Find the White Guy

Good luck with that

The ideology of diversity has come a long way over the last 30 years. Arising from a commonsense truism (that a variety of people and experiences is generally better that sameness) it has grown to become an ideology of the ignorant, with roots grown deeply in academia, government and, increasingly, the bureaucracy of business.

Anybody who works in a modern corporation knows the “HR Chick.” In previous generations these young woman would have become rather drab teachers. In this day and age they instead go to business school, where they enroll in Human Resources Management. When they emerge they land jobs in corporate HR departments. They are without fail perky, nondescript women without noticeable abilities or the capacity for original thought . But with lots of self-esteem. I was in a management training meeting a couple of weeks ago when one of these HR Chicks stood up in front of a room of mostly experienced managers and told us with unimaginable earnestness that “…diversity is really important. In fact, it’s a competitive advantage. Because our customers are divers.e. There you go. Case closed.

It is easy to laugh at ignorant HR chicks. So easy, in fact, that I do it every chance I get. But while we can more or less ignore HR chicks, I have started to see another area in which the corporate world seems to be mindlessly aping the diversity mantra, and this one is more worrisome. The world of Corporate Marketing has become so awash in the diversity silliness that it is almost impossible to spot a white guy.

It is important to distinguish between marketing and advertising. Advertising is a persuasive appeal to the individual to buy a specific product or service. Marketing is an effort to establish an emotional connection or bond between an individual and a brand, or corporate identity. While the advertising world has been thoroughly marinated in diversity, it is in marketing that it has become so pervasive as to be, well, weird.

Modern marketing is mostly image-based, and is most likely to be encountered on corporate websites, promotional materials, brochures, and occasional high-end advertising on TV and in magazines. Generally speaking, the purpose is to present you with images which make you feel safe, confident, proud and happy. Which give you the “warm fuzzies.” This in turn is supposed to lead you to connect those emotions to the brand or entity doing the marketing. Oddly enough, this is aimed at internal as well as external audiences. The characters in the images frequently project levels of happiness and confidence which border on the insane. I suppose there is science to back up the impact of this sort of foolishness, but it seems like just so much propaganda to me.

The company I work for is a fast-growing company in the health care arena. When I started working here four years ago, all of our marketing materials featured actual employees. I found that to be a refreshing concept. We were projecting the actual “face” of the company, not a bunch of cardboard images specifically designed to mislead. But as the company grew, the decision was made by a new Marketing head to jettison the actual faces and invest in cutting edge standard marketing stock images.

Part of the “cutting edge” aspect of the images appeared to include a complete lack of white males. The formula appears to be as follows: 1 white female, 1 middle-aged black female, 1 young black male, 1 Asian male, 1 distinctly Latino-looking male. Sure, every once in awhile you might spot an elderly white male, and increasingly there might be a young male of decidedly gay imagery. But as I look around me at my Minnesota-based company I see roughly 48% white males, 49% white females, and 3% other. The images my company is putting out to represent the company bear no relationship at all to the people who actually work here. I figured that maybe this was just my company, so I poked around a little. Nope. This is the image set being put out by almost every single major corporate entity doing marketing today.

By the odd logic of the ideology of diversity, creating an image set that “looks like America” requires excluding the one demographic most directly involved in driving forward the economy of America.

Why is this necessary? The easy answer is because these same archetypes have been long excluded from these same marketing images. In the 50s there were virtually no blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc. included in marketing imagery. So now it is time to make up for that fact. On that basis it is hard to get too worked up about it. But what worries me more is the underlying leftist sensibility that imagery creates reality. The unspoken argument is that the reason that “protected groups” are not represented in corporate boardrooms is that they have been excluded from the imagery of American business. By embedding them into our collective consciousness, the belief is that we will “learn” to accept them as legitimate faces of corporate success, thus leading to greater success and inclusion for those groups. All of that only makes sense if one assumes a conspiracy of bias.

The problem with this is that it reflects the opposite of what actually produces success in corporate America. What produces actual success is producing results. Period. If we get the government out of the way and let Americans of all hues and backgrounds seek to serve their countrymen as effectively as possible, then the only discrimination that comes into play is the discrimination in favor of success.

But to admit that would be to admit the hollowness of the liberal enterprise. The Long March through the Institutions has wound its way to the marketing departments of American business. That pretty much means the left has conquered every part of American life that doesn’t actually have to produce anything of value. The danger is that it may just suck the life out of that part of American life that does.

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