This Can't be a Coincidance: [sic]

You know an irony I noticed? Okay, so naturally you’ve heard by now that racial tension is a popular meme nowadays, swaying the currents of politics and policy alike. One would imagine that, in appeasing all parties concerned, and with the hopes of nullifying any potential damage portended by the propagation of the racial meme, mass advertisers would seek to represent a variety of people(s) in their commercials and, for the most part, this they have done, yet not without one blaring shortcoming: a seeming overabundance of uniracial couples.

(I must add, ere I inscribe this, that Microsoft Word, amidst its ample embarrassments, recognizes the word “biracial” but not “uniracial”, as though the former were peculiar enough to merit a word and yet the latter were entirely commonplace and self-evident.)

The peculiarity of this is underscored by its obviousness; very often, the couples featured, at least in American commercials, are apparently African American, yet this is a bizarre statistical anomaly, since only approximately 13.4% of the United States population is listed as “black”, implying that a heteronormative pairing between any two “black” people is technically astronomically improbable, not even one per cent, if one considers first the probability of being born an African American and secondly the probability of finding an African American partner, divided by two in order to account for gender.

Now: don’t get me wrong; even my next-door neighbours are a well-to-do black family, and they have never, to my mind, impressed themselves upon me as bigots, even inviting their non-black friends over from time to time and going out of their way to converse with me. Yet one must nonetheless suspect some element of foul play, almost as though an archaic custom of breeding were decisive in one’s choice of mate.

The same, of course, cannot be said for any majoritarian classification; in so far as any person is part of a majority, it is a matter of common sense that most probably, though not exclusively, he or she should find one’s self involved with other members of the same majority; heterosexuality itself follows this pattern, though it remains highly regulated on both the legal and the civilian levels, to a Draconian extent, in spite of myths about the personal advantages of that agon we call heterosexuality which formed the basis for so many classic tragedies.

Yet the meme persists, and it is almost as though consumers have grown so accustomed to it that they come to not only expect it but to demand it indignantly. Profiling played an unforeseeable role in the public reception for the 2017 film Death Note, an adaptation of the hit Japanese animated and manga series. Anime fans, in spite of having seen a markedly pale-faced anti-hero throughout thirty-seven episodes, nonetheless complained that he was portrayed in the film by a Caucasian actor. Similar complaints were lodged against J.K. Rowling for the casting of Nagini in the 2018 film The Crimes of Grindelwald, even though there was never any reference made within the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts lore that precluded the possibility that Nagini might have resembled a Korean woman whilst in her human form.

There are, of course, arguments at once defending the propagation of uniracial couplings whilst denouncing casting choices which defy archaic ethnic prejudices, yet all of these arguments are either banal or so ridiculously remote from daily life that they serve only to enable the banal whilst empowering the pretentious. The simplest contention may be summarized in that trite adage “it’s easy for you to say,” implying that the luxury of seeing one’s own likeness frequently portrayed in media entails a certain responsibility to accommodate those parties whose likeness is less often celebrated.

Yet there are almost too many remonstrative counterarguments to be made against this. The most obvious is, of course, that no likeness is so deceptive that one would literally mistake the man on the screen for one’s own reflection; even dogs, who are supposed not to self-identify with their own reflections, (though I doubt this) would be smarter than we are if one were to imagine that anyone sharing a melanin type with one’s self is an extension of one’s own, autonomous identity. Furthermore, to classify people based upon melanin type would be to laugh boldly in the face of the oceanic variety of peoples and ethnicities who happen to share either eumelanin or pheomelanin in common. While we all are taught to profile, from a young age, and this essay in itself is made possible by access to this encultured habit, it does not excuse the cynical presumption that people WILL profile to such an extent as to make life-changing decisions accordingly.

Perhaps, as Edgard Varese put it: “[one] is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.”

[({Dm.R.G.)}]