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Microsoft Poland Photoshops Black Guy To White One
wanted writes "If you look at Microsoft's Poland business solutions Web site, you will probably not notice anything odd about the main picture. However, when you compare it with the original English version, you can see that someone decided that showing black people in Poland is probably not going to be convincing to business. They just Photoshopped the head of a white guy in for the black one, in an amateurish way, leaving his hand unchanged. (Here's a mirror in case something should happen to the original.)" We noted a few months back that the city of Toronto had done something similar.
The racism flag seems to get trotted out a little too often these days. Statistically speaking, are there a heck of a lot of black guys in Poland? Honest question, really. I dislike Microsoft for a lot of things, but the racism tag seems a little odd; I wasn't aware they had a reputation in that department.
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If they Photoshopped in a white guy over the black guy, what about the Asian guy? I mean, how likely are you to see a Korean guy walking the streets of Poland? ( Or maybe I just don't know the streets of Poland).
--Bahamlabs
Both pictures are just the result of what a marketing department researched out that sells.
The black man in the US pictures DOES NOT mean that they're not racist, not at all. I'm not saying that they are racist either. He's there because he can help to sell more.
That's it.
We all have seen those TV adds, that, no matter what is being sold, show a Latin, an Asian and a black child just to appear that they have evolved into a society when stupid racism times are long gone.
Races are just resources to sell, from a marketing point of view.
Just in case I'm Latin and yes, I took already my diazepam pill ten minutes ago.
What surprises me is that the black guy had to go, while the asian is alright.
They couldn't just take a new fucking picture with Polish people on it, now could they?
That has nothing to do with the digital world, it just got easier. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Che and Castro all had former "friends" who happened to fall out of grace removed from pictures in their times. But of course this is going back much more, way before the availability of photography. Media was never and will never be reliable in general.
And I would argue that using raw data to is the only reliable way to inform yourself, anything that has been selected, annotated or edited is the problem, bringing over a certain point of view which is not necessarily neutral. Of course, this will seldom be possible because you dont' have access to that raw data.
The biggest question is.
Who gets offended by these marketing tricks?
Is it whites, blacks, or the target market?
In thi s example the black guy was replaced, in the previous example the white guy was replaced. Both times I couldn't care less.
Some people get so offended if there is the slightest bit of "racial" incorrectness. Either this or they want to take a stand on something, anything, and this is the most convenient, sensitive issue they can find.
Frankly I am offended most by advertising in general. Specifically those that try to promote something that is unrealistic. ie: Weight loss PILLS, Drug companies telling everyone they have restless leg syndrome or the like. Who cares that the actors in an ad get swapped for another. Again these are paid actors/models. The photo is the property of the ad company or product's company and they are free to do with it what they want. There is nothing politically incorrect about the swap.
"Stand up" for real issues or take the easy route and pop an Enzyte.
... I wouldn't be surprised if the photo was originally was white and the US side photoshopped in a black guy.
Microsoft Poland doesn't like black people.
That's not necessarily true. In Central Europe, nationalism is alive and well (actually increasing due to the perceived cultural threat from the EU), and a picture with three different skin colors for three people will not be interpreted as affirmative action, but unwanted external cultural influence.
Particularly the black guy, as you don't expect to see black people every day.
In Hungary, at least, the original picture would cause outrage from the far-right and a measurable decrease in sales.
or to paraphrase, "market to your demographic". If our customer base is white, show white people in the advertising.
I've noticed that billboards in black neighbors show blacks. In Hispanic neighborhoods, they show Hispanics. etc, etc, etc.
This was just a poor attempt at getting something out the door to fit the job, rather than doing another shoot with fresh models.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Many Polish peoples are also racists.
By a strict definition, I'm also racist. Australians that I have encountered (without exception) in international airports have been unfailingly polite, helpful and friendly. Clearly a superior group of people.
My next international vacation is definitely going to be in Australia.
That video is awesome! Bill Whittle flashes the light of truth on the latest contemptuous dishonesty of the liberal media and educates on the conflict-mongering, anti-America roots of the American Left. It should be required viewing for every American.
I'm pretty sure they do that sort of stuff all the time. Earlier this year there was a small scandal regarding a teacher at a local school. The school resource officer involved apparently would not give comments that the news stations wanted, so they got a recording of a *different* police officer and played it while displaying a candid telephoto shot of the first guy. The newspapers also quoted the wrong officer and suggested that they were quoting the correct person.
it wasn't until years later that I really understood that there was anything wrong about the things I had said.
Translation: they finally brainwashed you. People are not equal, never were, and never will be, no matter how hard you try to believe it. But now we need a $8 million study to acknowledge the fact that men and women think differently.
Of course kids will joke at each others' expense: you're fat, she's blonde, he's black. That's all perfectly normal. The fact that people think merely making a nigger joke is racist means things are seriously fucked up. Quoting Troy: "It's not an insult to say a dead man - is dead."
Racism is when you hate those who are different for no logical reason, not merely talk about it casually and be fine with it. Also, most people here accept evolution for a fact, yet deny that it applies to humans as well. Ever heard the term "doublethink"?
Racism is when you hate those who are different for no logical reason, not merely talk about it casually and be fine with it.
Uh, no. Racism is not limited to "hate"- you can love people of one race over all others for no reason other than they are members of that race, that's still racism.
However, what is total bullshit about your analysis is that you think "talking casually about it and being fine with it" is not racism. Duh! You judge an entire group based on the attributes of a few individuals, but because you joke about it you aren't racist?
Dude, you've brainwashed yourself with your own rationalizations. You've embraced your own version of doublethink.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
However, what is total bullshit about your analysis is that you think "talking casually about it and being fine with it" is not racism. Duh! You judge an entire group based on the attributes of a few individuals, but because you joke about it you aren't racist?
Who said I judge anyone? I just don't shy away from the topic of skin color any more than from the topic of hair color. Consider the following joke: "How long is a gypsy girl a virgin? As long as she's stronger than her younger brother, runs faster than her older brother, and her dad's still in jail." If you can't tell it to your best friend, who happens to be a gypsy, and expect a good laugh from it over a beer at the pub, it's you who thinks way too much about ethnicity.
And here is what I consider a normal approach on the topic.
Um, no.
I am a white American living in Japan. I've been here about 10 years. People say racist things to me all the time. No, they don't mean any offense (usually), but that doesn't mean that I don't get offended. But I didn't used to.
When I first got here, little comments like "Oh! You can use chopsticks!" and "Wow, you can write kanji just like a Japanese person!" and "everyone move over; Klein needs space" (even though I am a very little guy), I thought it was quaint.
Now when those comments are made, it makes me feel excluded. As if I can never be treated normally, just because of my brown hair and blue eyes. The novelty has worn off.
A woman complemented me on my amazing Japanese a few months ago when I used a word I literally learned in my first semester of Japanese study. It bummed me out the rest of the day.
Then there's the "special" treatment you get from cops. And drunks.
Maybe at one point I thought minorities in the US were being oversensitive, but I think that after 10 years, I finally get it. Finding hateful racist people is getting harder every day, thank god, but when you're a minority, everything is just a little racist. You're treated differently, and it doesn't have anything to do with how you act or what you can or can't do. It just comes down to your physical attributes, and you can't change those. It just gets... tiring.
But I have it better than minorities in the US or Canada or wherever. This is not my home country. If I ever get totally sick of it (and I'll be honest, there are some things happening these days that are really making me question if it's worth being here--the cops' treatment is getting more special by the day), I can go home to the US where I'll be just another regular white guy. But a regular black guy in the US can't go anywhere. It's his home, and his life is one of being treated differently every single day. I understand why some people get touchy. I'm getting touchy, and I don't have it anywhere near as bad as black people in the US.
So there's the perspective of a white guy who has figured it out without any brainwashing.
Watch your mouth, people. It sucks when the main thing people remember about you is your race.
If you can't tell it to your best friend, who happens to be a gypsy, and expect a good laugh from it over a beer at the pub, it's you who thinks way too much about ethnicity.
And if you personally can't replace "gypsy" with any ethnic group and find the joke just as funny then you are stereotyping. And puh-lease, "my best friend is a ..." is the first sentence in the book of how to be a racist.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
that every company feels that every time they show a group of customers it has to be "diverse". For example the pic from the article: asian man, black man, white woman. Wow I guess MS doesn't have any white men using their products, and here I thought that was the majority in IT. Who knew. Anyways seems stupid to go out of your way to create artificial diversity.
I don't think the issue is whether you are able to connect to a black man. The picture for a Pole just screams "foreign", since the picture is nonrepresentative for a Polish office setting, just like a picture of for instance a family in an American style kitchen wouldn't communicate "family" but again "foreign". To get the feeling you are trying to communicate across you need to localize.
No way! If you say things like "brainwashing" and "doublethink" that many times, naturally you're totally immune to such phenomena! How could I possibly be wrong?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Can't speak for Poland, but for the US... yes, it's realistic. I work for a company that does it's business over the internet and we've hired just about every 'race' you can imagine, and not because it's mandated. They were legitimately the right persons for the job. (Thank God we don't do any of the 'affirmative action' bullshit. It's just as racist as being racist is.)
A picture like the one from MS (but with younger people) would be spot-on in a meeting from any department in the company, including accounting, customer service, and tech.
As for Mission Impossible... An American in Russia would be pretty freaking obvious no matter what color his skin was. The facial features are just too different and noticeable.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Microsoft Poland doesn't like black people.Nobody likes black people, not even other black people.
I'm just totally amazed that marketing hasn't realised that no-one swallows this 'we're all at work and we're totally loving it' utter bullshit that every file photo they have exudes. Just look at them in that photo.. all sitting there with their brilliant teeth, perfectly pressed business suits not a hair out of place and those BIG CHEESEY SHIT-EATING GRINS. Is she showing them pictures of kittens ?? Kittens are nice. They make me smile. But no.. the inference is that it's a fucking Powerpoint presentation.
FUCK OFF WITH THAT ALREADY. Have you ever seen a scene like that in your office. Don't you normally have at most a neutral expression whilst you're concentrating. This ridiculous crap they try to feed us that using their product will make us taller, more attractive, whiten our teeth and let us get more sleep is just insulting. It's software. Sell it like bridges.
And HR can all fuck off too...
That's not necessarily true. In Central Europe, nationalism is alive and well (actually increasing due to the perceived cultural threat from the EU), and a picture with three different skin colors for three people will not be interpreted as affirmative action, but unwanted external cultural influence.
Particularly the black guy, as you don't expect to see black people every day.
In Hungary, at least, the original picture would cause outrage from the far-right and a measurable decrease in sales.
In Holland we could not care less. Outrage over a picture like this? People in Hungary should get out more often. And i don't think that sales would suddenly drop because of this. The people who are dumb enough to get offended by this usually aren't the ones that make decisions that cause companies to buy the product or not.
So there aren't any white males in your company?
What makes me laugh is how carefully choreographed the original photo was. One black person, one asian, one white. Two men, one woman. It's amazing to see publicity photos etc and notice how many of them have the we-must-have-one-of-everything mentality in them. If everyone wasn't so paranoid about offending anyone, then the publicity shoot would have probably had a brief of "get three people in a room to look like they're having a fun meeting, then take a photo". Because everyone's afraid of being called a racist, I'm sure the brief would have included the caveat "Make sure one is black, one is Asian and at least one of them is a woman". The only thing that's missing is an "I'm gay" sign on one of them.
Outrage over a picture like this? People in Hungary should get out more often.
Well, that's kind of the point. You walk outside in Poland, and you don't see any black people.
What would be the reaction if this were marketed in Europe, and all three people were Asian? "Is this a Japanese board room?" Or if all three people were very dark-skinned black: "Where's this taking place? Kenya?" It's sort of the same thing.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The fact that you're expressing the typical politically correct BS while the OP is expressing a minority opinion should tell you who has been brainwashed.
A joke wouldn't be a joke without an element of truth.
For instance, try to make a joke about Chinese people being "lazy" and see if you can elicit a laugh, even from an evil racist.
Making a racial, religious, or cultural based joke is not "judging" a group as a whole, merely making fun of a stereotype easily formed by inductive reasoning. No intelligent person would universalize such a statement to 100% of the subject group.
Are you REALLY offended by such things? Or are you just exhibiting the Pavlovian-style "feigned offense" response that you were conditioned to make by TV and higher education?
Ok. So you need to "localize" the images. That makes a certain amount of sense. Except they didn't completely "localize" the image. They just got rid of the black guy while leaving the asian one behind. Also since we're going to the trouble of "localizing" then getting rid of the WASPy white faces would probably be a good idea too.
The "localized" version doesn't look terribly European either.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The original showed an Asian guy, a black guy and a white woman. How tediously politically correct. Also completely unrealistic for Poland. (Is it even realistic for the US?)
Is it even realistic for the US? Are you serious? I'm a black guy born on the African continent sitting in an office with a white woman and a jewish guy. In the office right next to mine there's an asian woman and a guy from the UK. Just walking down the hall yields people from every ethnicity. Sure there are obvious majorities and minorities, but it's almost impossible to snap a candid photo of this office and not have a pretty colorful palette of skin-tones. I'm not exactly a fan of political correctness, but I think this recent anti-PC movement smacks of a type of reactionary bigotry I'm even less comfortable with (probably because it always seems to be coming from the same 'demographic' of people).
The issue isn't that they felt having white guys in their ad would be more appropriate for their intended audience, the issue is that they whitewashed a black guy out of an existing image (poorly), suggesting that the black guy would be unacceptable (but the asian and woman were fine?). If they found the orriginal image inappropriate, then find, buy, or cast and shoot another photo that more suits your demographic. Slapping a black guy in white face is just stupid (look at the results), and I can't see how it's not insulting, if to no one else but your intended audience; suggesting they can't handle the sight of a black guy.
I'd doubt that textbook was written in 1650 - the wording would be modern.
At a guess, the original wording for that census would have been "Negro" or similar.