It’s December and as surely as that means Christmas music and year-in-review pieces it also means jewelry commercials on NFL football. This year’s crop have been the usual mess of half baked yet improbably romantic situations. A prosperous looking couple will be curled by the fire, or strolling down a ridiculously festive and prosperous street, or in some other impossibly romantic context when he reminds her of his love with some chemically inert metal and minerals. She becomes as smitten with him as when they were newlyweds. The end.
The hard and fast rule of this stupid and unvarying genre is that the couples be not only wealthy looking, but white. (There’s certainly a logic to that, most of the country’s rich people are white after all. Though you’d think it wouldn’t kill them to throw in an East or South Asian now and again.) To call these commercials behind the times is a massive understatement. Each one is a thirty second window into a lily white America that not only doesn’t exist now, but never existed period.
Most television commercials don’t insist on total whitewashing the way the ossified jewelry ads do, but that doesn’t mean that they’re much less racist. On the contrary, they’re obsessed with race. Tokenism was practically invented by teevee ads as a way to avoid dealing with race. The clientele at a store, the revelers at a party, really any large group depicted in an ad will have its multicultural contingent carefully calibrated to achieve the least offensive mix possible. It is the very essence of intellectual dishonesty, promoting cosmetic solutions and cover-your-ass based reasoning.
We can know this about them by what they don’t show us. For despite all the different colored people the one thing you never see is a biracial couple. If you see a man and a woman paired in a commercial, they will inevitably be the same color, whatever the product in question. The diversity is a lie.
Then a few weeks ago I saw this add for blue jeans:
I’m not a television historian, so maybe this isn’t the first time this has ever happened, but it is the first time I can remember seeing a biracial couple in a major television campaign. Not only is it a black man actually kissing a white woman (the very heart of the taboo), but the ad is trying to sell jeans by placing them in the context of authentic Americanism. It’s an appeal to the greatness of the American people and they’re placing the freedom to love anyone front and center. (None of this has a damn thing to do with blue jeans, of course, but for our purposes today that’s beside the point.)
It’s been more than four decades since Loving v. Virginia and little over a year since we elected our first half-black president, so we can see how long unspoken racism like this can take to fade. And it seems unlikely that we’ll get a mixed race couple in a jewelry ad any time soon. But it did happen, I saw it on national television, and that deserves a little recognition.
