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PSP Ad Draws Charges of Racism
Lord Kano writes "The Guardian Unlimited is reporting that a new Sony ad for the upcoming white PSP has caused an uproar because of claims that it carries racist overtones. The ad depicts a white woman, clad all in white, grabbing the face of a black model in a dominating pose." From the article: "It's questionable whether the world is ready to explore themes of race and domination in the context of a videogame console ad. Although not as wilfully controversial as Benetton's infamous 'United Colours' campaign, many viewers will be unwilling or unable to decode the imagery until it becomes about two different colours of plastic." What do you think about this latest in a long line of PSP ads of questionable taste?
All they had to do was buy one billboard, now everyone in America knows about the racist ad, oh and they know about the white psp too. These guys really know how to get the bang for the buck in advertising.
Jeebus. There are three ads:
* White woman over black woman.
* Black woman over white woman.
* White woman and black woman on equal footing.
Everyone can't stop talking about the first and ignoring the others. And what are they ignoring the most? They're all hot.
One, it isn't in the US. 2 you need to lighten up, sure racism exists, but its a video game advert and guess what, in another on it shows the black person on top of the white... I don't see what the big deal is personally, but I guess that is how I was raised, with quite a few good friends who are of different races. Check out The CAD newspose for an insightful post on the subject, as well as the pictures of the different ones, including prior art for a DS :P
Disclaimer: I am Canadian from a small border town near Niagara Falls.
--Valthan
What the heck are you going on about?! ...
The ad isn't racist, nor are the people looking at it. The ONLY people that seem to be racist are the hyper-sensitive Americans looking at the ad and applying their own screwed up values to it.
The above comment is a perfect example of that.
Have a look at Nintendo's work: http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/images/news/ds_ad .jpg
Seriously though, I think Tim's article on the whole issue covered this pretty well (currently on the front page of CAD).
I agree. If you think about racism, you'll find the ad. racist. If you don't give a damn about skin color, the ad is just the representation of PSP colors.
I'm not saying that this should be censored. It shouldn't.
But this feels like trolling -- deliberately saying or doing something controversial, to draw attention. And trolling is lame.
If they choose to open this door -- to associate an electronic device that has nothing to do with race with all of this ugly history, just to be titilating -- then they deserve whatever they get.
Is it sexist that the don't make a pink version, or is that homophobic today?
...Or is all this a big fuss over nothing, and a lot of free advertising for Sony?
Would it be more or less racist to deny the brown woman her right to choose to be paid to appear in the ad?
Should I be boycotting both versions of the PSP, because I'm a nudist and I fnd the clothing in the ads offensive?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
> the success of an add is whether or not it propts you do buy the product
Ad success is partially determined by whether it sticks in your head or not. Oftentimes it's too hard to determine if a particular ad resulted in a sale. This is because there's a time lag between when you see the ad and when you purchase. So they usually measure ad effectiveness by your ability to recall the ad after varying periods of time. So if you remember the ad two weeks from now, then they'll call it a success.
However, the ultimate purpose of all advertisements is to make you have a favorable attitude towards a product or service. So a particular advertisement, even if it's offensive, can be a success if it gets your attention, but you eventually forget about the offensive ad but remember the product in a good way.
However, it's been found that if you don't like an ad, you will associate negative feelings towards the product. Thus, there is such a thing as bad publicity.
The other spots put the ad in context, but I suspect they were created just for the purpose of having plausible deniability -- "Hey, we're not being racist! Look at the other spots [that you wouldn't have noticed before if we hadn't had the offensive version shown first]". However, I don't their intention was to be racist, but rather to be controversial (like the old Benetton ads). Sony was hoping to get tons of inevitable publicity from a racist ad, but they had the other two produced to shield themselves from the inevitable fall out.
It's important to remember that any major corporation (or political entity, for that matter) carefully scrutinizes every single element that goes into an ad photo. They hire psychologists for the sole purpose of this.
Like the old Simpsons episode, if you want advertisements to go away, stop paying attention. Just don't look.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
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DesireCampbell.com
The media is run by people and people are affected by their own bias. Somebody with no previous knowledge of racism would not think that this ad is promoting white supremacy in any way (especially after they see the other ads).
People looking for racist overtones will see them everywhere. A black co-worker at my last job complained about police racism everytime he got pulled over (not wearing a seatbelt, speeding, drunk driving, etc) even though he deserved to be stopped. He was convinced that the reason he was stopped so often was because he was black while I have never been stopped because I am white. Nevermind the fact that he was a terrible driver who regularly broke traffic laws.
In the case of the Sony ads people are seeing one instance of a white woman being agressive towards a black woman and assuming there is deep anti-black meaning behind it. Really, Sony's ad firm was trying to create a black vs. white ad campaign about the color of the PSP and used white and black people to help convey that message.
The real racists are the people who continually add to the problem by accusing people and companies of racism. They're the ones who can't handle the fact that people come in different colors and that those colors can be used for visual effect in movies, tv and ads. (Just look at how Snipes' black skin and clothes are used in Blade).
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I'm from the Netherlands and I'm not too happy some Californian assembly speaker is judging our culture with his prejudices. I doubt many of my fellow Dutch citizens would consider the ad racist, including my non-white fellow citizens, so he's basically stirring up a racial issue where there is none.
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Is the ad potentially racist?
yes.
However racism depends on sevreal factors for recognition, to someone insulated or otherwise un-exposed to a diversity of cultures on a personal and frequent basis such an ad would be unlikely to convey any racist undertones to them.
Racism greatly depends upon historical perspective. Without a history of oppression or ill-will surrounding race semi-fresh in the minds of the viewers it would be very difficult for any given imagery or prose to evoke such a moniker.
However, in the ad we have a white woman all decked out in white mencing a black woman in black, attached with "white is comming" as a slogan. Intentional or not, satire or not, literal or not, product advertising or not... it carries obvious racial unertones.. even if its creators have no recist intentions, it is almost blatantly made in a manner delibratly based upon racial issues or at the minimum a HUGE leap of total ingnorance to the world we live in.
Of course the intentions are all the more obvious by the markets they have decided to place it in, as the non-US release clearly indicates they knew just how the US (with a much more diverse population, and more open race relations issues) would react.
Bottom line is, the ad puts a black person in a position of total infiriority to a white person, with a tag line that emphasizes that aspect.
Its inflamatory at best.
As a note of intrest there are the other two images, which "balence it out"...
* White woman over black woman.
* Black woman over white woman.
* White woman and black woman on equal footing
But of course this is pointless, the other two images have little to no relevancy in the worlds current climate of race relations. (of course if we had a succeeding couple hundred years of black oppression of the masses, and subsequent social revolution... the situation would likely be just as inflamatory in the opposite direction).
The real issue here, is such an advert reinforces negative stereotypes and relationships in our still healing society. While subtle it would serve to influence our children giving them (children of all races) cause to somehow believe just a "tiny" bit more in white supiriority, seeding racists, low self esteem, etc...
Until the rifts between under-represented and marginalized minorities and the power wielding majority (still overwhelmingly white - and largely male) are diminished, such forms of "advertising" will remain bad mojo.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
If they had the chance, the blacks would have enslaved the whites. In fact, in Africa, blacks enslaved other blacks.
Race-neutral whites today have nothing to feel guilty about. Only a fool liberal goes around apologizing for his ancestors.
"Honestly, look at how racial diversity is crammed into everything. You almost never see an advertisement that doesn't include a black person or an asian person right up there with white people."
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Let's see here:
- How many female, non white in congress ?
- Any female or non white President yet ? don't think so.
- How many fortune 500 CEOs are female or nonwhite ?
- How many major metropolitan media are owned by female, nonwhites ?
- How many females in the Supreme court ? or lower court?
- How many nonwhites is anchoring for a major news network?
Stop belly aching - racial attitudes are real and still persists.
They are perhaps not overt, but still present.
Check out the site below for some glass ceiling charts based on EEOC data:
http://www.80-20educationalfoundation.org/glassce
Travel to a country like Brazil where centuries of mixing have
produced a wide range of skin colour and you will feel a very different
attitude. It's not better, just different.
There's a point at which we're keeping the wound from healing because we keep picking at the scab every time it itches.
As long as we let slavery control our thinking in any way by doing things like playing the slave card every time a racial issue comes up, we'll never escape its legacy. You can keep evoking the memory of slavery in your own mind all you want - and I hope you have fun dwelling in the ugly past. If you need me I'll be in the better future.
Indeed. I personally have never had any slaves or treated anyone differently because of their race. I'll certainly not be held accountable for something terrible which I could have in no way prevented (because it happened before I was born).
I believe you are correct, but I don't agree with what you were getting at.
I lot of people have to think about racism, whether they want to or not. So they are going to be more sensitive about stuff like that. If you live your life in a place where there is no, or little racism. The ad probably won't offend you.
But if racism is something you have to deal with on occasion, then you will be on your guard, and sometimes over react.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
In the town of Elsemere, Delaware, a local politician named John Jaremchuk recently proposed (local ordinance 447) that brown people (specifically, people of hispanic appearance) be required to carry papers proving citizenship, and that anyone (regardless of actual citizenship status) who could not produce such papers would be fined $100.
My daughter looks hispanic (though she's not) and she doesn't even *HAVE* citizenship papers. Neither do I, but I'm pasty white, so I get to go anywhere I want without question.
The proposal was defeated, but Jaremchuk has considerable local support... especially among the police and the anti-hispanic vigilante types who like to cause trouble in the low-end housing where there's a high percentage of illegal aliens... Jaremchuk is a rising star in Elsmere politics, and his entire platform is thinly veiled, weasel-worded white supremacy (he'd probably say "traditional cultural values" and "equality").
Elsmere also has the distinction of having the strongest curfew laws on the East Coast, but the curfew is only enforced on brown kids, as far as I've seen. We live less than ten miles from Elsmere, which is NOT below the Mason Dixon line - this is the industrial northeast of the USA here.
If you think color-line racism isn't alive and growing in America, you are living a very sheltered life. The 9/11 atrocities have proved the perfect wedge to drive racial profiling back into the mainstream of acceptability; in fact Ordinance 447 mentioned 9/11 specifically as justification.
People in the United States, particularly in certain parts of the United States, have to think about racism even if they are not themselves racists. A lot of people act as though racism is a thing of the distant past, simply because slavery was outlawed so long ago. But parts of this country still had institutionalized racism not forty years ago. People who experienced that are still alive, and their children certainly know all about it, and they still feel the effects economically, socially, and emotionally. And of course, there's still a marginal but not insignificant number of racists floating around, poking at wounds that haven't had time to heal yet; and there are people who exploit and exacerbate that emotion in order to gain and hold power within their community.
Some people will tell you that everyone needs to just get over it, that whites need not apologize for the actions of their ancestors or walk on eggshells to avoid giving offense. Those people don't get it. It's not over yet, not by a long shot. It's going to take a few generations for the emotional aspects of the memory to fade, and probably longer to right the social and economic wrongs that were done. In the meantime, a certain degree of sensitivity can only help.
So when some of us look at an advertisement that depicts a white person subjugating a black person, it's not so much a question of the ad itself being racist. In the context of its intent, it is clearly not. In the greater context of the time and society from which some of us observe that ad, its connotations are abrasive. Does this mean the ad in question is inappropriate? Not necessarily. It didn't run in the United States. Maybe in the Netherlands the social context is different, and those abrasive connotations are simply not there. I certainly hope that is the case. Regardless, your accusation of racism on (for instance) my part is misplaced.