I don’t see much TV, but what I do confirms something that both my father and my friend Kelly have recently observed: television commercials have taken on a sort of inverted minstrel-show quality. That is to say, if there’s going to be a buffoon in a particular advert — the one who just doesn’t get it, and acts as a foil to another character who is wise enough to know the virtues of whatever product is being hawked — then the buffoon is invariably white and male. Of course, the majority of people in commercials are also white, but I think the pattern’s still there once you factor that out — and it’s probably even more pronounced on the gender side, where the numbers are more even.

Just in case you’re worried, this is not prelude to some kind of boring screed about “political correctness” (once an actual stifling orthodoxy; increasingly a glib way for genuine bigots to dismiss criticism) or to the risible claim that we should all feel sorry for the poor repressed white man. If anything, the point is the opposite.

Being a member of the dominant ethnic group means not having to think about ethnicity. In the U.S., “white” is the default; it vanishes into the background like the sounds or smells of a familiar place. You will not read many newspaper articles talking about the reaction of “many in the white community,” and I suspect that caucasians are far less likely than others to think of their ethnicity as something important to their identity or concept of self. Ditto, to a lesser extent, with gender and orientation. I will occasionally hear a friend talk about “My reaction to this as a woman / gay man,” whereas I can’t ever recall someone qualifying their perspective as that of a straight male.

So, what does this have to do with ads? Well, when you have an ad in which a straight white guy is the idiot, nobody takes him to be representatve. We don’t think, in any particular instance, that “white men” are being portrayed in a certain way — just this guy who, oh yeah, now that you mention it, is white. Make it a latino guy or a black woman, though, and the people at the ad agency might start worrying they’ll get letters: “Why are you making hispanics [plural] look stupid?”

You know two people are getting to be friends when they start to be able to make fun of each other without either taking it amiss. Advertising might be able to provide a similar barometer of race relations in America. You’ll know that a particular group no longer feels itself the target of widespread discrimination when it’s possible to make a member of that group look like a moron in a cereal commercial without triggering too much fuss.