A couple of weeks ago the news media carried a story covering a Microsoft advertisement which was used in Poland. The image had originally been used in The United States and showed three office workers, one of them black. The Polish version of the image had a white guy’s face superimposed on the black man. The image editor appeared to have forgotten about his hands which were the original colour giving the game away.
Microsoft Ad
Accusations of racism ensued and Poland was branded a racist nation. However, branding a whole nation racist is itself a racist generalisation so let’s just think this through.
Microsoft ran an advert in a country with a diverse, ethically mixed population and wanted to run the same advert in another country with a predominantly white population.
When faced with these sorts of issues it is useful to alter aspects of the scenario slightly to challenge assumptions and see how this changes our reaction. So let’s say that the company was Chinese and they were selling to Kenya. Let’s say that the original image had three Chinese people. Would it be racist to change the image to one showing predominantly black people?
What if the Chinese company wanted to use the image in The United States but the U.S. marketing guys complained that the people in the image were not sufficiently ethnically diverse. The Chinese might respond that one guy was a Wega, one a Han Chinese and the other a Tibetan. Who’s the racist? The Chinese for not including a black guy or the Americans for thinking that all Orientals look the same?
Could Microsoft have run the same image showing only one black guy in an advert used in Nigeria? If they had, might this not be construed as lazy neo-imperialism?
The real question is this: Is it racist for a company to adjust the ethnic mix of characters in advertising to suit the target country? In my view it is not, it happens all the time. Advertisers design images so that the target audience will empathise with the people in the commercials and for this they try to reflect the ethnic make up of each country.
Other times advertisers might also try to project an image that people aspire to and this can mean that the people portrayed are of a different group than the target audience. An example of this was Australian TV advertising in the 1970s where English accents were used because they were considered more up market.
Nationality, race and ethnicity are all exploited to produce an image that the seller believes is attractive to the target audience. We all have prejudices and advertising executives make conscious attempts to exploit our unconscious prejudices. We believe that German cars are superior so Citroen tell us that the new C5 is “’Unmistakably German”.
We believe that Scots are prudent and so banks use Scottish accent for their commercials and who would dream of selling spaghetti source without an outrageous Italian accent?
There is an enormous block of hypocrisy on all sides of the racism debate and too many people scream
Rivers and Howe
racism as a cover for their own prejudice. This ranges from the supposedly anti-racists liberals treating Africans like children to the automatic condemnation of all things “little England”.
Darcus Howe fell into this trap during a BBC Radio 4 discussion with Joan Rivers in 2005. He casually slandered Ms. Rivers by saying that the word “black” offended her. This absurd insult was vehemently denied by Ms. Rivers but what was interesting about this episode was that she picked up on it at all. Racists insults such as these are often ignored and the accusation of racism sticks by default.
Too often accusations of racism against organisations are met by an attempt to distance the organisation from the supposed perpetrators. Presumably this is done because of the fear that the organisation will be branded as racist but this distancing means implicit acceptance of racism and only serves to reinforce the public perception that the incident itself was racist. In the case of Microsoft and the Polish advert this is by no means clear.
Racism has become a taboo in modern society which probably stems from the recognition of the evil of the African slave trade and The Holocaust. The feeble minded have picked up on the necessity to be anti-racists and interpreted this as a prejudice against white people and a knee jerk accusation of racism whenever they hear the word “black”.
I enjoy BBC, Radio 4 comedy but am often surprised at the vitriol of Jeremy Hardy and Markus Brigstock when they attack some poor soul who they have deemed a racist. These two admirable comedians fall into the same trap as the racists: The automatic and prejudice vilification of an individual because of an assumed membership of a hated group. The audience appears to laughs and claps energetically but this is not from mirth but a desperate attempt to distance themselves from the target of the abuse.
I am reminded of a sinister piece of video showing Sadam Hussein when president of Iraq. He sits smoking a cigar while casually ordering individuals to be taken away by security guards. The remaining individuals become frenetic in their efforts to show their allegiance to Sadam.
She’s a witch, he’s a communist, you’re a racists! We invent groups to exclude people more than we do to include them. In the Christian bible Mathew asks: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”
The answer, of course, is to distract attention.
Irrespective of whether Poles as a group are racist or not the furore over the Microsoft advert is not evidence either way. It is business as usual in the advertising industry met by prejudiced people deflecting scrutiny of their own views by publicly accusing other.
As if the witch hunt of racism is not enough a new prejudice is evolving along with a new terminology of persecution. We are now called to hate all those who remain sceptical about climate change and so, as we drive our cars, we can assuage our guilt by hurling abuse at the Chelsea Tractors and the Gas Guzzlers.
Humans! – Hypocrites the lot of them.
Bun Fight – Question Time with Nick Griffin
Tags: anti-semitism, Any Questions, BNP, British National Party, bun fight, Chris Huhne, David Dimbleby, Hypocrisy, hypocrites, indigenous British, indiginous people, Jack Straw, Nick Griffin and Bonnie Greer, racism, racists, Sayeeda Warsi, talk bollocks, talking bollocks
Ill Informed Ranting
I listened to Any Questions last week with the BNP leader Nick Griffin. I’d previously blogged about this and a friend email me to say that she thought that, contrary to my opinion, some people were too stupid to be exposed to Griffin’s sort of talk.
I’d respond that, while it’s true that stupid people are more susceptible to the ill informed rantings of racists (IIROR) they ar also more susceptible to the ill informed rantings of non-racists.
And good grief there was a lot of ill informed ranting on both sides in last week’s Question Time. It was a bun fight as I had predicted. Nobody let Nick Griffin finish a sentence. Everyone condemned him before he had a chance to condemn himself. I thought it was a missed opportunity to let the bloke show himself for what he was.
Someone asked him why he visited a Ku Klux Klan leader in America and he started to explain and said that this particular group were “almost totally non-violent” which I thought was a little gem but nobody was able to pull him up on this as no sooner had he uttered the words than the other panellists were asking him other questions and deriding his smile and they never actually picked up on this “almost totally..”.
It frustrates me that the self riotous lefties cannot bare for anyone to hear their opponents opinions. It’s as if they have no confidence in their own argument or opinions.
Bonnie Greer is a black American cultural commentator who usually appears on Newsnight reviewing films or theatre. She sat to Griffin’s left and he seemed constantly to be turning to her for approval.
Griffin made the point that everyone dismisses the idea that Britain has an “indigenous” people but they would not dare deny that Australian Aboriginals or Soux Indians are indigenous. I usually find Ms. Greer intelligent but last Thursday night she seemed determined to talk as much bollocks as everyone else. Pursuant to this she claimed that Britain does not have an indigenous population because it had an ice age! – Amazing.
I think much of the world had an ice age and if you’re going to claim that ice killed everyone off and so people had to immigrate into Britain then you could argue that for everyone in the world. There is even a respectable theory that organic compounds arrived on earth via comet debris and so you could argue that there are no indigenous people on Earth – If you want to be talking bollocks.
Chris Huhne, Sayeeda Warsi, Jack Straw, David Dimbleby, Nick Griffin and Bonnie Greer
Jack Straw sat to Dimbleby’s right. I quite respect Mr Straw and he normally talks sense but he too joined in with the spirit of the evening. He said that he came from a line of immigrants of Jewish origin and during World War 2 all ethnic groups in Britain had pulled together and fought off the Hun. This is the sort of thing we British like, a mongrel breed that’s pulls together in a pinch.
However, Griffin popped his balloon quite quickly by pointing out that Straw’s dad had been a conscientious objector during the war whereas Griffin’s dad had been in the Royal Airforce.
Straw bemoaned Griffin’s anti-semitism but later, when Griffin was trying to say that he wanted to support the “indigenous” people of Britain and that colour was not important, Straw kept shouting “you mean white, you mean white”. Straw is as white as Griffin on my TV so he can’t claim to be discriminated against by Griffin just because he’s a Jew and then accuse Griffin of limiting indigenous people of Britain to whites.
People become idiots when it comes to racism and think it means hating black people. The point is that Griffin was telling the truth when he said that colour is not important. Griffin hates Poles as well as Indians. Czechs as well as Nigerians. But he was not given time to say so as the angry mob just kept yelling that he hated blacks.
One black guy from the audience said that he was born in England, it was the only country he knew and he loved this country. He then asked Griffin where he should go and Griffin said that he was quite happy for the guy to stay in England. This answer seemed to disappoint everyone present.
It was interesting that after spending 90% of the program on baiting Griffin they then turned to other questions and some black guy from the audience complained that New Labour had lost control of immigration. Straw then spouted some platitudes about implementing a points system before Conservative MP Sayeeda Warsi joined in the criticism of New Labour on immigration.
I guess this was encouraging in a way. That, though there was real concern about the numbers of people immigrating to the UK, nobody was drawn to be sympathetic to Griffin or to blame the immigrants themselves.
The next question was about a gay pop singer who had died in Spain and how a newspaper had written something..not sure what….I think it was supposed to be insulting to gay people. The question was about free speech in the news papers.
After not letting Griffen finnish a single sentence the hypocrites then pontificated in favour of the freedom of the press to print whatever they like.
The evening was spent trying to put words in Griffin’s mouth and then getting angry when he refused to agree with them. The whole thing was a farce.
A more evenly argued review of the program than this one was published in The Independent the next day.