My guess is, yes.
I knew an Indian guy once and was telling him about an Indian woman from my department.
He goes, “what’s her name?”
I told him. . .and it apparently indicated the region she was from.
He says, “I bet she’s an ugly, black, dog.”
:eek:
Living in a city with a majority black pop, I seem to see the spectrum of light to dark, and it seems like in ads, you get a higher representation of the light side. Still, you seem to see some things like black hair care products in the supermarket that have a darker black person on the bottle than the black lady in the commercial for Southwest Airlines or something.
Of course, the black people in the SWA commercials are always doing something stupid like rifling through your medicine cabinet and downloading computer viruses. I thought we were over groundless stereotypes like, “black people are always going through your medicine cabinet”.
Please, tell me how it’s racist in any way shape or form. The models in the ads are black, are they not? In most cases, advertisers want good looking people to represent their products and most of the black community regards lighter black skin as more attractive than darker black skin, so it is natural for advertisers to use lighter skinned black people in their ads. You rarely see white models with big over sized noses or prominent buck teeth, features that are not generally considered attractive. Is your contention that these black models are somehow not “black” enough? I just don’t understand your point.
Alek Wek is a very popular “supermodel” from Sudan who has distinctive African characteristics.
I agree though, in most advertising the trend seems to be towards racial ambiguity.
Light vs. dark skin in many regions of the world is viewed in class terms. Those that have darker skin are more likely to be those with more sun exposure and thus more menial work. So the lighter the skin, the more educated and higher class you are seen to be.
Look, even in the black community, there is a bit of schism between light skinned and dark skinned people. Those that have really light skin and can pass as white are especially scorned. Dark skinned blacks get treated like the step child and it’s because they are so dark, not necessarily because of their facial features. I do think that things have improved somewhat in some sectors when it comes to race but racism is still alive and well and it still exists on TV, Movies, and yes,even advertisements. I’ve yet to see a dark skinned black in an advertisement and to say that it’s because dark-skinned blacks aren’t attractive, well, that just doesn’t compute.
And no, I’m not saying that the light-skinned blacks in ads aren’t “black enough.” I’m saying that I believe advertisers want to use black people that seem more palatable to whites. This is how I see it and I think it’s f*cked up. That is my point.
And the fact that these same people are also more palatable to the average black person doesn’t fit into it? I think what’s fucked up is someone claiming that this is a “form of subdued racism”. You claimed this was racism “masquerading behind the veil of political correctness.”. The only PC I see here is the detestable tendency of the PC offenderati to invent imaginary things to be offended at. Crying racism over a non-issue like this is ludicrous, and a real slap in the face to people who have suffered from real racism. It also has the disturbing side effect of masking real racial incidents, see Little, Chicken and Who Cried Wolf, Boy. Knock it off, would you?
This will probably lead to the GD board and then to the Pit, but I have a theory. Mixed race people are genetically superior to single race people because of hybrid vigor.
Hybrid vigor is the principle that if you separate breeding stock into smaller groups recessive genes will combine producing non-survivable offspring. After several generations if you combine the separate groups the recessives have been bred out and the offspring of the combined group is genetically superior to the single race groups.
People of all races find mixed race people attractive because they know that they would provide superior genes to their offspring.
It’s not a good theory, and I suspect someone who knows way more about genetics than I do is about to come here and hand me my ass, but it’s a theory.
As a professional photographer (news type), it is indeed markedly more challenging shooting darker individuals because the darker the hue of a person’s skin tones, the harder it is for standard film to capture detail in features.
It is not impossible to believe that tastes in models with light skinn has followed the photographic path of least resistance.
There are now (and have been for about 25 or so years) films that are calibrated for black skin tones. That being said, most images today are digital and the easy way to get images that are clear with dark skinned individuals is to lighten the subject.
Is that rascism? Perhaps. But I am inclined to think it is more likely the power of taking the easy way out.
TV
I wonder how much of this is due to the influence of Western media. Personally, I’d be pretty skeptical of claims that people naturally find light skin more attractive (especially since it’s a survival disadvantage in sunnier regions of the world.)
But then, advertisers don’t care which preferences are natural and which are society-induced, they just care what sells.
In at least one of these examples, I can see a Catch-22 coming on: use dark haired, prominently “black” models for a fried chicken ad, and you’re perpetuating a racist stereotype of the watermelon and fried chicken eating, ignorant black Southerner. Use a lighter skinned model, and you’re being racist for “suggesting” that they’re more attractive than “darker” blacks.
As for what we’re “naturally” supposed to find more attractive, wasn’t there a study done with infants that showed that most, even the ones of non-white ethnicity, seemed to respond more positively to attractive white faces? Hrm.
It should be kept in mind that using models with “prominent black features” can result in charges of racism, too. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
A friend of mine works for a local advertising agency. Several years ago they were working up an ad campaign for a local jazz festival. The poster that their artists designed featured photos of a very dark-skinned man who had a broad nose and thick lips. The festival’s organizers were horrified, and said that the man looked like a Stepin Fetchit caricature of black people. The final poster used a model who resembled Lenny Kravitz. :rolleyes:
Advertisers only have two goals: 1) to make you want to spend your money on the product, 2) to keep getting advertising clients. Being discriminitory would almost certainly cost them money. Barring a stupid racist CEO with money he’s just dying to throw away, no advertising agency would practice discriminitory advertising because businesses are generally in the business of making money, not losing money.
I think that ads feature racially ambiguous people because, like someone else pointed out earlier, thay have a wider appeal. People can project/interpret whatever race they want onto the subject. The US today is more racially mixed than it used to be. Take a look at past demographic information compared to the latest census. In the early 20th century, there were immigration restrictions that made anything in recent years look like an open border in comparison. With many different groups, each with potential dollars to spend, making ads with a wide appeal simply makes sense.
In addition, we are wired to find people who fit a generalized ideal as attractive. A foundation that has done a beauty analysis has found that an average blend of many different face proportions yeilds a face that is seen as attractive by most people. There are some slight differences for different races, but using the same idea of a facial proportion blend would probably give you a racially ambiguous, universally attractive face–exactly what an advertiser looking to maximize the revenue for an ad placement in a racially diverse location would want.
Asking why people with stereotypically black features aren’t seen very often in advertisements is like asking why people with stereotypically Scandanavian features aren’t seen in ads. Limited appeal, slightly disconcerting if you’re not the target audience, not as effective as a person who doesn’t have features strongly identified with a particular race.
Come to think of it, the only Irish people I see in ads are dark-haired, medium-skintoned Irish. None of the very pale-complexioned, very red-haired people I associate with Ireland. Clearly this is discrimination against the land of my forefathers!
Someone please tell me this thread and its responses are an elaborate joke and I’ve gotten whooshed. I was under the impression that talk of mulattos and skin tones and “pure” races became outdated around the time people started wising up and realizing that it doesn’t make a difference. Now we’re faulting advertisers because the models aren’t black enough? Whenever I hear anyone talking about differences in skin tone, I’m hearing a definite racist message – but not from the ones who are being accused.
Did any of y’all ever think that maybe the people making the ads aren’t paying as much attention to gradations of skin color as you all are? That they’re still every bit as shallow as we assume of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, but that they’re looking for models who are pretty enough, not ones who are light enough.
Too many of the wrong terms are being thrown around here.
Racism is a belief that a “race” or member of a race is innately superior to others, with a strong preference for light skinned peoples: Japanese and Northern Chinese, most Eastern Europeans, white America.
Some of you reading that no doubt mentally “fixed” that sentence to put Europeans and white America ahead of Japanese and Chinese, thus illustrating the pervasiveness of racist beliefs.
Discrimination is denying candidates opportunities, preferences or other key considerations less on actual merit than their not fitting a key characteristic: gender, race, age, class, sexual orientation, political beliefs or religion are the big seven. In the world of modelling, skin tone and facial characteristics definitely matter, as do body proportions.
SolGrundy you’re right – a lack of Irish redheads would tend to support a charge of discrimination as opposed to racism. But not all discrimination has a racist rationale.
I know the NAACP used a similar argument with media-conditioned, school-aged black children in the 1950s during Brown Vs. Topeka to explain the harmful effects of forced segregation – but infants? I’d love to see a cite for that. It flies in the face of everything I know about imprinting and ethnocentrism.
Yinz might be interested in the current story arc of the comic strip “Silo Roberts” (link is to the first strip in the story), recounting the trials of a model whose job as the Token Black Guy in advertisements is drying up in favor of the Token Multi-Ethnic Person. Not that this ads anything useful to the discussion, but I happen to think it’s a pretty good strip 
They’re black ONLY if you grew up in America conditioned to looking for minute racial characteristics in mixed race people and abiding by the centuries old conventions of the"one drop" rule and deciding that Jennifer Beals is equally “black” as India.Arie. If you grew up in Brazil, where behavior and class tends to dictate race, they’d be seen as white.
“Most” of the black community does not regard lighter skinned black people as automatically more attractive – it tends to regard light-skinned women as so. It certainly has changed when Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge and Josephine Baker lit the stage in the 40s and 50s.
More Afrocentric standards of beauty have been the norm since at least the mid-eighties when Spike Lee elevated Tracy Camila Johns as Nola Darling as an object of desire, Phylicia Rashad played Claire Huxtable and Seal was an international sex symbol. Which makes sense: the eighties was the first time American blacks began to seriously have control of the images we create and the stories we produce.
I say this only illustrates the pervasiveness of perceived racist beliefs. You have no idea how most of the readers of this board really processed that sentence, or whether they thought anything of it at all. The only interepretation that’s clear is your own – you saw the importance of listing Asians ahead of Europeans, because that’s a distinction that’s important to you. And you assigned a motive to it, calling it “racist beliefs.”
This isn’t intended to be an attack, but to reiterate my point: there’s definitely discrimination going on. But it’s on the part of the people who think that there is a lack of “very black kids” in advertisements and that it’s because of discrimination (whether intentional or subconscious) on the part of the media.
I say that “the media” is way too shallow to have that kind of an agenda – they focus on the bottom line and they target demographics. And the only way that “dark black” versus “light-skinned” becomes two separate demographics, is when the audience makes that distinction. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – every time I say “I’m a pale, chubby white WASP guy! The slim, tanned, Jewish media sees me as different! I’m under-represented!” then that sends a signal that I’m a demographic that needs to be targeted. And then they do see me as different.
Of course they do; it’s all about surface characteristics. But they matter in regards to how they well they accentuate the clothing/jewelry/make-up/hamburger/car that’s being sold, not in regards to the actual qualities of the model or whatever ethno-socio-economic background he or she is supposed to represent. Calling that “racism” or even “discrimination” is quite a stretch.
Being a pale, chubby white WASP guy, I’m skeptical that FUBU would be particularly eager to have me model their clothes for an ad campaign. And for that matter, Tokyo TV isn’t exactly beating down my door to get me to do ads for them. Do I charge them with discrimination? Or do I take the more practical approach and say that it’s just possible I’m not the best fit for their ads?
Contrary to what I learned as a child race in human beings is a social construct and not a biological truth. So I’m not sure how the hybrid vigor would work out in that case.
Marc