This past Sunday morning (March 29) I was looking through the New York Times. I picked up this hefty advertisement for fun in the Florida sun and started flipping through it. The producers has pitched this to a different economic bracket and I was noticed the affluent looking people on the glossy pages. The front cover has a 20 something woman clearly having fun on this weird parasail with a seat. How did they get such a perfect angle of her hand in the water? Inside I noticed an attractive woman leaning into a more wrinkled, more mature man carrying a 4-5 year old boy (blue shorts and shirt are a giveaway).  But as I flipped though looking for more evidence of the target audience, I noticed that all the people were white.

Wait a minute! This is the New York Times. Then I started looking in earnest. Could that man dancing with the woman on page 14 be black? Hard to tell given the shadow and the romantic coloration. But possible. I kept turning pages.

I next found a picture of two women walking into the surf, water thigh high on p. 36. The white woman’s face is turned toward the camera. The other woman’s face is turned away from the camera. Her skin is dark. What ethnicity is she? This picture prefaces a list of the best “white, sugar-sand beaches” (p. 36).

I kept turning pages, the next black person appears in a panorama of an Italian market on p. 44. There are two black folks in this picture. The woman on the far left has her head turned away from the camera and the man walking to the right is blurred — but then everyone is blurred to show movement in the center of the shot.

The first time there is a black family is on page 62 in an advertisement for Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida. And on the 76-77 page spread for “Love: Romantic Excursions in our Little Pocket of Paradise,” there are two black couples on honeymoon.

After swiftly paging through the magazine, I decided to be a little more systematic. I took out the post-it flags and used it to mark pictures with people other than Caucasians. The 5 tabs on the top mark pages where non-white, non-black folks appear. The 8 tabs on the side mark pages where black folks appear. Now this glossy, expensive advertisement is 104 pages long with multiple pictures on each page.

What messages was this magazine/advertisement communicating — about who can go on vacation? who has money? who deserves to have a good time in this exclusive playground in Florida?