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Sprint Quickly Pulls Video Ad Calling T-Mobile 'Ghetto' (fiercewireless.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Sprint has pulled an ad in which it was calling its competitor, T-Mobile, "ghetto." The ad featured company's CEO Marcelo Claure. "I'm going to tell you a carrier name and I want you to basically tell me what comes to your mind," Claure said in the ad. "T-Mobile. When I say T-Mobile to you, just a couple of words?" Which is when a white woman chimes in, "Oh my god the first word that came to my head was ... ghetto." "That sounds, like, terrible," she says. "I don't know't know. There's always, like, three carriers; there's AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. And people who have T-Mobile are just, like... Why do you have T-Mobile?""We're sharing real comments from real customers," Claure wrote in the aftermath of criticism. "Maybe not the best choice of words by the customer. Not meant to offend anyone."
...but there were no negroes in the Hot Club in Paris playing with Stepane Grapelli and Django Reinhardt and their crazy gypsy buddies.
Nor would there have been, considering the club opened in '34 and jazz originated decades earlier in New Orleans... but thanks for playing. ;)
Geez, I for the days of NOT that long ago, when the only words you couldn't use on TV were the George Carlin Famous 7.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I have used t-mobile for about 5 or 6 years. I have never had a problem with the service. Contrary to what that airhead customer thinks, I don't live in a ghetto.
:)
I love to see the look on the faces of my ATT friends when I tell them I only pay $50/month for unlimited text/calls/data (up to 2GB at 4g then throttled back after that). I also have rollover data, so what I don't use gets put on the next month's "allowance". They just sent me a text the other day showing I have about 6GB of 4g-speed data to use.
And recently they mentioned something about certain kinds of streaming traffic not counting towards your monthly allotment. I haven't really looked into it yet.
On a personal note, the attitude of that customer makes me sick. I have friends and family of different races. I know people who live "in the ghetto". They are not subhumans you can look down your nose at...what a bitch.
But the person on the ad was not calling anyone "Ghetto"...she said the word to describe T-Mobile, a competitor, was Ghetto.
Thinking of the broad definition of the word, things like:
the poorest part of a city...
a situation that resembles a ghetto especially in conferring inferior status or limiting opportunity....
I'd think it would be somewhat of a appropriate word. It isn't even remotely referring to the people that live there, but to the area itself.
But no...everyone has to attach a racist tag to it.
Funny....where is the uproar over the NY Mayor and Clinton's skit the other night, where the mayor said he was late because he was on CP time?
I saw a little blurb about it on the new...and I didn't even know what CP time was...apparently it is "Colored People" time.
It isn't offensive to me...but God help us if a couple of conservative type folks did the exact same thing, there'd be howls in the media for their heads.
But, I digress.
People, just get over it...pretty soon, NOTHING will be able to be said.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
> People, just get over it...pretty soon, NOTHING will be able to be said.
Oh, please. There is no never-expanding-list of things you can't say. It's merely an matter of respect. This article is a perfect illustration of that. The word itself isn't the issue, it's the interpretation of what the person meant. To most it is doubtful that that person pored over a dictionary trying to find the best most accurate word to use. Instead they probably thought the person had a particular picture in their head, one they found unflattering. They could have said "trailer park", not even a remotely racial term, and the same would have happened.
People don't like being judged for something they didn't do. That's it, that's the whole story. There are lots of terms that do just that, and you already know what they are, it's not some new thing that just came along. What is changing is that the scope of people you meet in your life is broadening. In my own case I gave up using the R-word very fast after doing some volunteer work for the Special Olympics. I'm in a position where I could really darken the day of someone who doesn't deserve it. Nobody has ever actually gotten on my case before for using that term, I didn't have to find out it was on a "bad list" by using the term in front of one of the athletes. All I needed to know was what the word meant. It isn't too much to ask to know what words mean.
You don't actually have to live in fear of accidentally using the wrong term, especially if you're not already an asshole.
Finally someone with some sense on Slashdot. How insecure are people posting here that they have to cry every time a story comes up that references changing social etiquette norms, especially in public circumstances? The exercise was word association. The woman associated T-mobile with "ghetto", and the implication was clearly that it was meant to be derogatory, in the sense that it's bad to be associated with a ghetto. Many people are forced to live in what have traditionally been called ghettos, this does not reflect who they are as people but the association with "ghetto" impacts their life in negative ways, from financial and social hardship to just feeling shitty. Commercials like this normalize this association in our culture and imply that the effect is neglible. This further hurts the people already affected by the association because it basically says that their negative experience with the association doesn't matter. Now, you can be an asshole all you want in private, that's fine if that's what it takes to make you feel better about yourself. But in the public domain, when your thoughts may be heard by anyone, have a little consideration about the actual effects of what your dumb ass wants to say. I swear reading all these comments on Slashdot complaining about PC culture, I feel like you all are a second away from killing yourselves because you can't handle the notion that social norms can be hurtful to others. tl;dr thank you, poster above me, for having some damn sense
I honestly love the history of music lesson and telling a bigoted cretin to shove it, but I came here to learn more about what's wrong with T-Mobile.
But once I realized what was going on, I have to say the only way they could have done worst is record the commercial in Yiddish and air it in central Europe.
The broad definition of the word isn't "the poorest part of a city" - it actually means the area of a city that is set aside for a minority, and carries some connotations of that place being poor. People aren't just attaching a racist tag to it; the very definition of the word is inseparable from race. The fact that you think "ghetto" simply means a "poor area" suggests that you've been exposed to a lot of casual racism in your life, and you haven't noticed.
For example, during the Nazi era, the Jews were gathered into ghettoes. They weren't called ghettoes because they were poor, they were called that because they were areas that were set aside for Jews.
When I was in high school, a lot of kids would say "that's gay" to refer to anything they didn't like in general - imagine if the woman in the ad had called T-Mobile "gay"! It's similarly offensive to people who actually live in ghettoes, or are part of races that have historically been forced into ghettoes.
Yeah, to me the word in common parlance just means something that's shoddy or low-quality. There have been all kinds of ghettos in history, some identified with a single race or ethnic group and some not. I know in our hyper-offense-sensitive culture people love to throw a fit when they think it will get them something, but this ad just falls under the 'stupid' category. (as with many or most of Sprint's ads)