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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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One thing that I don't understand is why nobody "inside the kitchen" don't notice how weird their attempts at propaganda seem.

I don't think most people think "white woman protagonist with black man love interest" is "propaganda." Like, propaganda for what? Would it be propaganda if they were both white? If it was an asian woman and a white man? What is the non-propaganda interracial pairing? What makes such a pairing not propaganda?

Like anything interracial pairing can be a propaganda or not depending on the context. In the American context there is widespread effort to reduce prevalence of white men in media with the goal of representation and making viewers less racist(in the vein of studies that showed that growing up in more diverse schools leads to being more inclusive). You can of course expect interracial pairs in US media without this factor, America is racially diverse and there are quite many interracial unions, but they are vastly overrepresented in media. I didn't write this in the OP because I thought that here most of the people already know about this.

Was it bad when whites and white men were over-represented in media? Did that make it difficult for you to enjoy a piece of media?

  • -16

Were they overrepresented? I'm sure they were at various points in time, but I'm not sure how much of that was intentional versus the realities of working with the materials on hand.

There is an interesting question as to what exactly constitutes overrepresentation here. If the average USer is white, and I make products targeting that average, then that could entail making films with just white people and never black people. It would be fair to say black people are not represented under that dynamic, but I'm not quite covinced it's fair to say whites would therefore have too much representation. Not that I wouldn't wouldn't find this hypothetical phenomenon somewhat offputting and worth correcting for to some degree.

If I recall films from the 90s to the 10s, I think the average filmgoer saw representation in aggregate that was more proportional to their lived experience. Yes, a lot of movie leads were white. But you still saw occasional movies from Denzel, Sam Jackson, Will Smith, Snipes, and so on. Movies and performances that weren't really coded 'black' and were intended for average peoples' consumption. Depending on where you are, this pattern probably lines up everywhere from your childhood upbringing to your office personnel: mostly white, and a few black people. And while you weren't blind to their skin color, there was a sense that it was wrong to approach them in those terms.

So while you may not have gotten a complete balanced breakfast of diversity and inclusion in any one given film, you probably did get it through a dozen or more films throughout the year. Nobody's wires gets tripped because this pattern matches to more Americans' lives than not. People get cynical - rightly so, I'd argue - when the images they regularly see on their screen is consistently discrepant with their realities. And it's especially repellent when it is clearly being done as a kind of moral mandate. When so many current media products individually reflect this kind of template diversity, you start to wonder what's up.

I wasn't knowledgeable about US to have an opinion about it when this was true. And I think that the latest part of that period was color blind enough to be just the result of fair hiring practice. But for example native Russian minorities being almost non-existent in Russian media apart from a selected few does bothers me.

Like, propaganda for what?

Miscegenation and racial admixture, of course.

Would it be propaganda if they were both white?

Obviously not.

If it was an asian woman and a white man?

No, because that pairing actually reflects reality rather than distorting it.

What is the non-propaganda interracial pairing? What makes such a pairing not propaganda?

There isn't one. This is about race.

No, because that pairing actually reflects reality rather than distorting it.

I don't see how this is true. According to PEW (as of 2017) 11% of interracial relationships in the US were white/black compared to 15% that are white/asian. Black men are twice as likely to have a white spouse as black women, while about 50% more asian women have a white spouse compared to asian men. That's 7% of all interracial marriages that are black man/white woman compared to 9% of interracial marriages that are white man/asian woman. Hardly a substantial difference.

Obviously not.

Why not? Surely it would be propaganda against race-mixing then.

That's 7% of all interracial marriages that are black man/white woman compared to 9% of interracial marriages that are white man/asian woman. Hardly a substantial difference.

It's huge when you consider the relative proportions of Black vs Asian people in the US.

According to the US census there are 41M black people in the US compared to 20M asians. I'm highly skeptical there are more white men married to asian women than black men married to white women.

  • -10

Well, there are according to your own immediately previous post, about 28% more WM/AW than BM/WW with no particular reason to think the flipped-gender versions would balance that out. This seems to roughly match my own observations for the tiny, potentially biased bit that's worth. The numbers and the way they were arrived at have a lot of room for rounding errors but not enough to cancel out or reverse the conclusion they'd lead you to.

The black male/white female divorce rate is astronomically higher than any other pairing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183451/

It's not the individual story, it's the statistical mismatch between stories generally and reality.

If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.

It's not the individual story, it's the statistical mismatch between stories generally and reality. If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.

Just have to say that is awesome and I will have to remember it.

What shows or stories are obliged to change their casting decisions in response to other shows casting decisions?

If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.

This works in the context of a particular series. I am not sure it works in the context of many different sets of writers on many different series.

  • -13

By the same token, if a bunch of different American shows uniformly showed white men as heroes and black men as villainous brutes, with all of those casting decisions happening independently, would that be indicative of some kind of broader societal bias?

Sure, but the degree of portrayal of interracial couples in media is not anywhere near that density.

  • -13

I believe the contention is that it in fact is near that density. It certainly is much, much higher than observed reality.