This is a totally different thing to the others. I grew up watching those same TV shows and commercials when I was a kid. I used to pretend I was Batman and Spiderman and it made not even the tiniest difference to me that they were white. It didn't occur to me that it made a difference. Thank God nobody told me it SHOULD make a difference. It never once occured to me that black people were inferior because I didn't see them as prominently on TV.
It's interesting that you mention Tarzan. I think Tarzan would be considered problematic whichever colour he was, don't you? White and he's white washing. Black, and he's portraying black people as animalistic primitives. This is part of the problem I'm pointing to. If the lens you look at the world though is "where is the racism?" rather than "is this racist?", then Tarzan (and may other things of course) are racist whichever way round you do them. A better example is Jesus. The magical, blond haired, blue eyed, white man from the Middle East. I was around ten before I realised how bizarre this was. Luckily it was around the same age I realised how bizarre religion was.
But to your example above, I never one assumed that the police should have been beating or shooting black people. This starts from the assumption of black people's inferiority or criminality and goes forward from there. This is a completely different breed of racism and one which I think is far from ubiquitous today. Of course, some black people ARE getting shot because they deserve to be. If you have an armed populace, some people will be shot by the police. This isn't a surprise. But when I hear about somebody being shot, my question is what happened, not what colour were they. The problem is that you have the Robin Di'Angelos of the world, who are self confessed racists (in the traditional sense, not in the new "everybody who's white is racist" sense) making themselves feel better (and becoming enormously wealthy) by telling all other white people that racism is just the default state of the human brain. This is untrue.
It's not that I disagree with the point you're making about representation. I think there are very few people arguing that people of colour shouldn't have better representation on TV and I think that in general it's hard to argue that this isn't happening. I'm saying that implicit bias, whiich literally everybody carries in one form or another, is not the same thing as racism. And conflating the two makes it harder to talk about examples of actual racism.
If you'd rather have a white dog than a black dog, I couldn't care less. If you're more likely to buy a product because a blond lady is holding it, fine, I'm sure we can all be manipulated by some version of this. If you think that black people are criminals who are getting what's coming to them when the police arrest or kill them, or if you woudn't hire us because you think we're going to be lazy or turn up late all the time, THAT'S a problem. The article is about where our priorities lie, and far too much of supposed anti-racism today is focusing on the first two examples because dealing with the latter two are much harder.
