The Colour of Progress

Back in the 1990s, creativity checked out for good. Here's the result.

The Seine at Charenton by Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin (1874)

This week, the strangest thing happened whilst I was busy minding my white privilege. Without ample warning, on the television screen before me appeared a white person.

Reader, please do not pretend to not know what I am talking about. Acknowledging the rare sighting of a white person in a commercial doesn’t make you a fascist; reading this essay will not tinder within you the unspeakable desire to march into the Sudetenland. Everything will be fine.

Despite Great Britain being an unexcitingly 85 percent white, adverts here paint a rather fanciful picture. So fanciful is that picture, British people overestimate the demographics of this country to comical proportions.

In these advanced times, to claim one spotted a white person on the TV is to join the ranks of the spurious, who, when walking their dogs, return convinced they’ve encountered a puma. Yes, the local media will humour you—everyone loves a ‘local nutter’ story—meanwhile, behind your back, people whisper: ‘A puma? He’s lost his marbles. Poor bloke.’

I remain in possession of my marbles. I saw what I saw. How empowering to witness an anaemic prole who shares my skin colour, buying a box of Bird’s Eye Crispy Pancakes on the lobotomy box!

Does this development mean that we white working-class boys have too entered the promised land?

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Perhaps I’ll chalk this enlivening experience down to the modern obsession with The First X to Do Y.

You know what I mean. That modern enthrallment with one’s immutable characteristics. That celebration of achievement based solely and shamelessly upon the achiever’s unachieved achievements.

It goes like so: The first [insert melanin density/genitalia/sexual orientation] to achieve [anything, really.] Add exclamation marks to taste.

This lurid celebration of false progress is that of a moribund culture masturbating to its mirror image, as Vesuvius rumbles in the distance. A silent fire alarm is a first. Would you buy one?

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I suspect the creators of these Twitter-brained adverts—a majority of whom are fellow Millennials—have neglected the counsel of their minority friends.

Many British minorities are doing rather well. If anyone bothered to ask, they’d find those whose ancestors were often defined by their skin colour, don’t want to be defined by their skin colour. They prefer merit over melanin.