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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.
They changed a black guy into a white guy, but they used cropping.
A black man took a gun to an anti-Obamacare rally. MSNBC showed his picture, or at least a picture of his shirt and gun (no hands or head), claimed it was a white guy and that he was motivated by racism.
Link here: Instapundit and Afterburner video
Poland like many parts of Eastern Europe did 'clean' up after ww2 by driving out anyone not Polish.
The last months of 1945-46 did let many parts of the Eastern Europe become very "homogeneous".
Decades later you can blame the Germans up to 45, the Soviets post 45.
In reality the locals did sort things out in a very permanent way.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
As a "current" Pole (born 82) I have to say that I mainly agree with you. None the less I don't think that we are xenophobic. Some fringe cases, as for instance the ultra right wing minded and older people brought up in a different time are, as they always (or most of the time) are in other countries as well. But I wouldn't say that Poles in general are xenophobic or racism. The fact is that we didn't really have any diversity in society for a very long time and just now we begin to learn about new cultures, new people and so one. As you've said we are mostly curious.
As to the matter at hand, Microsoft Poland did the "right" thing. A black (sorry I don't know what the PC way is of saying that :-)) man is a very rare thing in Poland, doubly so in a business context. So the ad wouldn't be as believable with him in it. The quality of the work is something completely diffrent
He grew up in an all-white (segregated_ neighborhood where racist comments like "come on, act like a white man" were quite the norm.
He didn't even think to question those kinds of comments until he ended up sharing a table with me for a couple of months. I'll tell you -- those racist comments were a hard habit to break. Even into the second month, he would still occasionally go "Oh come on, act like a whi.... blah, oh shit I did it again", and then spend the next couple of minutes apologizing to me.
It would have been funny if it wasn't for the fact that he was so hurt by what was coming out of his mouth.
My point though, is that -- until he met me, and the one other black student at the school, he hadn't even thought to reconsider the racist comments and jokes that he had grown up with -- or the racist attitudes that went with them.
Now, I realize that anti-racism really has to go a long way past simply banning racist jokes, but that does, at least, cause people to consider that the other racist attitudes that may be floating around their space aren't the norm and/or don't represent the real (and generally rather minor) differences between the races.
and, if you want to get a handle on just how close we all are, consider that geneticists were able to find more genetic diversity in a single band of chimps, than across the various human races.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.