And Now a Woke Word from Our Sponsor. By Phil Shannon.
Does any other member of the TV audience feel they are being hit, over and over again, by the speeding diversity bandwagon which is now rolling through the all-too-frequent ad breaks? Commercials, it appears, have climbed onto the woke charabanc, no longer merely crass and annoying but in-your-face virtuous as they flaunt their woke casting of ethnic, racial and other minorities.
Ensuring that every woke category wins a prize, there is also a side-order of other go-to minorities, such as the gaily gay (in ads for on-line dating services and banks). The ‘generously-proportioned’ — overweight in the common parlance — also get their garlands for being not only ‘stunning and brave’ but, or so it is alleged, ‘healthy and beautiful’. …
In all their diverse glory, there they are, off-white, brown and black people lecturing their captive viewer that legacy Australia (Anglo-Irish-European) is passé and that the glorious new multicultural Australia (or whatever Aboriginal word will likely soon be the continent’s new name) is where it’s at. The endless parade of happily mingling ethnicities on our TV screens is a less-than-subtle moral rebuke to all the unbelievers in the great big racial melting pot.
Survey:
To see if this perception of a contemporary upsurge in woke TV ads holds any empirical water or whether noticing such a trend is old-fashioned lizard-brained bigotry, at great sacrifice I sampled the racial and ethnic composition of TV ads over the past two weeks of prime-time TV as it went to air in the Adelaide market. Only those TV stations raising revenue from commercials (thus including SBS) were in scope because the ABC is not only ad-free but also a giant, ever-rolling 24/7 advertisement for the wonders of wokeness through its every programming choice and news coverage. …
Only a third of Australian TV ads are all-white. True, Australia has been ‘culturally enriched’, as they say, by a further period of mass, non-white immigration but the migration levels have been nowhere near enough to plunge the ‘White-Caucasian’ demographic share of the Australian population into the low-thirties percentage region. …
About 85% of Australians are white:
Driving this woke front is not, therefore, demography but woke ideology running amok in corporate boardrooms. … Let’s emphasise our anti-racist dedication while we’re at it by, say, including lots of actors of conspicuously African origin with Afro-hairdos — because nothing says ‘Australia’ like the ubiquitous tonsorial presence of frizzy hair. …
Never, however, underestimate the ability of modern corporations, especially those operating within the woke zeitgeist, to sabotage their own commercial success by embracing the diversity fetish at all costs, even that of profitability. Think of Gillette’s recent and insane — there is no other word for it — ad campaign which sought to sell razors to men by telling them how generally awful, stupid and violent they are. Gillette’s sales are said to be slowly recovering from the backlash, but ‘go woke, go broke’ remains in effect. …
If the hit-you-over-the-head woke make-over of Australian TV ads is a metric for the dismembering of Western civilisation before the high altar of multi-culti diversity, then the great woke quest to turn those ‘non-dominant cultures’ in the wicked white West into the ‘dominant’ culture is well on track. That can only happen, mind you, when a country is intent on losing its unique national identity and cultural heritage.
