Marketing Multiculturalism

Subliminal advertising, whereby a message appears on a TV or movie screen for a fleeting instant, too quick for the eye to see, but long enough for it to register on the subconscious, has long been banned in the UK. However, there are many similar tricks used by Marketing and advertising firms to subliminally plant an unspoken message in the subconscious mind of an unwary audience. This seldom more the case than with those in the business of promoting multiculturalism.

We have all long grown used to the TV shows and dramas which show a parallel universe beset by high levels of white crime and innocent ethnic victim-hood. American TV is perhaps the worst, indeed some of the cop shows are hardly worth watching, because you know from the outset that the villain will be the handsome white guy. Admittedly, sometimes they will play with us for the first two acts and allow us to believe that a black character might be guilty, however, you can guarantee that by part three he will be exposed as the innocent patsy of the “real” (meaning white) criminal.

Those who do not wish to have “Law and Order” and “CSI Vegas” ruined for them, should skip this paragraph, but there are various formulas to which the US shows almost always comply, as if the screen writers' guild have issued a set of rules which any studio producing a US cop show is obliged to follow.

Rule One: Whatever the story, a handsome rich white male will be revealed as an unpleasant person at some point.

Rule two: a black male will never guilty be of a serious crime unless

a) he was led into the crime by a much more morally reprehensible white character,
b) he committed the crime to pay for his dying daughter's / mother's / grandfather's urgent cancer surgery (or for an equivalent benevolent motive) or
c) the cop is black.

Rule three:
White women are only guilty if
a) they smoke,
b) they smoke and the victim is black or female
c) they are rich and smoke.

Rule four: Black women are never guilty of anything, ever.

Similar rules, together with the “include as many jolly black faces and presenters as possible in every scene” rule are followed in the UK in respect of the TV, Internet and magazine propaganda aimed at our children. However, when marketing multiculturalism to British grown ups the media reluctantly accepts that they are selling their product to a more sophisticated audience than than is generally the case in middle America, and this requires them to take a slightly more subtle approach.

The techniques used by the UK media in hyping “diversity” are less transparent than those used in America, but they are no less dishonest. One of the perhaps less subtle of these techniques is what one might call “racial proportionality weighting”, in this respect it is occasionally possible for an ethnic minority character in a soap opera or drama to be guilty of a crime or even, very occasionally, not be a very nice person. However, this must be offset by greater levels of white guilt and white unpleasantness and accompanied some biting reference to social (i.e. Black) deprivation. In addition any show which includes a guilty or unpleasant person of ethnic minority must also include an equal, or preferably greater, number of honest, upstanding, likeable and altogether admirable characters of similar ethnic heritage.

The racial proportionality technique is a more subtle form of the infamous “tiny minority” lie, which is regularly used, with varying degrees of success, when discussing extremism within the Islamic community.

Another and progressively more frequent technique is the use of the very white black man, that is to say, the employment of actors who look black but act white, just a little sexier. For most actors, acting is a precarious profession, often involving long periods of unemployment, however, this is not so for that small, select, group of clean cut black actors who look good in a blazer, they are never out of work. Such actors are usually presented as action heroes, generally brighter and more athletic/competent than their white counterparts and will invariably end up in a passionate clinch with the beautiful (white) heroine.

This is such a common device that I think many of us would be challenged were we asked to name a recent prime time TV drama or Soap opera which did not have one of the very white men as a central and active cast member. (Do not be fooled by Lenny Henry, ethnic characters are hugely over represented on UK TV, even in costume dramas where Victorian London is often portrayed as almost as racially mixed as modern day Croydon)

We all know that in real life such very white black men would not survive five minutes if their Range Rover broke down in Peckham, and that they probably think gang culture is something grown in a petrie dish, but Hey in the world of multicultural marketing he represents his race, and he ain't changed much since Sidney Poitier came to dinner.

The very white black man is also used, sadly with a lot of success, in the ongoing promotion of interracial sex which has has had such a damaging effect on the lives of so many young white girls, who have led to believe that the very white black man is representative of the majority of black males. However, that is a much larger and more serious issue which I will not address here.

Of the many other techniques used, the last I will focus on here is perhaps as close to subliminal advertising as it is possible to get. It is the use of the unspoken visual message, whereby the images chosen, and the manner in which they are presented, convey a subtle message designed to produce a response or stimulate an opinion on the part of the view.

An excellent example of the is the trailer for the forthcoming BBC series “White”, which supposedly deals with the experience of working class whites in modern Britain. In the trailer all we see is the head of a white male which gradually seems to disappear as words in various different foreign languages and dialects are written across his face. The image and the subject have been carefully chosen and manipulated in order to convey a subliminal message, in addition to the official one. It is clear that the BBC had no intention of presenting whiteness as being an attractive condition, and this is reflected in the choice of model who, with all due respect to the gentleman himself, is singularly unattractive. He is middle aged, he is overweight, he looks unfit, he is balding and he has a face which even a mother would struggle to love. The fact that Britain has produced some of the most famously handsome and attractive men from Carry Grant to Jude Law and David Beckham is ignored, and instead the white British male is presented as a semi obese slob.

Can we doubt for one moment that had the subject been the black community we would have been presented with either a smouldering dude or a beaming jolly Bob Marley look-a-like, or had it been the Asian community we would instead see a dark eyed, sari clad, lovely.

However, it is not just the choice of image, the manner in which it has been presented has also been deliberately manipulated to make whiteness appear even less appealing. The colour saturation has been reduced to the point where it is almost, but not quite, shot in black and white, this, as intended, presents an impression which is bleak, grim and... lacking in .er... colour (you get the message?). The image and, as such, the race is presented as something unappealing, unsatisfactory, incomplete and certainly not something the viewer would aspire to be part of. Can you, for one second, imagine that any other race would be presented in this way?

Were “White” to be instead another hymn to Multiculturalism, you can be assured that vivid and bright colours would be lavishly employed in order to remind the audience that, despite what they see around them, diversity is really a lot of fun.

From the clips we have seen of the series so far it seems that the same harsh, bleak, low saturation filming technique has been used, again presenting white Britain as somewhere nobody would wish to be, and, to stress the point we are promised that one of the programmes “White girl” will follow a young white girl as she escapes from her bleak existence in order to find solace in the warm and enlightened embrace of Islam.

From what we have seen of the “White” series, I am in little doubt that we can expect more of the anti white propaganda with which we are assailed both frontally and subliminally on a daily basis