Thursday, January 30, 2014

Only Black People Watch TV at 4 AM

I fell asleep earlier tonight while watching television with my favorite damsel. Waking up after midnight, not hungry enough to terrorize the neighbors, there is nothing left to do but watch the season finale of American Horror Story before tuning in to whatever else involves murder. It was about 4 AM when I decided to get on the internet while watching Deadly Women. Three commercials back to back had only black actors in them, for a total of 11 actors across all three. The first commercial didn't depict any people. The last commercial was an advertisement for another show, which cancelled my suspicion that maybe I was watching BET. 

Look, I'm not going to say all television marketing is racist, and I get that if you're going to scam people into your project, it certainly may help if the target can identify as much as possible with the actors in your commercial. Depictions of working-class black women will certainly appeal more to working-class black women, but this is the United States and the majority of commercials have white people, the occasional token black, an out of place Latino, rarely Asians, and sometimes Others.

I don't expect to see a Kentuckian of questionable ancestry anytime soon, nor am I questioning race and ethnicity in commercials, but I am questioning it at 4 in the morning. Do advertisers think only blacks watch television that early, or was it a fluke placement? If nothing else, for once, the commercials depicted authentic portrayals of blacks, they didn't look like they were exploited for entertainment value, and basically you couldn't tell they were written by rich white kids whose only exposure to people outside of their culture is their South Korean-born gardener and MTV. This was just something I found really odd. 

This image is to help me NOT make a joke about 
Mississipi and slavery. No, no, I still can't forget 
they just now outlawed it last year.