TV ads in black and light.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: Mass Media

TELEVISION advertisements are seen by most viewers as an annoyance to be tolerated while there is a timeout on the field or as a director holds back the final moments of a tense script. Who watches them? More people than you would think, but most of the ad viewing is passive. That is, it takes place while the viewer gets up for a drink refill or carries on a conversation.

So, we often cannot tell exactly what the ad is about--such as some beer or some fire sale or some other consumable product--but we do remember later that there were four guys in the ad and one of them was black. We see children playing after school in ads and some of them are black; some are white; some are Hispanic; occasionally, one of them is Asian. If you think about it, the proportions by race in advertising are something like the proportions that we have in the U.S.--about 64.7% white, 16% Hispanic, 12% black, 4.5% Asian, and 1.5% Native American.

With the roughly proportional placement of actors from particular racial groups, interacting in cooperative and friendly fashion, television advertising becomes an agent in the creation of a multiracial America. It does not reflect the actual interactions of even the actors offstage, let alone societal relations at large. It is the admirable and idealistic society in which advertising plots and casting occur. As an agent for media, the advertisers become critical partners in the creation of a multiracial society that does not otherwise exist. This is what we see; what children see; and what we will try to make of our society, based on the premises provided by advertising as well as our favorite movies and TV shows. It all settles into our consciousness whether we want it to or not.

Is there a mastermind at work in planning out racial integration on television and subsequently in society as a whole? Is it the business community? Is it consumers directing the business community that creates ads? Is it the government, or somehow the larger society that wants a certain view to prevail and presents it in the media as fact? Every fourth neighbor in a nice upper class neighborhood where houses are for sale is black. Every fourth child in a lunchroom is black. Bowling teams are made up of four whites and one black. It is not the way it is but it seems to be the way that someone wants it to be.

As a subset of one investigation into this direction-setting phenomenon, I have been tracking television advertisements in which there is an African-American couple. This is a relatively new phenomenon over the last few years. I am interested in the couples, but let us first make some notes on the context in which these black couples appear. Seldom do they appear as the only actors in the ace Often, there are four couples, one of which is black. Again, roughly the same proportions as you see with individuals.

Television advertising virtually never shows biracial couples. During the course of observation for this study, only three were recorded, including an...