How modern culture distorts reality

Much of “propaganda” began with techniques originally developed in advertising.

Written by Peter Frost.

Dutch people underestimate the crime rate of dark-skinned immigrants while overestimating the crime rate of light-skinned immigrants, including Roma, Turks and Chinese. Our perception of crime, and reality itself, is being distorted by the messaging of modern culture.

The crime news is unfair to Negroes, on the one hand, in that it emphasizes individual cases instead of statistical proportions ... and, on the other hand, in that all other aspects of Negro life are neglected in the white press which gives the unfavorable crime news an undue weight. Sometimes the white press "creates" a Negro crime wave where none actually exists. (Myrdal, 1944, pp. 655-656)

Gunnar Myrdal wrote An American Dilemma at the dawn of the civil rights era. His book appealed to the educated post-war public, and his arguments became the new conventional wisdom, particularly his claim that prejudice makes Black crime seem worse than it really is:

The popular belief that all Negroes are inherently criminal operates to increase arrests, and the Negro’s lack of political power prevents a white policeman from worrying about how many Negro arrests he makes. Some white criminals have made use of these prejudices to divert suspicion away from themselves onto Negroes: for example, there are many documented cases of white robbers blackening their faces when committing crimes. (Myrdal, 1944, p. 968)

The new post-war sensibility would give us the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. First published in 1960 and never out of print since, it tells the story of an innocent Black man who is presumed guilty of a crime. It was the book most often cited by British librarians in response to the question: "Which book should every adult read before they die?" (Pauli, 2006). Thus arose a recurring theme of modern culture: the Black man as innocent victim.

That theme would spread not only in the United States but also across the Western world, particularly among the university-educated. It would spread to countries with no history of black slavery or Jim Crow, and even to those that had no substantial African minority until recently.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee features a recurring theme of postwar American literature: a Black man is presumed guilty of a crime because he is Black.

Crime in the Netherlands: Perception and reality

One such country is the Netherlands. In a recent survey, 615 Dutch adults were given the following instructions:

There are many different immigrant groups in the Netherlands. For each of the groups, adjust the slider to your estimation of the crime rate relative to Dutch natives. This means you should adjust the slider to two (2) if you think the crime rate of this group is twice that of natives. (Kirkegaard and Gerritsen, 2021, p. 4)

The actual crime rate of each immigrant group is known from data published by the government. It was thus possible to measure how much the respondents overestimated or underestimated the crime rate of each immigrant group. About two-thirds were recruited by a firm that tends to select younger and more university-educated people.

The findings are shown in the graph below. The vertical axis shows the degree of anti-immigrant or pro-immigrant bias among the respondents. At values above zero, the immigrant crime rate was overestimated. At values below zero, it was underestimated. The horizontal axis shows the percentage of Muslims in the immigrants’ home country.

Gap between actual and perceived crime rates versus percentage of Muslims in the home country (Kirkegaard and Gerritsen, 2021).

The study’s authors argued that the respondents had a pro-Muslim bias, i.e., they systematically underestimated the crime rate of Muslim immigrants (Kirkegaard and Gerritsen, 2021, pp. 12-17). But this bias did not benefit all Muslims. In fact, the respondents actually overestimated the crime rate of immigrants from the largely Muslim countries of Indonesia, Syria, and Turkey, while correctly estimating the crime rate of immigrants from the largely Muslim countries of Egypt, Iran, and Iraq.

The above graph does show a bias, but not a pro-Muslim one. The respondents were most favorable toward immigrants from certain countries that are less than 25% Muslim. They greatly underestimated the crime rate (by a delta of 1 or more) of immigrants from Congo, Angola, Cape Verde, the Netherlands Antilles, and the Dominican Republic. Conversely, they greatly overestimated the crime rate of those from Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Mexico.

Do you see a pattern? The respondents were underestimating the crime rate of dark-skinned immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, while overestimating the crime rate of light-skinned immigrants from Europe and Asia. The bias was so strong that it distorted the perceptions of different Muslim groups – apparently according to the darkness or lightness of their skin. North Africans and Somalis were perceived as being less criminal than they really are, while Turks were perceived as being more criminal than they really are.

All in all, a systematic pro-Black bias better explains the data than the presumed pro-Muslim bias. The respondents were overestimating the crime rate not only of European immigrants but also of any group not sufficiently “Black,” including Chinese, Mexicans and, presumably, Roma.¹

What about respondents who supported “far right” nationalist parties? Were they less pro-Black and anti-White? Apparently not. Although nationalist voters were more inclined to overestimate the crime rate of Muslim immigrants, they were just as likely to underestimate the crime rate of Sub-Saharan African and Caribbean immigrants. The pro-Black bias was really that pervasive.

This bias may originate in modern cultural messaging, perhaps a consistent association of Blacks with positive stimuli and Whites with negative stimuli.

Manufacturing a new culture

Advertising doesn’t exist solely to promote specific products or services. It also exists to shape the culture and to change social norms. This is no fantasy. In fact, it’s a view openly held by advertisers. Back in 1938, an American trade journal described the role of business in creating not only new forms of merchandise but also new forms of culture. After learning how to manufacture products and bring them to market, “the future of business lay in its ability to manufacture customers as well as products” (Printers’ Ink, 1938, p. 397).

Keep in mind that the 1930s were a time of economic depression. The economy had to get moving again, and for that we had to get people spending more. A culture of thrift and frugality gave way to one of consumerism. The free-spending consumer thus became a recurrent theme of advertising from the 1940s onward.

That reason was understandable and hardly sinister. Consumerism helped to end the misery of the Depression and give us the affluence of the post-war era. However, once the power of advertising became widely known, the temptation arose to change our culture in other ways. Much of what we call “propaganda” began with techniques originally developed to market goods and services.

What, then, is the goal of “black-facing” our culture? To right a historical wrong? In terms of pure numbers, that goal has been achieved and indeed surpassed. Black faces today account for between one third and one half of all the faces in advertising. A contributor to The Washington Times observed:

The sheer overrepresentation of blacks in ads poses another potential obstacle to greater equality and inclusion. While statistics are hard to come by, we can say with confidence that blacks appear far in excess of their 13 percent of the population — so much so that if a foreigner had nothing to go on but our ads, she might reasonably conclude that America is a majority-African-American country. (Gatsiounis, 2019)

We are seeing the same pattern in Western countries where Blacks are an even smaller fraction of the population. In the UK, a study of a thousand advertisements shown over two months found that 37% of them featured Black people, who nonetheless make up only 4% of the British population (Gordon, 2019). A more recent study found even higher non-White overrepresentation in British (59%) French (55%) and German (47%) advertisements (Podcast of the Lotus Eaters, 2023).

Why is this happening? Or is it impertinent to ask the question?

Peter Frost has a PhD in anthropology from Université Laval. His main research interest is the role of sexual selection in shaping highly visible human traits, notably skin color, hair color, and eye color. Other research interests include gene-culture coevolution. Find his Newsletter here.

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References

Gatsiounis, I. (2019). When advertisers fetishize race. Depicting a sanitized racial utopia is unfamiliar to most Americans. The Washington Times, December 2 https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/2/when-advertisers-fetishize-race/

Gordon, A. (2019). Advertisers are 'trying too hard' to demonstrate diversity by shoehorning in minorities, study finds, as it reveals third of commercials now feature black people. Daily Mail, June 6 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7111087/Advertisers-trying-hard-demonstrate-diversity.html

Kirkegaard, E.O.W., and A. Gerritsen. (2021). A study of stereotype accuracy in the Netherlands: immigrant crime, occupational sex distribution, and provincial income inequality. OpenPsych, June 14 https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2021.06.14

Myrdal, G. (1944). An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Row.

Pauli, M. (2006). Harper Lee tops librarians' must-read list. The Guardian, March 2 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/mar/02/news.michellepauli  

Podcast of the Lotus Eaters. (2023). Why always this combo in ads? November 7

Printers’ Ink. A Journal for Advertisers (1938). Fifty Years: 1888-1938. “Chapter IX. Education in Consumption (1930-1938),” pp. 397-400.

Stevens, D.E. (2003). The Migration of the Romanian Roma to the UK: A Contextual Study. European Journal of Migration and Law 5(4): 439-461. https://doi.org/10.1163/157181603322849343  

1. Roma in Western Europe typically identify themselves to the authorities by their country of origin, not their ethnicity. The Dutch respondents greatly overestimated the crime rate of immigrants from Romania, who are widely considered to be mostly Roma:

In these figures, the number relating to the Roma is indeterminate since the ethnicity of asylum seekers is not recorded. Nonetheless, the assumption is that the majority of these applications were made by Roma. Certainly, the press is of this view. Articles discussing Czech or Romanian asylum seekers refer frequently to the Roma. As a result, it is easy for the ordinary member of the public to assume that such groups of applicants are of Roma extraction (Stevens, 2003, p. 440)