If this was criticism of a very diverse photo, do you think it would be viewed charitably?

I think this is the result of applying the critical theory lens in the other direction. Which was bound to happen.

We don't really know what their actual intention was, and there isn't a lot to go on.

Scroll on up to pps 42-43 and check out the kind of 'events' and case study photos that the mayor considers appropriate to portray and I'd say there's a fair bit to go on; doesn't really seem like a 60/40 split is what he's going for.

It's Tuesday in some parts of the world, so Throwback Tuesday to a time where we discussed a similar incident.

It does appear that for many, the mere existence of a white, non-interracial, non-obviously LGBT family is enough to engender seethe. Seethe that is within the Overton window, in contrast to Noticing the overrepresentation of blacks in media and advertising or the overrepresentation of interracial couples (especially black men with white women).

Obligatory in-group biases by race/ethnicity.

I am no fan of white people and even I think this is not right. There is no way this remark was targeted at any other category in that photo other than white. The photo is not "too perfect" for a stock image, it doesn't seem staged at all. The only good thing from this is that at least the racial animus isn't targeted towards minorities. Hopefully this is a good empathetic lesson for what they historically had to face in the past, and why that was bad and wrong.

  • -15

I don't think westerners need teaching that racial prejudice is wrong. The obsesssion with race and with racial grievance is driven mostly by people of European descent. The people who wrote this guide were almost certainly majority Britons.

Besides, the idea that only non-westerners ever faced racial or ethnic prejudice and that Europeans need teaching how this feels is absurd. You know that the Russian military is trying to wipe out a European ethnic group/nation like, right now?

You know that the Russian military is trying to wipe out a European ethnic group/nation like, right now?

I didn't know that. Can you elaborate?

Avoid low-effort sarcasm like this.

The lesson that should be learned by whites is to more thoroughly crush your enemies, to stop this kind of thing happening again. We showed, and continue to show, far too much clemency to our subjects. All of this is a result of attempts to uplift, rehabilitate and integrate the conquered, instead of just wiping them out wholesale and replacing them. Can't be accused of being racist if there are no other races in your country.

Now therefore kill every boy, and kill every woman who has had sexual intercourse with a man. But all the young women who have not had sexual intercourse with a man will be yours.

I'm not sure if you're being ironic, testing the boundaries of what we'll put up with here, or making a serious point. But taken at face value, literally calling for genocide is culture warring in its purest form, and if this is some sort of Swiftian proposal, you're not clever enough by half and you need to speak more plainly.

I disagree with destroying the conquered, but the distaste for it is relatively recent in history.

Even Machiavelli advised that when killing an enemy it’s best to kill their whole family, to ensure their offspring don’t come back in reprisal, and with the common people on their side.

Moses said they could keep the virgins, after killing all the women and boys.

I would prefer we keep only the pretty ones.

I think you're right on the basics, morality nonwithstanding - ethnicities that have been entirely wiped out no longer get to claim any grievances or preferential treatment.

But Machiavelli? Didn't he write the prince tongue-in-cheek? Honest question, I've heard contradictory opinions.

I thought I was being plain. A lot of online pro-migration rhetoric, particularly on twitter, is phrased as "revenge for colonialism" or suchlike. The reason these descendants of the colonised still exist to be able to make these kinds of statements is the extraordinary mercy of not wiping out the lineage of the conquered in its entirety. If the result of that mercy is disadvantaging ethnic Brits now, then that mercy was clearly a mistake, as far as we today are concerned, wasn't it?

I did not intend in any way to imply that we should finish the murderous job today, if that was what you were worried about. But I did mean that we should consider dismantling them as a political force.

The point of colonialism was never to eliminate the colonized nations or wipe them out. At least not the late colonialism, and I'd argue this is mostly true for most of European-based colonialism in general. The point was to lift the nations being colonized from the darkness where they dwell into the light of civilization. Now, there are many people who may argue this approach is problematic for many reasons, but that's what the colonizers tried to do. Of course, not entirely for free - in exchange, they expected the use of the resources of these nations (just as they use resources of their own nation), and have combined power of them plus colonies be much larger than them alone, and also maybe certain measure of gratitude and deference. Again, I am not discussing there if it was right for them to do that - but only that this is what they tried to do. You can not blame people for not doing properly something that they never intended to do in the first place. It wasn't "mercy", it was the whole plan from the start. Surely, if somebody objected, there might be some killing needed to be done, but again, only in the service of this larger goal.

The first colonialists were not humanitarians. They were a fairly callous, profit seeking band of adventurer-merchant-conqueror-grifters. Colonialism as a civilizing effort was a later rationalisation, and not a convincing one.

The first colonists didn't set the policy however (and they scarcely would wipe out or subjugate the whole the native population, either). The system that sent them - and came after they came back and reported they found something they can name by European name with added "New" in front - did. And I don't think "humanitarian" is a correct word anyway - at least not how we understand it now. "Paternalistic" or "nanny state" would be more appropriate term - and as we know, all these impulses did not disappear, they just turned inwards (mostly).

Colonialism as a civilizing effort was a later rationalisation, and not a convincing one.

How do you explain multiple evidence of the people performing colonialism themselves saying that's what they wanted, and not saying what they wanted was actually to wipe out the aboriginals completely, never actually trying consistently to do that, and spending a lot of effort on things like converting them to christianity, making them follow European customs, etc. etc.? They just knew in the future people would want to rationalize their actions exactly matching the way they are behaving, and obligingly laid the ground work for that, while not doing anything to achieve what they actually really wanted - which is wiping out the natives?

I mean, I think this is overly simplistic. Did some people aim intentionally for genocide back then? Sure, probably. Did some people aim, agitate, and advocate for uplift? It seems like this was also the case, hence schools and churches. And of course, the natives as labor force is and has always been among the resources being exploited, where it could be, and this can also explain the schools. Iunno, I don't think you're wrong, per se, I just don't think any single strategy can explain colonialism, being as it was an emergent venture prosecuted by many interest groups. I'd expect most things that were done to fulfill multiple interests.

Yes, it is a simplification, if we're talking about motivations of huge number of people, of course there's a variety there. But - if we talk about the leading ideology of the colonial project, I think there was such a thing, and I think it was the ideological and moral basis for the actions of many people and governments. And I think it's possible to say that the drive to wipe out the original population was never a main motivation there - though once can not ignore that specific homicidal and genocidal actions did take place. But it wasn't the overarching goal of this project, that's not what Europeans tried to do.

Can't be accused of being racist if there are no other races in your country.

I’m pretty sure the genocide necessary to achieve this will raise much more vocal and far longer lasting accusations of racism than anything you’re bothered by now. And that’s assuming it’s an even remotely likely possibility, which it thankfully isn’t.

I’m pretty sure the genocide necessary to achieve this will raise much more vocal and far longer lasting accusations of racism than anything you’re bothered by now.

It won't, though. Arabs engaged in quite a bit of slaving against europeans for quite a long time, with all the rape and brutality you could ask for. They also castrated the male slaves, so those male slaves had no descendents. Thanks to that innovation, their centuries of brutality is treated as a curious anecdote, not a crime that echoes down through the centuries and demands restitution.

Thanks to that innovation, their centuries of brutality is treated as a curious anecdote, not a crime that echoes down through the centuries and demands restitution.

Between the following 2 options, which one do you think is more likely to have affected this demand's non-existence?

  1. Arabs castrating their slaves.
  2. Arabs not having a culture that would tolerate people making such a demand, let alone a myriad of others that are related to this line of morality.

Call it premature, but I'm going to take the position that 2 probably matters more than 1.

I disagree. Issues in the present are raised by survivors of the past. Where there are no survivors, there is no one left to care.

The problem is that it's just not true that there are no descendants of Arab slavery in Saudi Arabia.

From Wiki:

Afro-Saudis are Saudi citizens of Black African heritage. Afro-Saudis are the largest Afro-Arab group.[1] They are spread all around the country but are mostly found in the major cities of Saudi Arabia.[2] Afro-Saudis speak Arabic and adhere to Islam.[3] Their origins date back centuries ago to African Muslim migrants settling in Saudi Arabia, and to the Arab slave trade.[4]

There is also this article from refworks. CDHR refers to the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia:

Sources indicate that many black African Saudi nationals are the descendents of slaves (CDHR 9 Jan. 2014; Professor 13 Jan. 2014). Sources note that slavery was not abolished in Saudi Arabia until 1964 (CDHR 9 Jan. 2014; IGA 10 Jan. 2014) [or 1962 (Professor 13 Jan. 2014; The New York Times 10 Apr. 2009)]. The UVM Professor expressed the opinion that racial discrimination generally stems from the history of slavery (13 Jan. 2013). Several sources indicate that the term abeed, meaning "slaves" [or abda "slave" (The Guardian 28 Sept. 2012)], is still being used to describe black Saudi citizens (IGA 10 Jan. 2014; CDHR 9 Jan. 2014a; The Guardian 28 Sept. 2012).

Their origins date back centuries ago to African Muslim migrants settling in Saudi Arabia, and to the Arab slave trade.

Be careful not to interpret a Wikipedia article as saying more than its literal words. Wikipedia editors carefully word the things they say as much as newspaper writers do.

Notice the lack of numbers, or even the lack of "the primary reason their ancestors came is..."? If it doesn't say "a lot of their descent is from slaves", don't read it to mean "a lot".

There is also this article from refworks. ... Sources indicate that many black African Saudi nationals are the descendents of slaves

The word "many", without being quantified, is a sign of someone trying to pull the wool over your eyes. If they had any evidence for "most", they would have said it, so they don't.

More comments

Can't be accused of being racist if there are no other races in your country.

They can still be imported and you're not genociding the whole world.

I don't think this is about race at all. Plenty of the other pictures which are examples of good photos show the mayor with exclusively white people. The point is that regular Londoners probably don't spend their weekends strolling along the most famous and photographed portions of the river. With the eye just behind them it looks like a stock photo or like tourists/day-trippers, not average Londoners going about their business. Now, overall they do say they want diversity, but that seems perfectly reasonable, and there is no reason to think that they therefore believe every single photo must contain someone not white. It's just that overall the Mayor should be photographed with a broad range of people; young and old, white, Asian and black, people in hard hats and people in suits etc. etc.

The essence of advertising is tying one's product to high status. And like it or not "new britons" are high status whilst "persons without a migrant background" are low status.

I've made this point before here when someone mentioned their (American) friend complaining about their city being "too white". This is all about aping the values and aesthetic of the ruling class, and we all know that "diversity" is one of their core values, by which they mean a virtuous sidelining of ethnic Europeans.

I just wish people would stop pretending this isn't what it is. But alas, pretending it's not happening is integral to the virtue of the thing so we can't even have a reasonable conversation and everyone has to be all cloak and dagger. Even though by now everyone knows who "real Londoners" are.

At least when the Chinese don't want certain races in their posters, they don't have to make elaborate postmodern discourses for it.

Even though by now everyone knows who "real Londoners" are

Do we? I would say that the connotation of 'real Londoners' is basically just 'doesn't live too far out and isn't too rich'. So while yes an Afro-Caribbean from Brixton is one sort of person that comes to mind when one says that phrase, so is a white plumber from Bethnal Green, or whatever. It just doesn't include bankers, lawyers and people from Upminster.

When Londoners talk about "real Londoners", which is rare, it usually refers to long-term permanent residents as opposed to transients (depending on context, tourists and other visitors, temporary residents such as students or corporate transferees, or rich people with multiple addresses meaning they aren't fully committed to London). The proposition "If you have lived in London for at least ten years, you are a real Londoner" doesn't attract much opposition. There is also a fairly strong consensus that the boundary of London is the M25 and that suburbanites are real Londoners too. The super-rich would be real Londoners if they were long-term permanent residents, but the view that super-rich people are globe-trotting jetsetters without the kind of commitment to any one city to qualify as a real Londoner is widely held.

If a real Londoner wrote that, "doesn't represent real Londoners" means that the people in the photo appear to be either tourists or posed models. I agree that it is possible that some recent (white, thick) graduate of a provincial university interning at a cheap PR agency could think that the family are too white to be real Londoners.

This will have been the decision of an agency designer. If someone had said, "what because they're all white?" they'd have said no, because it's a cheesy "too perfect" stock image. Someone senior or the client might have noted the possibility of negative headlines like the ones that have ensued, and then they'd have changed either the picture or the wording of the "don't". (I work in London agencies and know how all these conversations would likely go -- I also know this document won't necessarily have been looked at all that closely by anyone in a position of authority; brand books like this are often makework by agencies to pad their fees and to help brand managers accrue power to themselves. Once you've made something like this, every bit of communication goes through your office to check.)

Now, did the all-whiteness of the image contribute to the sense that this is a clear example of a cheesy "advertising of the past" type image? Very probably. It's what agencies are all keen to avoid.

To me the more interesting thing is that there are journalists scouring every little going-on in public life for evidence of wokeness. Standard culture war stuff I guess but it's a goddamn brand book, one of the least read types of document in the world and not usually a source of scandal!

are journalists scouring every little going-on in public life

That's a unreasonably negative way to describe journalists reading documents published on official government websites. This is pure "Republicans pounce" style blaming the messenger.

Are they really not doing this though?

There are articles about how being on time is racist. The car you drive is racist. Having a family is racist, etc.

Calling this pure 'republican whatever' is pure misdirection. Argue with their points, not just applying the 'out-group' bad label.

You're right, the scouring is actually good. The selection of this small detail and crafting it into a news story that will push their reader's known buttons is not good. Obviously if you think the story is a big deal you're entitled to disagree, and obviously the other side does it too.

You're right, but now race flip it. Imagine the shitstorm that would ensue if the mayor's office had a media book saying it would be wrong to have an image with 3 non-white people (not real Londoners!) without at least one white Briton.

Let's say the current scandal is a 2/10. The race-flipped version would be an 8. So is it really accurate to complain about oversensitivity here?

The best way through the culture way is an armed standoff, not one side ceding all ground to the other. We will have fewer cancelings when the right is able to cancel as well. When it's a superweapon that one side can use exclusively, they will use it as much as possible.

Yeah. I am very anti-cancellation but seeing heads roll for this would be something I would classify as only "slightly bad" instead of "terrible".

The concept of "try to show a realistic mix of ethnicities" just makes sense in mass communications so I'm actually unsure if this would be a much bigger scandal? It depends how it was worded, the nature of the examples etc.

PS Obviously if you used a picture of a black family with the caption "Not real Londoners" that would invite a scandalous interpretation but I don't know how far that takes us? Of course the implications change with a race flip, as black and white are not symmetrical opposites in British society.

I think this proves my point. "Diversity" is a fig leaf for promoting a race-based spoil system that promotes some groups ahead of others.

I don't know why people keep falling for the diversity canard. "But wait, why are white, working class Britons ridiculously underrepresented, I thought you cared about diversity", the naivë conservative whines, not aware that diversity was never the point.

I think you're being too generous. As Tanista said, there is already a separate example of a staged stock photo. They didn't say the photo of the family walking looked fake, they said it didn't represent 'real Londoners'. The mayor's office has since claimed that this caption was added mistakenly, but that just begs the questions of which caption they intended to put there and why the photo was on that list in the first place?

The photo itself doesn't look staged or fake to me. It looks like a photo of a real (albeit photogenic) London family walking around the city.

Moreover, page 35 specifies that photography must be diverse. Page 33 specifies that all photos must 'reflect a recognisable, real and diverse London'. Given that there are (as far as I can tell) no photos in the guide which only include indigenous (BIPOC?) Britons, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the problem with the photo was the ethnicity of the family.

And as someone who works in or with this industry, I don't know if you're just not aware of the implicit rules that the rest of us notice because you're too steeped in them, but this is a textbook example of shoehorned multiracialism. Do you ever notice how every advert on TV these days has either multiple ethnic groups or interracial relationships? Or how every costume drama somehow includes at least one West African character regardless of the setting or era? This is the same thing.

no photos in the guide which only include indigenous (BIPOC?) Britons

Really? Unless you're saying that you don't count the ones with Khan in them, which is almost all of them and therefore cheating really, there are several with just him and white people. There's one of him with two white police officers, with the white woman in the coffee shop (the only other person being a white guy in the background), with just a different white woman in the 'air quality event photo' and one with a white couple in their flat. The one with people strolling around the market square also looks mostly like white people, though maybe one or two in the background aren't white.

No, I wasn't counting the photos with Khan in them. As the guide itself says multiple times explicitly, real Londoners are diverse. The British family walking alongside the Thames are not real Londoners (according to the guide), but because of his brown skin, Khan bestows legitimate Londonness (even if he is an Uncle Tom).

I don't think it's necessary to bend over backwards to ignore what the authors of this guide are bashing us over the head with:

p6: Brand principles: We reflect the city’s diversity and openness.

p32: Photography supports our message and is...diverse

p33: The photos we use should reflect a recognisable, real and diverse London.

p35: [Photography] reflects diversity

p42: We should show a true, diverse London that Londoners can relate to.

p43: To fully document the event, we use different perspectives [that are] diverse

p47: [British family] doesn't represent real Londoners

p48: [Preferred social media shots] show audience diversity and their reaction

p50: Audience - Showing diversity and their reaction

p52: Encourage diversity in images

I'm not disputing that they want racial diversity in their photographs. They clearly do, and that's fine. What I'm disputing is this bizarre notion is that because one of the 'bad' photos has white people in it therefore they think white people can't be Londoners, despite all the other white people in the good photos. What about the almost exclusively white street scene? That family actually doesn't look like an 'ordinary London one', the problem being their location especially along with general demeanour that makes them look like tourists.

I'd be more amenable to that explanation if the caption read 'photos of tourists' or 'staged demeanour'.

But it didn't, it said they don't represent real Londoners. Their complaint was specifically about representation, not about the staging of the photo. According to the authors of that guide, a British family with a father, mother and two children are not representative of real Londoners. The guide also included about half a dozen other mentions of how real Londoners are diverse.

Moreover, their explanation when caught was that the 'caption was added in error' which is about as plausible as 'my twitter was hacked'. Documents like this don't get made or disseminated without half a dozen people proof-reading them. They knew what they were writing, they just didn't expect any tabloid journalists to read it.

Epistemic charity means taking people at their word, it doesn't mean rewriting their words into something they never said.

they don't represent real Londoners

They don't. The word 'represent' doesn't have to mean race. Tourists on a day trip do not represent real Londoners. And again, what about the almost exclusively white street scene?

Do you really think that they wrote 'this photo does not represent real Londoners' with the intention that the reader interpret this to mean 'these people look like tourists'. If they had wanted to say that the family looked like tourists, they could have written that. But they didn't, they wrote a caption which a normal person would interpret to mean that the photo has inadequate racial representation. If they meant what you're claiming they meant, they could have said that the caption was poorly worded. Instead they said it was 'added in error' whatever that means.

As for the street photo, I'm not sure which one you're referring to, but you answer your own question regardless. Mostly white is okay because this still has diversity, entirely white is bad because this photo is not diverse and therefore the people don't represent real Londoners.

More comments

I won't try and speak for the designer but I can imagine different don'ts for staging a situation fakely on the one hand and casting in a way that looks inauthentic on the other. I can't stress enough how makework these things are. The more categories of 'don't', the better, from the agency's point of view. I also know how these things come together, it could easily be a junior designer doing a quick web surf for images that they think look intuitively wrong for the brand, and then they try and think of various categories for why they look wrong so it looks structured and scalable and keeps clients convinced that this is not smoke and mirrors made by failed artists, but real rigorous MBA type stuff. How can we produce a lot of rules and stuff to sell the client is the guiding principle (can you tell I've had bad experiences with brand guidelines?).

I'm very aware that ads tend to try hard to 'represent' for a few reasons, and so if there are two people one will probably be non-white. The decisions are taken per piece of communication, and there are not large casts in all ads, so this has lately led to some kinds of minority over-representation (I don't know what the situation would be if all ads had a cast of thousands, enabling them to more accurately represent the actual demographic mix!).

A photo of a good looking, carefully dressed white nuclear family can easily come across as cheesy for a few reasons, especially that that is how the much mocked ads of the past looked. Agencies want to be seen as modern.

All this is fairly dumb but I think the causation is mostly due to dumb industry dynamics, with ideology part of the mix but not the whole story.

But again, the authors didn't write that the photo of the British family was cheesy or staged, they said they weren't real Londoners. In a guide where they also said (multiple times) that real Londoners were diverse. There's really no ambiguity about what they thought here.

Brand books are influential. Black people are pushed into every element of culture. Diversity doesn't mean mongolians, it means people who look like and are culturally african American. This is becoming a defining feature of culture in which add campaigns in places that barely have black people are full of them.

It's what agencies are all keen to avoid.

Why is it cheezy to show British people living in Britain? Isn't it more absurd to show it as an African nation? Is it cheezy when Eritreans don't have lots of white people in their adds?

because it's a cheesy "too perfect" stock image.

The photo looks like something from your neighbour's facebook page. The family looks average and it isn't an overly set up shot.

This is becoming a defining feature of culture in which add campaigns in places that barely have black people are full of them.

Aside from the fact that there are lots black people in London, the brand book actually does feature a broad range of races. Plenty of white people, plenty of people who are non-white but not black, and yes plenty of black people. Few Mongolians, presumably, because there are no Mongolians in London.

The family looks average and it isn't an overly set up shot.

Part of the problem is that they are right in front of the eye, which, combined with the general gaiety of the picture, makes them look like tourists.

Agreed. I started a count of white/black/Asian non-Khan faces, but it is skewed by the large-group pictures of "Positive and Optimistic" on p34 which is an almost-all-Asian group and of the African dance troupe on p43. But my casual impression is that the racial mix is only marginally less white than London, and probably not less white than young London (the ethnic minority population is a lot younger than the white population). The most obvious weirdness about the demographics of the photos, which I assume is a message that Khan's team intend to communicate but can't write down for legal reasons, is how young everyone except Khan is. There are zero photos showing Khan (who is 52) with someone who appears to be older than him, and only one picture without Khan (on p44) where a pensioner is in focus.

I don't agree that it looks like a Facebook image, if you can't see it you, can't see it, but that screams Getty to me. Look at the carefully casual composition of multiple landmarks in the background, harmonious wardrobe and filtered sun. I bet you it's chosen from hundreds of images of the same people, look how all four of them are smiling at once. Hardly the cheesiest example ever but it seems more appropriate to me for overseas tourists than an audience of jaded Londoners.

Of course I agree that it should be fine to show the right image of an all white family but I think the nature of the decision making process often favours mixed ethnicities except when casts are very large. (If you've seen TV ads with multiple vignettes of different families, pretty common on British TV, that is where you're most likely to see more homogenous families depicted.)

Maybe the "real Londoners" refers to not using stock photography of posed models? The author here charitably had the title to work with and picked some stock image that looked noticeably inauthentic, and race never went into it at all.

Right above it the report gives examples of staged or PR photos as a separate, but also bad, categories. If that's what they meant it was already covered.

Also,in my experience with Canadian ads, mixed race couples (especially with black people, who should be of much less relevance here) are very over-represented. I don't really see how it can be a coincidence at this point and not a result of the exact sentiment I'm seeing here, even if it isn't as badly or explicitly put. I think they just said the quiet part out loud this time.

Yeah I watched some big sporting event on a Canadian network and I had to google what percent of Canada is black. I follow the nba so I understand Canada has black immigrants but I didnt think they’d be in every car / insurance / beer ad during time outs

What little BBC I’ve watched seems to have a suspiciously high number of black people.

Pulling from an old post:

The BBC did do that ridiculous piece on a "typical" family in Roman Britain with a black Roman centurion. Which also permanently dinged my respect for Mary Beard when she lent it her name in defense

Then we have Stephen Moffat basically admitting to lying as a social engineering tactic. He's probably the most prominent person on the fiction side and apparently has first dibs on major British IP (Sherlock, Doctor Who, Jekyll, Dracula...) on that channel:

Moffat even talks about the idea he mentions above — the excuse of “historical accuracy” that some people often give to justify an all-white cast — “[W]e’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’”

It's past suspicious for me at this point.

I usually blame the US for everything wrong in the world but it may just be London's impact: half of Black Britons cluster in that area. People working there may just be exposed to disproportionate amounts of black people and react by doing stuff like this.

Which also permanently dinged my respect for Mary Beard when she lent it her name in defense

Her interactions with Taleb were how I was introduced to her work, so I was actually immensely shocked when I saw people treating her like a real academic or historian. I still don't think her work deserves any credibility, but I don't know if there's any amount of legitimate scholarship that can actually undo the corrosive effect that kind of politically motivated advocacy has on your reputation.

It's especially bad for someone who writes books for laymen.

If she was only involved in highly technical research about Roman numismatics or the climate of the early Roman Republic then it wouldn't be as bad both because the source material would be unlikely to be misinterpreted/misused and her audience of 400 specialists would have the immune system to deal with it.

Beard is one of those historians the rest of us are supposed to be able to trust and read without worrying she's a kook or going too far out on a limb. Except she just did. I like good pop history as much as anyone and she's a very common "safe" recommendation (especially if you want audiobooks) and it sucks cause I just don't trust her or want to hear from her. She seems respected for her actual scholarship, it's a shame this is how she advertised herself and spent her credibility.

"representation" is a basic requirement of every piece of media I make relating to characters. At the start, the art team defaulted to white characters, we have since been taught that every shot has at least one black character and one female. We instituted a skin-color randomizer to get more diversity, and then we instituted a skin-color-randomizer-override because randomness did not deliver the desired results.

Go figure. It's very noticeable for a lot of properties, like League of Legends, but I always wondered whether it was an unspoken thing or explicit rule in these companies to always be showing certain types front and center. I'm in a different field, but I have received explicit instruction in the past to request diversity from the graphics team when I have ad creatives made.

I suspect this is why you aren't allowed to change the race or sex of your character in Battlefield One. You're gonna have to swallow your pride and accept playing as a black woman fighting for Germany in WW1.

Yeah they can fuck right off with that. I was wondering why I was getting randomly teabagged in a Battlefield V multiplayer game all the time, lo and behold I noticed it had randomed me as a black skinny chick. Fucking nonsense like this in world war 2 games should be straight up illegal.

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