Phony Baloney

I worked for a company in Philadelphia years ago that strongly encouraged all employees in the office to have their photos taken for marketing purposes. Photographers were hired to come in and take head shots of all participating employees. Some of the photos, we knew, would be used for promotional materials for the company. I didn't think much of it at the time and had my picture taken along with other employees in my department. When the marketing department showed us the marketing brochure some weeks later, I was surprised to see my photo along with the only two other non-white women in my group, right on the cover. The brochure had a number of employee photos featured, but the marketing people seemed to seek out anyone who wasn't white to put those folks up front. This company wasn't exactly the most diverse place either. There were hardly any non-white people in my own office. You could probably count the minority employees on two hands. Really. I felt that the management put the brochure out to try and convince others that the company was more inclusive than it really was. The minority employees were few and far between but, according to the marketing brochure, the place was like the United Nations: black, Latino, Asian...and some white folks. This marketing phony baloney angered me and I vowed never to participate in any kind of shenanigans like this again. At my current day job, employees are encouraged to post photos of themselves on the company's intranet page, but I have refused. All you'll see for Kim Davis is a blank avatar. I'm not letting these corporate overlords use my photo for some fake diversity marketing campaign. (This place isn't exactly a model of diversity either.)

I was reading comment on the Datalounge blog a week or so ago about commercials people hate (and there are many), but one person commented about seeing so many black people in commercials lately. The person basically said seeing black folks hocking everything from laundry detergent to car insurance was great, but it wasn't real and I agree. If I watched television and didn't know any better or came here from another country, I'd think the US was more diverse than it really is. What you see on TV, as we all know, isn't reality. Most of the advertising firms who create these commercials are filled with non-white people (men mainly) who make the final call on how many non-white people (if any) to put in a commercial. Groups of interracial young people are a really hot thing right now. I could see a bunch of guys sitting around a conference room table bouncing ideas off of each other (a la Mad Men). Hey, let's get an attractive multiracial group of kids together to go and get hamburgers and fries. None of the black kids can be too black, you know. Get some biracial ones and a few fair-skinned Hispanics. Or: Hey, let's have a choir of black people singing an 80s song by the Go-Gos while this blonde woman looks at cars. Yeah. Great. This, my friends, is fake diversity.