RaceFail - not just in SF/F
Holy cow. Harry Allen, in today's Media Assassin blog, follows up on the Racefaily ad from Old Navy that I posted on two days ago with another one.
Because of course this shit is pervasive. It has been for several centuries. As people have pointed out, when your race spends several hundred years (conservatively; we could make a case for several thousand if you want to talk Classical Greece and later Europe) constructing hate-filled stereotypes of PoC and embedding them throughout the socioeconomic structure, a mere 50 years of Civil Rights struggle, 150 years of Abolition (in the US; nationally, YMMV) doesn't suddenly uproot, weed out, and disembed them from the cultural vocabulary.
Media's vocabulary is full of the slapdash stupidity of stereotypes; it's a substitute for thinking.
Check out Allen's new commentary - I couldn't possibly say it better. Especially because he posts other examples. These include a shot from the classic Benetton "United Colors" ad series showing a black woman nursing a white baby, which raises interesting intertextual echoes of LJ management's heavy breathing over breastfeeding icons.
Because of course this shit is pervasive. It has been for several centuries. As people have pointed out, when your race spends several hundred years (conservatively; we could make a case for several thousand if you want to talk Classical Greece and later Europe) constructing hate-filled stereotypes of PoC and embedding them throughout the socioeconomic structure, a mere 50 years of Civil Rights struggle, 150 years of Abolition (in the US; nationally, YMMV) doesn't suddenly uproot, weed out, and disembed them from the cultural vocabulary.
Media's vocabulary is full of the slapdash stupidity of stereotypes; it's a substitute for thinking.
Check out Allen's new commentary - I couldn't possibly say it better. Especially because he posts other examples. These include a shot from the classic Benetton "United Colors" ad series showing a black woman nursing a white baby, which raises interesting intertextual echoes of LJ management's heavy breathing over breastfeeding icons.