Comment by CoastalCoder

I think there's a large overlap there, in that in media, to ensure an experience of representation you often need to exaggerate minority presence (and not just in terms of ethnicity or gender) to create a reasonable impression, because if you "round down" you'll often end up with a homogeneous mass that creates impressions of bias in the other direction. In that sense, it will often end up aspirational.

E.g. let's say you're making something about a population with 5% black people, and you're presenting a group of 8. You could justify making that group entirely white very easily - you've just rounded down, and plenty of groups of 8 within a population like that will be all white (and some will be all black). But you're presenting a narrow slice of an experience of that society, and not including a single black person without reason makes it easy to create an impression of that population as entirely white.

But it also needs to at scale be representative within plausible limits, or it just gets insultingly dumb or even outright racist, just against a different set of people.

I think you can be aspirational for the future but I can't see how a request for an image in historical context can ever be desired to be aspirational instead of realistic?

On a second thought, maybe for requests like "picture of a crowd cheering signing of the declaration of independence" the exists a big public demand for images that are more diverse than reality was? However, there are many reasons to prefer historical accuracy even here.