Aren’t we all “racist” these days? After all, so casually is the word tossed around that it is hard to see how it hasn’t been stripped of all meaning.
If, for example, you voted for Brexit or believe in strong borders, the nation state or the primacy of the majority culture inside Britain, you will inevitably have been branded a “racist” at some point. I know I have.
There was a time when to be hit by such an accusation would be reputation-destroying. But things are shifting. People are no longer easily convinced that someone accused of being a racist is, in fact, a racist.
They realise that the word has been so overused and devalued, especially in political debate, that the threshold for assuming guilt should probably be higher.
It is in that context that the furore over Reform MP Sarah Pochin’s remarks about the number of black and Asian characters in TV commercials should be seen.
Pochin said, during a media discussion about that subject, that it “drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people” before going on to make the argument that such output was rooted in woke ideology and not representative of the country beyond the M25.
Were her words poorly expressed? Unquestionably. But her underlying point – that the demographics in TV advertising are deliberately skewed so as to propagate a DEI-inspired image of the country that is flatly inaccurate – was undeniably correct. And, frankly, everyone knows it.
Only last week, research was published demonstrating this fact. Channel 4’s “The Mirror on the Industry” study showed that black people are massively overrepresented in TV commercials.
While making up only four per cent of the population, they feature in over half of all commercials. Advertising bosses also seem obsessed with featuring mixed-race families, even though they constitute a small minority in the real world.
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