No, that’s a good point. I have to admit that white people typically appear as individuals to me while people of other races are unfairly made out to be representative of their entire race.
In media, if I saw a white (or to a lesser extent, black) person behaving like an idiot, my first thought would be “What a moron.” If an Asian, Middle Eastern, Indian, or some other less commonly portrayed race* did the same thing, the first thing to pop into mind would be the question “Are they [the creators] being racist?”
It’s sad. And racist (of me). Part of it is, I think, that certain races appear in media so rarely that when they do, it’s easy to overgeneralize their individual behavior to their race for lack of comparative points of reference.
I don’t know how much of that is my personal fault and how much is simply human nature. When I see an alien (extraterrestrial) on TV for the first time and he starts killing and eating humans, I will naturally presume their entire species does the same thing. Likewise, when I see an unfamiliar race (human) being cannibalistic, I’ll make the same, equally invalid overgeneralization – only this time, I can easily shift blame for the act onto the show’s producers because “they should’ve known better in these enlightened times”. Either that, or I’d have to deal with some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance: Could it be that I’m the racist one?
And that, I’m sad to say, is exactly what happened here. McDonald’s marketed to different groups with legitimate differences. I immediately jumped to conclusions and cried “(potential) racist!”, even if those differences were real and non-negative.
It’s a double-bind for content producers. If someone from a different race does something different, it’s racist. If he or she acts just like their white peers, the character is either “whitewashed” or “unauthentic”. They just can’t win.
*Wow. Upon preview, I noticed that this semi-conscious prejudice is even inherent in my language use: See “white person” versus “some other less commonly portrayed race”, as if other races consisted entirely of similarly-dyed clones. And in the paragraph right before this, the use of “a different race”, as though “white” were the de-facto standard for world skin color.
No, I meant something else by “faux-colorblindness”: Pretending like there’s no such thing as skin color and letting a false sense of homogeneity overshadow (or perhaps I should say bleach out) legitimate racial/cultural differences. In practice, that translates into “Here’s this completely unfamiliar guy from an completely unfamiliar culture… I better treat him as though he were the All-American White Stereotype next door or he’ll think I’m racist!” Which is as ridiculous as it is insulting, but that’s what I experience and what I try, with limited success, to consciously override. It seems like the idea of racial equality I grew up with is to pretend that everyone is like me instead of being aware of and accepting actual diversity. Not an easy thing to un-learn.
From what I understand of some Asian cultures (specifically Chinese), that IS true. Coming from a non-Asian marketer, though, it will immediately seem like an “Asians are cheap” stereotype. That’s not fair, I know, but that’s the way it works. It’s the same as the “only blacks can say nigger” effect.
I think McDonald’s does run ads for the Dollar Menu targeted at the general cheap, er, value-conscious demographic. They might even include people of different races in it. Those ads make no particular impression on me. Likewise, if they ran a series of ads targeting college students in need of scholarships, or of musicians partnering with them, or of languages around the world, etc., this thread would never have appeared.
It’s their correlation of certain things with certain races that makes these ads inherently racial, but perhaps there is a difference between racial and (negatively, discriminatorily) racist… something I’m slowly learning.