The Benetton Hierarchy

Way back in the early 1980s, the Italian apparel retailer Benetton began an ad campaign intended to promote global harmony. It started benignly, showing people of different skin colors happy together. When the campaign became stale (as ad campaigns usually do), they moved on to more “shock value” stuff, but the original diversity aspect hung around as a trope. My friends and I would joke “Benetton ad” if we lined up a certain way (white, black, Asian... you get the idea).

What I remember is that the ad promoted people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds amicably coexisting, without judgment. That was nice, and is a stark contrast to today’s form of diversity.

The key difference today is that equality, long a goal of forward thinkers, has been cast aside. Now, it’s all about hierarchy, with the most “traditionally oppressed” given ascendance over the “traditional oppressors.”

That shift away from equality to a ranking system has been going on for decades, and it was reflected in another area of pop culture: Hollywood.

Take a look across history at the racial or ethnic identities of movie and TV villains, and you will find a progression. In the 60s and 70s, when street crime was a common theme and the Mafia had its heyday, Italians were routinely cast as the toughs. Even in lighter fare (and often as heroes or antiheroes). In Happy Days, the “nice kids” were white-bread UK and northern European heritage, while Fonzie and the rest of the more nefarious sorts had surnames that ended in vowels. The next bad guys were various flavors of Latino, because 1980s and cocaine and cartels. They were followed by brutal Jamaican gangs, then hard-ass Russians, then Middle Eastern terrorists... and then more generic Eastern Europeans (with a special emphasis on Chechens).

Now? The ethnic origin has become an afterthought to the fundamental requirement: straight white men. This isn’t a new theme - the creator of the various Law and Orders, Dick Wolf, made sure that the majority of bad guys in his original series were well-to-do whites. Compared to real-world data, L&O over-represented whites (and women) as criminals... and as victims. That’s a dirty little reality check for the “defund the police” types - their policies do the greatest harm to minority victims of crime. But, that’s a bit for another day.

I’m not the only one who has noticed this.

A fellow (not Voltaire) once observed “to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” That fellow’s back story is highly problematic (reportedly a Neo Nazi, Holocaust-denying pedophile), and I won’t name him here, but that doesn’t mean his observation is incorrect (that’s a cautionary lesson against genetic fallacies). It suggests the converse: To learn who has less power in society, figure out who you are expected to criticize.

While not strictly true, it does carry a whiff of “yeah, that sounds right.” Bullies have power over the bullied, especially when everyone else rejects the right of the bullied to push back. The bullies, of course, employ a variant of inherited sin to justify their bullying, as if a white guy today must pay penance for the misdeeds of some white guy of yesteryear.

It’s all terribly dehumanizing. Which makes it perfect for the modern Left. Per their rules, you are nothing more than your immutable characteristics. You are not a person of free will and self-determination. The dice-roll that determined your sex, race, ethnicity, and place of birth define you, and if you don’t accept that, you are part of the(ir) problem.

This is one big reason that, despite the Right often giving me fits, I find it so tremendously difficult to find common ground with the Left. Fundamental to libertarianism is the primacy of the individual. It’s a view that liberals used to embrace before they sold their souls to the fascistic Leftists who, ironically, despise traditional liberal values. A few brave liberals are trying to claw back that position, but they face a massive uphill fight and a horde of angry miserables denouncing their straying off the plantation.