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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.
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.
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.
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