Kim Belair, CEO of Sweet Baby Inc., gave the entire postmodern playbook away in 2019 and most people quietly ignored it. At a GDC panel that year she observed that the project of training people not to see color had not succeeded. What it produced, she said, were token characters. People who had been instructed to notice race and sex in a certain way were still noticing them, only not in the “correct” way. When it came to naming that correct way, she could offer only a feeling. The correct noticing remained undescribed because ordinary human perception does not work that way. This is because people naturally function by means of categorization. Postmodern speech tried to escape those boundaries and install a new, more virtuous seeing. What it actually produced was a multiplication of noticing while denying the ordinary means by which human beings have historically recognized one another.
Kim’s panel encapsulates the entire “woke” project as it was implemented so blatantly across media over the last decade. It was, in effect, a rush to the finish line. The entire postmodern ambition, to get people to think outside the box of generations of ordinary human thought processes, had not succeeded. When the slower work of reshaping how people actually see had stalled, the faster work of flooding the screen with the correct signals became the substitute strategy. Faced with that failure, a cohort of progressives, high on the values of modern progressive institutions, advanced through media harder than ever before.
This is how power has functioned since the Civil Rights settlement: continuous identity accounting became both the moral requirement and the practical path to institutional position. Those who could perform the required noticing most fluently were elevated; those who could not were sidelined. When the slower work of reshaping ordinary perception stalled, the same institutional logic that had placed them in power simply continued to operate through the channel it already controlled: media.
Almost everyone who covered the Sweet Baby Inc. dramas of the past few years completely missed this and most continue to miss it. The public conversation stayed at the level of whether a given video game was “well-written” and whether it preached its messages too obviously. The conversation never touched on the progressive ideals or institutional reward structures that had placed these people in positions of cultural power in the first place. Those were treated as a given. The scandals were therefore discussed as failures of craft and never as the predictable output of a speech that had already declared ordinary perception insufficient and set about replacing it through the only channel still fully under its control.
In Layman’s Terms
Remember Captain Panaka? The character was introduced in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, but you would not have know his name until the credits rolled given it is never said by anyone. Panaka was head of the Royal Naboo Security Forces and was heavily involved in much of the action throughout the movie. He is even given a number of lines to speak. Yet the character has never been featured as prominently as, say, Boba Fett whose helmet alone generated a mythology. For most people, Panaka (if he is remembered at all) is simply that black guy who served under Queen Amidala, argued briefly with Qui-Gon Jinn, and then was involved with the siege of the palace at the end of Episode I. Funnily enough, an old Episode I video game expanded his role and made him a playable character. He even appears in some of the Lego Star Wars titles as well. Yet, even that small enlargement has not made him a prominent character.
A generation later, the same grammar reappears. In Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series, a black female Sith appears named Reva. She is given a personal vendetta, several action and dialogue sequences, and even her own redemption arc. Yet many viewers met her as a blatant demographic decision and not as a true character. And whether or not the decision to cast her was made with the best of intentions is besides the point. Instead, the question on everyone’s mind should be, what changed? Why is one character left blurred in obscurity while the other is written as demanding your acknowledgement?
The Age of Entitlement
The Civil Rights Movement set double mandate that has infected contemporary storytelling. We are required to see color but the refusal to see it appropriately is treated as a crime. The ideal of colorblindness, the belief that race or ethnic identity can recede into the background of civic and narrative life, has been set aside. In its place stands a new requirement: the correct manner of being racist. This means one must adopt a completely positive outlook that treats the elevation and glorification of particular races as a moral good in itself. Certain faces must be advanced, stories must be centered, and casting decisions must be celebrated under an umbrella of historical redress. At the same time, the audience is forbidden to be “racist.” And that contradiction has been left unresolved.
The very act of putting one race forward as a privileged moral category is, by definition, a racial preference. But, for some reason, we don’t call this racist. Instead, our current speech declares this preference virtuous while branding any resistance to it as the true racism. Therein is the contradiction: the eye is commanded both to discriminate and to deny that it is discriminating. This grammar has resulted in an ideological double vision.
Captain Panaka’s presence was pre-empted by speech that surrounded his casting. The age had already declared that someone like him must be seen. The characters, as an individual, was left to compete with a Civil Rights-era ideal. Then, a generation later, the same speech produces Reva. Yet, where Panaka is quietly secondary, Reva is loudly marked. Both figures were pre-empted by the same grammar, yet one is diminished by it while the other is inflated by it,
Why did the grammar change? Consider how Mace Windu is remembered. He is recalled less as a specific temperament than as Samuel Jackson, as the black Jedi who used a purple lightsaber. The blade and the skin became the primary data and his role as Jedi Council member receded behind those categories. Consider how the character Ki-Adi-Mundi survives in memory largely through his alien designs. Ki-Adi-Mundi’s elongated skull has been joked about for years as the “penis-head Jedi”, a visual oddity functions as a high-contrast signal in the same way Boba Fett’s helmet or Windu’s purple saber does. The point being that these are not deep personalities. Instead, they are distinctive silhouettes the mind can latch onto when the writing supplies little else.
When it comes to media consumption, the audience is culturally conditioned to elevate certain signals to decisive prominence. Those signals will almost always win over actual character development, even when the signals remain purely formal or anatomical, and regardless of any moral ledger attached to them. The eye, which is trained to seize high-contrast markers, seizes them wherever they appear.
People in marketing understood this mechanism earlier and more clearly than most critics. They recognized that high-contrast signals, once installed in the culture, can function as reliable attention devices. A public that has been taught to notice certain markers with heightened moral or visual intensity, could be deployed to capture and direct attention. And so, the same speech that declared certain faces must be seen also discovered that white guilt is a powerful and reliable motivator. What happened in the last decade was that markets pushed this realization into experimentation. White guilt was monetized and demographic signaling was sold to them as virtue. The result was not the quiet recession of race into the background of civic life, but its permanent elevation into a high-stakes moral and commercial category. The audience was being trained to seize a new marker while the market intended to profit from the training. And so, what the previous age had made salient for reasons of historical redress, marketing simply put to work.
Anita Sarkeesian’s foray into video games offers another clear case. Holding a degree in the relevant media and communications fields, she operated at the intersection of activism and marketing. Her work did more than diagnose representation; it leveraged shame. Men were to be made to feel the weight of alleged historical and cultural culpability before being guided toward the cultural postures that demonstrated proper awareness of their sins. Guilt itself became a marketing instrument. To purchase the correct products or to support the correct corporations carried the correct signals. Affirming this publicly was a means of securing moral relief.
To better understand how we got here, one must read Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement. What is entailed therein is that the formal equality of the Civil Rights era was quickly supplemented by an administrative and cultural apparatus that required continuous racial accounting. This tasked all institutions, including media, with rooting out bias. Therefore, race had to be kept constantly visible as the diagnostic category. To demonstrate that one is not racist, one must notice race in the correct way. But, of course, this also means noticing it at all. The instruction “do not see race” and the simultaneous instruction “notice under-representation and correct it” cannot both be obeyed cleanly. Moreover, the second instruction tends to dominate because it is measurable and enforceable.
The Great Un-noticing Continues
Our speech creates the times we inhabit. The words a culture repeatedly speaks both describe the world around us and help us live within it. By speaking race into permanent salience, such as insisting that it must be noticed and morally weighted, the age altered the shared perceptual field in which persons appear to one another. The original ideal had been that race ought to be allowed to recede into the background of civic and narrative life. Instead, it was deliberately kept in the foreground. Salience gave certain actors a durable form of power. As long as race remained a high-stakes moral category, the charge of “racist” retained its force as a social and professional weapon. To keep the category visible was to keep the weapon loaded.
Marketing did not invent that salience. The elevation of race as a high-stakes marker was already underway through institutions, education, and moral discourse. What marketing recognized was the commercial utility of a public that had been trained to notice. Once the eye had been taught to seize certain markers with heightened intensity, those same markers could be used to capture attention and direct desire. Marketing used this new grammar to accelerate the reach of this salience and and deepen its hold on everyday perceptions.
Between roughly 2016 and 2025 the contradictions of that speech (the race be noticed as a decisive moral category) became public and, for a time, unanswerable. The same voices that insisted certain faces must be elevated also insisted that noticing the elevation was bigotry. The same institutions that celebrated demographic correction (DEI mandates) denied that any pattern of correction existed. The audience was ordered both to see and not to see, to affirm the ledger and to pretend the ledger was not being kept.
Speech cannot sustain a double command indefinitely (Matthew 6:24).
And when the commands finally collided in full public view, trust collapsed. Eventually, audiences were ordered both to see and not to see.
As of the past two years the louder woke declarations have quieted within much of mainstream media. The patterns often continue, only without the accompanying sermons. Subtle continuity has proven more effective than open proclamation. Many critics who spent years documenting forced representation and identity politic and spoke against it all now wish to declare the former categories (race, sex, etc.) incidental again. They speak as though the old color-blind transparency can simply be restored by an announcement, as if the last decade were a fever dream from which the culture has now politely awakened. Their direction tends to remain at a level of vague complaints about “the writing” without going beyond the surface about these things. They do not name the institutions that produce the writers, the educational formation that inducts them into these principles, nor the people who staff those institutions and continue to operate according to that same grammar. Many of the formerly “anti-woke” now appear to believe that “woke” was defeated last year and that anyone willing to call it out today is simply overreacting.
Have these critics learned nothing?
This is the same naïve faith that people will just reset their perceptions and allow the original interjections to take hold. Formerly it was “we must notice.” Now it is “we must un-notice.”
Neutrality is a myth. The supposed “pendulum” between left and right consistently makes concessions to the Left and none to the Right. We have already seen that the mythic “middle ground” that insists upon its own even-handedness possesses no mechanism of enforcement whenever the Left attacks it. But then, when the Right makes any cultural ground, these
Centrists immediately defers to the Left. This whole idea of a “balanced center” is, in operation, a one-way valve: pressure from one direction is absorbed and accommodated; pressure from the other is treated as the real threat to neutrality itself.
This posture cannot last. You cannot put speech back into silence. The genie called forth by more than a decade of institutional and cultural insistence does not return to its bottle because a centrist, exhausted by it all, now longs to restore the quieter accommodations of the Obama years. Priors do not dissolve by decree. No one approaches a story as a blank slate. We all carry genre expectations and franchise memory. More than ever, audiences are reactionary.
Media criticism that insists on some blasé, blank-slate posture while operating inside a culture that spent years making particular identity traits salient is not rigorous. Instead, it is the latest version of the Dunning-Krueger effect: enough knowledge to see that something went wrong, but insufficient knowledge to see how deeply the wrong has already taken root.
To speak only of symptoms while leaving the sources unnamed is to leave the speech that generates the symptoms intact. Platforms built on documenting the forced noticing cannot later treat the residue of that noticing as a mere failure of craft without explaining the discontinuity.
Our culture remains in this condition because the institutions that formed the present generation of storytellers have not renounced the speech that formed them. The educational backgrounds and the professional incentives continue to operate, only they have learned to do so with subtle messaging.
To recognize what is being done in our culture, one must first recognize what is under attack: the fundamental sediment of Christian thought and practice. The postmodern project was always an attempt to undermine Christian cultural inheritance and install something new in its place. Ordinary noticing of beauty and ugliness, of good and evil, of intelligence and stupidity, of quality and its absence, was treated as a box that had to be escaped. The same suspicion fell on the most basic relational categories: husband and wife, man and woman, parent and child, brother and sister, son and daughter. Under an egalitarian logic these distinctions are ultimately problematic. But the slower work of reshaping public perception about all these things had failed. And so, the same institutional logic that had elevated the reformers channeled it harder than. Thus, your screens were flooded with ever more pervasive forms of virtue signaling.
This is why the Sweet Baby Inc. dramas are so widely misread. The public conversation stayed at the level of whether a given game or show was “well-written” and whether it preached too obviously. It never touched the deeper questions about the ideals and institutional reward structures that had placed these people in positions of cultural power in the first place, nor the older Christian formation that the project was trying to supersede.
What then? Shall we continue to refuse to leave the current grammar unchallenged? Should we treat the ongoing cultural distortion as some kind of accident of bad craft? Or shall we name it as the predictable fruit of a speech that was deliberately installed and has not been revoked?
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The civil rights movement was about reaffirming that black people had the same rights as everyone else. We were to judge by character, not skin color. But that's no longer a thing, now it's race only which determines the outcome.