Hoo boy, have y’all seen this article?
I am desperately trying to construct an image of proceedings involved in creating this ad and successfully pitching it to the sunscreen company. What a choice crop of morons.
Oh man! What were they thinking? That is so not funny that the thought of the ad agency thinking it up and their client accepting it is hillarious. Can you see these guys in the board room discussing it? How much scotch did they consume before they thought this was a good idea?
Oh man.
“I should not take bribes and Minister Bal Bahadur KC should not do so either. But if clerks take a bribe of Rs 50-60 after a hard day’s work, it is not an issue.” ----Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, Current Prime Minister of Nepal
I was quite appalled by it as well. On a side note, I didn’t realize the KKK was that well known in Argentina.
Yeah, it was very stupid. Not funny, in poor taste and it won’t sell any suntan lotion. But what does this mean:
Ummm… What’s his point? I thought that’s what the Ku Klux Klan was all about. I in no way condone this behavior, but yeah, that’s what the KKK is known for. Right?
Am I missing something?
Add this to the ever-growing list of Why Ignorant People Suck.
It’s a stereotype. The KKK is basically a non-entity. If you’re Black, your biggest fear should be a hood in the 'hood, not a honky in a hood.
Yeah, I’m with Canthearya. I think it’s nasty to make light of racial violence, especially for commercial purposes. I think the ad is dopey and immature. I don’t think that suggesting that the KKK have victimized black people is racist. It is true. Denying it might be racist; at least it reminds me of Holocaust deniers.
Anyway, I think it’s significant that in Brazil (not Argentina, but close enough?) there allegedly isn’t much skin-color-based racism. People can be nasty to each other over ethnicity of course (and politics, even more so), but being black as a Watusi is enviable in a country with as much sunlight as Brazil. So U.S.-style racial violence is going to seem pretty distant. This may explain, even if it doesn’t excuse, a certain cavalier attitude toward foreign racism.
A bad analogy follows: remember that one section of the Federal Bureau of Prohibition known as the Untouchables? They were so honest, they couldn’t be touched by bribery (unlike the rest of the T-men). Well, if you were an Indian trying to abolish caste distinctions, it might kind of stick in your craw that silly Americans thought it was a good joke to name some agents after the most oppressed group in all India. Yeah, it’s a bad analogy, but it’s the best I could do on short notice.
That which does not kill me just makes me really irritable
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- The few people I have known from S. America were pained to explain the type of social racial discrimination present there. I don’t know if any groups such as the KKK or any others have ever been active there or not, but the poplulation is “lightening” and it is a commonly accepted norm that lighter skin and “European” features are preferable to darker (at least, excepting suntans, which makes all this quite ironic) skin and amazingly enough, local “indigenous” facial features. There’s much more racial mixing in, say, Brazil than is common in the US so it’s difficult for “foreigners” to look at an ad such as this and understand how it would commonly be interpreted locally. Do we have anyone here from S. America?
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- On the other hand, in St Louis a local KKK group tried to adopt a stretch of highway under the state’s “adopt-a-highway-trash-pickup” program. Some called for the entire program to be scrapped, rather than allow a roadside sign to “advertise” the KKK. When the (2) signs were put up, someone went out and cut them down that night. A local radio DJ joked that all they had to do was nail a short horizontal board near the top of the (wooden) signpost, and the Klan would have come out and burned it down themselves. - MC
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MC- Apparently Missouri wasn’t the only place to run into that problem; John Shelton Reed wrote about it happening in North Carolina, IIRC. Reed said that the state refused to let the KKK adopt a road for fear that people would go out of their way to throw trash upon it. Reed posed the interesting solution, “Why not just let the Invisible Empire have invisible signs?”
JMCJ
This could be YOUR sig line! For just five cents a post, JMCJ Enterprises will place YOUR sig line at the bottom of each message!
MC-
I have family in Yucatan (Mexico) and have definitely seen the sort of prejudices that you described. The Mayan culture has been subjected to many indignations, despite the glorification of the ancient arqueology in the area. I am ashamed to say that my aunt and uncle’s housemaid is a tiny Mayan girl, of the ripe old age of sixteen, no less. Sorry- my point was that, yes, indigenous features and roots are often (unfortunately) perceived as less favorable. It is terrible!