Be careful with US Census data. In our census, we don't consider Hispanic to be a racial type, but a separate origin-related classification that you can either check or not check. So you can be Hispanic or Non-Hispanic, regardless of what race you otherwise specify. So you can be White and Hispanic, White and Non-Hispanic, Black and Hispanic, Black and Non-Hispanic, Asian and Hispanic, and so on...
Needless to say, this confuses a lot of people, who quite frankly don't know what race they should then identify as. My wife's whole family (they are Honduran/Mexican) usually goes, "what the hell, you guys?" A lot of people end up just choosing Other and Hispanic, because they don't want to identify as White, Black, Asian, Native American, etc...
Point being that Whites who are Hispanic are still Caucasian.
The other point being that you should take the numbers reported with a grain of salt, because it's largely a messed up system.
Now then...
I live in the US. We definitely have social problems relating to race, but I think they are much, much bigger than a mere "people of color don't appear enough on television" problem.
Blacks and Latinos make up a disproportionate portion of federal prisoners relative to their portion of the country's population. Why this is so is highly controversial.
As for commercials...
Here's a study on racial representation in prime time television advertising:
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic551691.files/Mastro%20and%20Stern.pdfThis is from 2003, so bear in mind this is ten year old information. In any case, to me it suggests a few things:
- American television commercials are filled predominantly with Whites and Blacks.
- Blacks are represented about proportionately to their actual representation in the U.S. population, while Whites are a bit overrepresented, and Latinos and Asians are underrepresented. (mostly unimportant side-note: I'm predominantly Scottish by heritage, and my father even regularly wears a kilt for special occasions, but I rarely see anyone wearing a kilt or speaking with a Scottish accent on American television)
- When elderly people are depicted, they are much more commonly Black or White than Asian or Latino.
- When Latinos are depicted, they are there more often than people of other races for the sake of filling an alluring/sexy role (i.e. the sexy Latino stereotype) or as the one gazing sexually upon another person.
- When Latino women are depicted, they are virtually always very thin and of above average attractiveness (as identified by the people doing the identification, so whatever that implies, you can decide for yourself).
Of course, this is focused just on television advertisements. We really need to think about how people are represented in the actual TV programs as well. We have a lot of shows that are targeted directly at Black audiences, but there are also a lot of shows that deliberately feature cast members of different races. The one that keeps coming to mind right now is Grey's Anatomy, but this is mostly because my wife is watching it every single damn day when I get home from work. Pretty much everyone in this show is a talented surgeon, and IIRC generally when there's a violent criminal, it's a white guy.
My point is that major TV producers aren't a bunch of blithering racist idiots. They understand that minority groups now make up a significant part of our population (and a quickly growing part!), and that in order to maximize their profits, they need their programming to appeal to those groups as well as to Whites. I think our programming has been moving in the right direction with regards to racial representation, and I can only imagine it will continue to do so.