APPLE PEELS OFF THE WHITE GUYS WITH NEW FOLDABLE iPHONE

THE VANISHING WHITE GUY OF CUPERTINO

By Winston Velvet

I went to Apple's website to look at the new folding phone and discovered something even more flexible than the screen: reality.

After about five minutes I stopped wondering how the hinge worked and started wondering where Apple had hidden the White guys.

I counted.

Twenty-two pictures.

Three Black women, all beautiful, all lit like somebody at Apple had just discovered Caravaggio.

Three or four Asian or Native women.

White women everywhere, one of them appearing twice, which may mean Apple ran out of women before it ran out of White men.

Somebody who might be Hispanic.

An Asian kid with a ball.

And several Black men.

TWO SUSPECTS

Then I went looking for White men.

I found two suspects.

One is a bearded guy in a long green coat standing so far down a hallway that Homeland Security would need facial-recognition software to determine his ethnicity or his sexual orientation.

Then there's another guy jumping through leaves with his orange hair flying and his face turned away.

Very convenient.

Try identifying this man.

"Is that him?"

"I think so."

"You see his face?"

"No."

"Good enough."

That's it.

Neither White man gets to hold the phone.

Twenty women in twenty-two pictures.

Two White men, preserved at a safe distance, as though the photographer feared that proximity might constitute an endorsement.

Now understand my position. I am a Black man. I am not here to file a grievance on behalf of White men. They have done fine. They own the company.

What interests me is not that they were left out, but who left them out. The joke is the guys who disappeared them look exactly like the guys who disappeared.

THE MEN WHO ERASED THEMSELVES

Apple is run by White guys. Its board, its senior leadership, the engineers who made the hinge, the finance people who will explain to you why it costs $2,400: by Apple's own diversity reports, that is a mostly White, mostly male building.

The White man has not vanished from Apple itself.

He disappears only when the photographer arrives.

They just don't photograph well anymore.

These are not people who were excluded from the photo shoot by some hostile outside force.

They approved the photo shoot. They looked at twenty-two pictures without themselves in them and said, "Perfect. Ship it."

Self-erasure has become a deliverable.

There is something admirable in a man who can attend his own disappearance and compliment the photographer.

The White guy in charge has quietly removed the White guy from the picture, and he did it out of a very specific emotion. Not guilt. Not generosity. Fear.

And once you notice it, good luck not noticing it.

Banks. Drug commercials. Universities. Airlines.

The White guy is still signing the checks, approving the budget, and running the meeting. He just doesn't want to appear in the brochure.

THE MAN IN THE GRAY T-SHIRT

Somewhere in Cupertino there is a creative director, and he is a nice man. Nice sneakers. Very thoughtful glasses.

He wears the same gray T-shirt every day so that nobody can accuse him of anything.

And he knows one thing about his job with absolute certainty: nobody has ever been fired for putting too few White men in an ad.

But he has watched colleagues get roasted alive on the internet for an all-White campaign, and he has decided that the safest thing he can do with his own demographic is to make it disappear. It is the corporate version of a man crossing the street to avoid himself.

EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT

And the women. I make it about 85 percent female across the page, which is a remarkable ratio for a phone that, by every survey, men and women buy in roughly equal numbers.

The few men who are allowed in are Black or ambiguous.

This is what I mean by cowardly, and I mean it fondly.

Cowardice, of a gentle and well-insured variety.

Courage would be casting the ad to look like the people who actually buy the product.

Even more courage would be casting it to look like Apple.

Now we're talking.

That'd scare the hell out of everybody.

Twenty-two photos of the actual people who built the thing, in their Patagonia vests, squinting.

Instead, they show me a Black man in a beautiful coat, unfolding a phone on a rooftop in a city.

Great coat. Million-dollar rooftop. Two-thousand-dollar phone.

WHAT I'D SAY TO THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR

So, to my friend in the gray T-shirt: relax.

Nobody hates you.

Put the Black guy on the rooftop, put the White woman with the expensive hair, put the Asian couple at the dinner table.

And then, picture four: you.

Gray shirt. Nervous smile. Squinting.

Come on, sweetheart.

Live a little.

I took the liberty to create a few new Apple White Ads