Blog
06.07
An Arizona Whitewash Reminds Us Casual Racism is Alive and Well
Oh, Arizona. You are just like that bitter old granny in the corner at my family reunion. Dry as a dustpan, in love with John McCain and still furious that minority races have the nerve to exist.
On Friday, AZCentral.com posted this heartwarming story about a group of artists who has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a large public-facing mural at an Arizona school. The project lead, R.E. Wall, says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children's ethnicity. The school's principal says the request was only to fix shading. Here's the mural:
Gross. Yeah, clearly that's a pretty offensive example of shading. Okay listen, I won't hide my own opinion—I obviously believe the artists' side of this story. And sure, this opinion is partially influenced by my view of the controversy currently surrounding Arizona's new immigration law... but mainly my opinion is based on experiences in the design world. As an artist myself, I, as well as colleagues, have in the past been pressured by clients to "lighten up" their advertising... more often than I care to admit.
As much as we'd like to believe racism is dying with an older generation, it isn't completely gone—bitter hatred may no longer be an ingredient, but there's a weird aftertaste of casual racism that presents itself pretty often in the limited cuisine that is American advertising.
Take Superbowl ads as an example. In a February 2010 blog titled "Why Superbowl Ads Are So Sexist, Racist and Homophobic," Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper uses the Superbowl commercial lineup, hailed as an achievement in advertising creativity, to observe how pervasive attitudes about sexism, racism and homophobia are used to push the edges of "funny" and "outrageous" in spots that get the approval stamp from CBS Standards and Practices. Two gay men kissing is too offensive for TV, but lazy stereotypes about blacks and South Asians get the green light. As Hess puts it:
In Superbowl ads, people of color are never employed to, say, return an Orca to the ocean after a wild bachelor party; they’re just here to get some laughs out of racial stereotypes.
A lot of people who are in the marketing driver's seat still consider caucasion to be the advertising "default," with ethnicities used only to promote something specifically ethnic... OR as a device to sprinkle diversity into a set of white images. If a product is not marketed specifically to a non-white audience, advertisers largely tend to use middle-aged white heterosexual people as the "norm" with non-white characters appearing occasionally to mix things up.
This type of calculated stereotyping is uncomfortable but not necessarily worn as a public shame by those who use it in advertising. However, in the cubicles and boardrooms of agency life, where C-levels are safely ensconced in non-disclosure agreements, this attitude becomes a precipitous boulder poised to tumble at any moment into dark valleys of the human condition. I'd wager almost any designer or advertising professional out there can give you a story where they've been forcefully, passionately instructed to remove ethnicity from a design because of a client's personal discomfort.
In another HCK2 blog in which I wrote about accessibility on the Web, I alluded to an experience I had at a previous agency where I, as a lowly entry-level AD, was pressured to not only remove all African Americans from the promotional photography of a relatively well-known Metroplex company, I was forced, under extreme protest, to lighten the skin, thin the nose, and replace the hair of a wonderful mixed-race model who their client considered to be "too close to black." That client, slurring through his daily lunch liquor, justified this indignity by insisting "those people aren't our customers."
That happens to be the agency I wrote about in my most recent blog. The entire employment experience there was miserable, and in rehashing this story, it actually gives me pleasure to say that I left the company on poor terms—and there is a part of me that takes pleasure in the fact that the agency has since all but closed its doors.
That story took place ten years ago, not long after, in a college retail job managing the Waco location of now-defunct menswear chain, I was told by my district manager to only hire employees who matched the company's ideal customer, "Alex," a hypothetical persona they described as a white, thin, twentysomething frat boy. Or, failing to find this person, I was to hire hot white chicks that would supposedly appeal to "Alex."
But that was all ten years ago, right? Surely that kind of thing is happening less now.
Not so much. It was only 2007 when the London Telegraph reported Hindustan Lever, the Indian arm of Unilever, was forced to withdraw television advertisements for its women's fairness cream, Fair and Lovely, which depicted dejected, dark-skinned women, who had been snubbed by employers and men, suddenly acquiring new boyfriends and glamorous careers after the cream had lightened their skin.
And it was only 2008 when L'Oreal Paris was accused of lightening the skin of Beyonce Knowles in a print ad for their Feria hair color line, a claim which the cosmetics company adamantly denied.
And it was only one day after the Arizona mural story ran on AZCentral.com that Fox News reported mural director Wall, after the school principal made the request to lighten the boy's face, "started to paint over the boy's face with a flesh-toned color this week, but stopped at his forehead, after getting a bad feeling."
Read that again. And again. "Flesh-toned." Fox's words. Fox, c'mon. I know you claim to be unfairly described as the toothless prospector of news organizations. But, really? Flesh-toned? Does that help your case?
Anyway, if those examples aren't enough for you, reader, here are 25 more.
The level of casual racism varies. Some marketing professionals, comfortable in the privacy of an agency boardroom or one-on-one, don't hide their feelings and will blatantly tell you, the designer, that you have used "too many Mexicans" in their brochure.
More often, these people will pass it off to their organization's audience: "This isn't how I think, but my audience is very conservative and we have to be careful not to offend them by being too diverse."
And all too often, it's just a case where the advertiser is "defaulting" to an expectation of white out of innocent ignorance, and is genuinely confused by the presence of a non-white person in their ad.
This is a tough challenge for us, guys. Graphic design is a predominantly white profession to begin with, so the responsibility to raise awareness and combat casual racism is in the hands of a crowd at which that racism is not generally directed. At the same time, we are being paid for this work, so our responsibility to the client must include protecting that client's reputation in a way that doesn't bring shame on our own integrity, and working through differences in opinion without resigning every account in which they occur.
So where do we start? Listen up. The stand against casual racism begins 100% at the creative level. Everyone's a little bit racist, so they would have us believe. So we in this profession must strive to be acutely aware of it without overcompensating. The creatives who do the photo research, the model selection, and the copywriting all have a choice to make with every single project. And that is, select a default other than white. Change your design default settings. Make your first go-to African American, or Hispanic, or Indian. Use caucasians, and use them predominantly if who you found best fits the concept... but just as an exercise for your mind, try finding the right image without immediately going white. If agency directors and clients must then bicker about those choices, so be it, because at least even then a bicker is a form of discussion.
Who knows? Maybe we'll be surprised, and perhaps more often than we anticipate, non-white will be a non-issue. Just realize that in the end, you, and only you creatives, control the brush with which you paint.
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