On Wednesday, as it happened, I went to see the “Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes,” which is something you can do at 11 o’clock in the morning in late November in Manhattan. I was by myself. My son, like so many children growing up in New York and fed with its imperious cultural attitudes, would sooner eat a head of escarole than choose to see something dependent on the word “spectacular” as a noun.

There were plenty of children in the audience though, even if it was a school day, and plenty of old people and middle-aged people. Many of them were wearing Santa hats. The crowd was overwhelmingly white.

I mention this fact because at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the Rockettes, whose performances are taken in by almost one million people every holiday season, are themselves almost all white. The show I saw featured, as far as I could tell, only one African-American dancer in the lineup of close to 40. There were, in the end, more camels on stage than black women.

Among the 80 dancers who make up the Rockettes corps, 10 percent are women of color, a spokeswoman for the company told me; you are only seeing half the cast during any given show because there are so many performances to fill — on weekends, up to six a day. Regardless of that, any variance in skin tone is obscured by lighting and makeup that have the effect of creating a stultifying homogeneity, which is the point and amounts, ultimately, to an eerie celebration of whiteness. Ancillary cast members in the pageant — non-Rockettes — include a black man playing an elf and a black man playing a bellman.