“Flippant” is a very self-absolving word to use. The problem isn’t being flippant, unless this very post is also part of your flippancy.
Yeah, unlike sex you don’t have to bring your race up unless it’s relevant. But if people don’t bring it up when it is relevant, that’s not exactly reassuring either.
There’s a serious issue here, but it’s much too complicated for a one-line comment. Maybe I’ll try and write something coherent when I have more time.
You don’t have to bring your sex or gender up, either.
Hell, I’ve been out as a cisgender woman for decades here and yet I’m regularly mistaken for a man (in my case, I’m not offended and don’t much care except when/where my gender is relevant).
Lost it in one.
I think there’s almost universal agreement that the … stuff on the Dr Bronner’s label is not literature. Nor is the ‘normal’ on the VO5.
But I’m sure I’m just a left-wing, progressive poster and I don’t want to interfere with your in control tribalism…
Yeah, when you lead off with that silly argument you typically can’t go anywhere but up. And yet …
Seriously though, isn’t that the main play of “beauty product” marketing? Taking what is normal and making as many people as possible anxious about it, convincing them that it is a “problem” that the product has solution for?
In the last few months, I’ve heard complaints about changing the brand name of rice, panckake mix, preschool toys, removing a picture from packages of butter, complaints about the publisher of books choosing not to print some books, and removing the word normal from hair care bottles.
When are these big issues coming into play? What is so worrying about incremental changes to what is considered good manners?
It’s classic stage magic. If you can keep the audience focused on the trivial shit you’re doing with your left hand, they won’t notice the actual work you’re doing with your right hand.
The big issues are stuff like “cutting funding to education” and “cutting the corporate tax rate” and “preventing any increase to minimum wage.” But hey presto, watch me shake my fist in outrage over a change in shampoo labels! Pay no attention to the accountants and lobbyists behind the curtain!
On a message board, you don’t have to bring your gender up when it’s not relevant, either; and people often don’t bring it up even when it is. I have no idea what gender most of the people on these boards are; and it occasionally becomes clear that others don’t know mine, either.
Have you specified your own race in this thread? Have all the people you’re assuming are white specified that, or are you expecting them to?
The ubiquity of gendered pronouns makes the difference. People assume a gender when talking about you, whether it’s relevant to the subject or not. Probably they assume a race, too, but it rarely comes up as something you must choose to correct or not.
I don’t actually assume everyone in this thread is white, though quite a few posters have given some indication of their background. I am assuming no one in this thread is black, since it would be relevant to say so, and also no one answered DSeid’s question from their own first-hand experience.
Gendered pronouns are not ubiquitous in message board posts. I don’t think anybody, even you, has used one for me in all of this fairly long thread. And many people (including me) don’t assume the gender of others without evidence.
In other words, you’re assuming that white is the default. Which is kind of what the whole thread is about.
I can think of plenty of reason for someone who’s Black to come across this thread, read it, and either not post at all or post without specifying their race.
But in any case (as well as being one of those possible reasons): why should Black people have to do all the work of getting rid of racism? Why shouldn’t White people be working on it?
@DemonTree FWIW I found your response to my question useful, whatever your personal race or gender identification is. The question was for actual factual information, not experience. And after your response I did some more searching and found more information, which confirmed and expanded on your post. But that was more of a GQ thing, and not the point of this thread discussion.
In case anyone else cares though …
Summary
Bottom line, the hair of many Blacks has less sebum, so does not need as much surfactant, and is more prone to damage and therefore negative electrostatic charge (which conditioner offsets).
Your 5. just hauled off and punched 6. right in the nose.
Ha, I wish that were the “biggest problem in America today”. We’ve got way bigger problems than “tribalism”.
However, as Cheesesteak and LHoD noted, it’s in the interest of conservative media and politicians to deflect attention from the more serious problems by raising the profile of “culture wars” issues and claiming that they’re a “both sides” problem.
If they can handwave away all the liberal critiques of serious issues by dismissing them as mere “both sides” “tribalism” (while refraining from calling out the “tribalist” behavior on their own side), then they can more effectively obstruct liberal policies, without ever having to actually confront the liberal critiques.
If “fixing” anything is your intention, you seem to be going about it in the wrong way? This discussion was doing a pretty good job of calming down and contextualizing the OP’s melodramatic accusation that “Advertising and product branding is getting so woke that products can’t even be ‘normal’ any more”, before you popped in to sniff that nobody should be paying any attention to any such issues anyway because OMG pandemic, and to complain about the “unnecessary cognitive load” allegedly produced by anybody paying any attention to any such issues.
You’re not saying that the two sides should understand each other better, you’re saying that the left should just shut up about any issue that you personally don’t have a problem with.
Well they’re the ones who have a problem with it aren’t they?
(That was sarcasm, obviously.)
I can’t imagine it’s the mere existence of shampoos aimed at different levels of oil in one’s hair. That seems to me to likely be a universal thing.
The issue as I understand it, may be that the white person’s “normal” may be someone else’s “oily”, or someone else’s “dry”, and that it’s the labeling as “normal” that’s the issue. To some degree this isn’t even an racial/ethnic thing, in that it even points white people who have oily or dry hair as being abnormal.
The only concern I’d have is that even for all its faults, the dry/normal/oily describes a continuum of sorts in terms of how the shampoo handles oil. I’d be worried that they’ll use a bunch of marketing nonsense and make it harder to determine which shampoo you want- which one of “vibrant clean”, “luscious locks” or “clean burst” do you want if you have dry hair? What about oily? What about somewhere in the middle?
That’s a legit worry. Based on some of the stuff above, it seems like oiliness in hair is roughly correlated to straightness; is that right? Could they use some continuum of straight to curly to help folks find the right bottle? Or even adopt some iconography showing a silhouette with the hair type for which the shampoo is designed? So, someone with oily hair would buy the bottle with the icon of someone with long straight hair, and so on.
I’m glad it was helpful. I’m white, but my sister’s partner is black and my niece and nephew are mixed race. I visited them quite often before Covid (
).
Plus there was a whole thing a few years ago about ‘good hair’ and ‘bad hair’, and black women pushing back against the idea that only chemically straightened hairstyles could be ‘professional’ or suitable for the office. A lot of women who straightened their hair or had weaves etc their whole lives were learning and helping each other out with how to care for their natural hair, including finding the best products to use.
I’ve never heard that, but I’m also coming from a limited perspective as a white person. It may well correlate for other groups.