In January, H&M had to apologise for an advert showing a black child in a green hoodie bearing the words “Coolest monkey in the jungle”.
The ad had sparked backlash on social media, with people calling it inappropriate, disgusting and negligent. Labour MP Kate Osamor tweeted: “I was totally shocked, dismayed to say the very least, to find this online imagine. hm do you think this imagery is an appropriate representation of a young black boy?” Musicians The Weeknd and G-Eazy have both cancelled partnerships with H&M: with G-Eazy who was collaborating with H&M on a clothing line that was due to launch in March this year deciding to end his partnership with the company. In Victorian Britain, monkeys were seen as allied with the dangerous classes: the ‘apelike’ wandering poor, the hungry Irish, Jews, prostitutes and impoverished black people A. McClintock, 1994.
Anne McClintock identifies the emergence of what she calls ‘commodity racism’, in Victorian forms of advertising. An example of this is when she looks at an 1899 advertisement for Pears’ Soap, which claimed:
The first step towards LIGHTENING THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. PEARS’ SOAP is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilisation advances, while amongst the cultures of all the nations it holds the highest place –it is the ideal toilet soap. In 1910, another Pears’ soap advertisement shows a little black boy in a bathtub about to be soaped and scrubbed by a young white nursemaid. In the second, her look of happy amazement registers the effects of what has evidently been a miracle. Where the soap has been applied, the boy’s skin has changed colour from black to white. McClintock notes the selling point of both advertisements relies on a casual and taken-for-granted identification of whiteness with the cleanliness and purity and blackness with dirt and pollution A. McClintock, 1994 in C. Lury, 2011. A modern day example of this mind set can be seen in a Chinese laundry detergent ad aired in 2016 and dubbed ‘The Most Racist TV Commercial Ever Made’ where the aforementioned laundry detergent is placed in the mouth a black man before a woman, doing laundry, places him into a washing machine. After a short cycle, she opens the lid and a smiling Asian man climbs out. This view that black is unclean or soiled leads to damaging stereotypes against people of colour. The ‘criminal stereotype’ of black people in the United States is an ethnic stereotype, which says that African American males in particular are dangerous criminals. In 2014, African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population. African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of Caucasian people. And even worse police have continued to shoot and kill a disproportionately large number of black males, who account for nearly a quarter of the deaths, yet are only 6 percent of the nation’s population.
When OJ Simpson’s skin was darkened for a news magazine cover image during his trial for murder to make him look more threatening and suspicious which links back to the criminal stereotype. After former football star O.J. Simpson was charged with the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman he was taken into custody by the police, who then released Simpson’s mug shot to the media.
Time magazine used the mug shot on its June 27th 1994 cover, but they asked photo-illustrator Matt Mahurin to artistically interpret it. Mahurin darkened the photo and shrunk down the size of the prisoner ID number. Time’s managing editor James Gaines said this about the magazine cover:
“The harshness of the mug shot — the merciless bright light, the stubble on Simpson’s face, the cold specificity of the picture — had been subtly smoothed and shaped into an icon of tragedy. The expression on his face was not merely blank now; it was bottomless.”
However, many people responded to the cover very negatively. Critics accused Time of racism, claiming that by darkening Simpson’s features the magazine had emphasized his skin colour and gave him a more ‘threatening” appearance. Benjamin Chavis of the N.A.A.C.P. argued that the cover made Simpson seem like “some kind of animal.” Journalists suggested that as the mug shot was a news photo it should never have been altered at all.
Wolszon (1998), talked about how we as a society we have determined as a culture that beauty is good and preferable to ugliness. And we have decided that white is more attractive than black. However, in her discussion of representations of race in consumer culture at the end of the twentieth century (1990), Susan Willis suggests that recent fashion displays are creating a ‘new ethnicity’ in which individuals who, in some way or other, represent all races in one are held up as ideals. She points to the use of ‘beige’ models in fashion shows and magazine features, and argues that their use indicates an attempt to erase the political significance of race S. Willis in A. McClintock, A. McClintock, Soft-soaping Empire: Commodity racism and imperial advertising in The visual culture reader by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2013. “Women who do not fit into this category, such as black… women are … invisible” Gantz, Gartenberg, and Rainbow (1980). Women who look significantly different from this – old, black or overweight – are portrayed negatively and classed as unattractive and undesirable.
In an advertisement published in the September 2008 issues of several fashion magazines, Beyoncé exhibits a skin colour several tones lighter than her natural colour. Although L’Oreal tried to deny that they had tampered with Beyoncé’s skin, but fans accused the company of whitewashing the star. Shevelle Rhule, the fashion and beauty editor of Pride, a lifestyle magazine for the British black community, said: “We know that this is fairly common practice but that doesn’t make it excusable. This sort of thing creates a negative perception of African beauty. It’s an attempt to impose European values on African beauty and the two simply don’t mix in this way. A lot of young black girls out there, who look up to Beyoncé as a role model, will be disheartened to see these images. We need to challenge the idea that being fair necessarily means being more attractive. It doesn’t, and models who are proud to be black need to be more in vogue. For all the talk of ‘black is beautiful’, images like this clearly show that we’ve got a very long way to go yet”.
In Celia Lury’s text ‘Circuits of Culture and Economy (2011) she notes another example of commodity racism in early twentieth-century advertising – the fetishization of ‘ethnic’ women. In order to advertise Empire goods, there were representations of black representations of black people as doll-like, images of a feminine, mysterious or exotic otherness typically used to heighten a product’s luxury or novelty appeal. Robin Wilson-Benson of SexAbled explains in an interview with Stella Harris for wweek.com; “Black people’s bodies have been fetishized since slavery. We were seen as physical beings to perform a service. Not just slave labour, but sexuality too. There’s a history and culture surrounding being with a black person being seen as taboo and kinky, being looked at as bringing in a bit of ‘exoticism’ to spice up a sex life”. Fetishization happens to other races, too. An Asian woman interviewed for the same article said; “In America, I have found that people have been drawn to me specifically for my race. I suspect a lot of this is due to the residue of some past colonial hang-up about Asian women being sexually submissive. Partly because of the wars in Korea and Vietnam, a lot of interaction between American soldiers and women from those countries were a sexualized dynamic.” She went on to explain how dangerous it can be for the women targeted. “I was recently sexually assaulted by an Asian fetishist who had sexually assaulted at least four other Asian women”.
By the end of the century, a stream of imperial bric-a-brac had invaded Victorian homes. Traditional national fetishes such as the Union Jack marshaled into a revamped celebration of imperial spectacle. Late Victorian advertising presented a vista of Africa conquered by domestic commodities. An exemplary ad for Chlorinol Soda Bleach shows three boys in a soda box sailing in a phantasmic ocean bathed by the radiance of the imperial dawn. In a scene washed in the red, white, and blue of the union Jack, two black boys proudly hold aloft their boxes of Chlorinol. A third boy, the familiar racial hybrid of cleaning ads, has presumably already applied his bleach, for his skin is blanched an eerie white. On red sails that repeat the red of the bleach box, the legend of black people’s purported commercial redemption in the arena of empire reads: ‘We are going to use “Chlorinol” and be like de white nigger’ A. McClintock, Soft-soaping Empire: Commodity racism and imperial advertising in The visual culture reader by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2013. As example of this in contemporary culture until recently, a number of brands a number of brands explicitly upon imperial and colonial iconography; examples include the long-standing use of an Indian woman uncomplaining picking tea for PG Tips and the use of a ‘gollywog’, a representation of a black face which draws upon the stereotype of the happy dancing minstrel with deliberately blackened skin and enlarged mouth, in Robertson’s jams and Trebor Black Jacks Ramamurphy, 1991; Chambers, 1992). Robertson’s officially ‘retired’ Golly the golliwog mascot in 2002. The company found that Golly was no longer popular with children, although it was still successful with adult collectors who collected badges, dolls, ceramics, children’s games, and even Golly clothing items.
Robertson’s insisted that they did not retire the Golly because of the pressure of political correctness in the 1990s, but simply for commercial reasons. The brand director at Robertson’s commented;
“We are retiring Golly because we found families with kids no longer necessarily knew about him. We are not bowing to political correctness, but like with any great make we have to move with the times”.
A Channel 4 documentary aired in October 2017 in which a white woman was given the appearance of a Pakistani Muslim in order to experience public attitudes and Islamophobia has caused “deep offence”, the Muslim Council of Britain has said. Makeup artists darkened the skin of Katie Freeman and gave her a prosthetic nose. She was dressed in traditional Muslim clothing, including a hijab. “The use of brownface and blackface has a long racist history and it is not surprising that it has caused deep offence amongst some communities”, spokesperson of the Muslim Council of Britain said. “Had we been consulted, we would not have advised this approach. We do, however, laud the apparent goals of the documentary – to better understand the reality of Islamophobia, which has become socially accepted across broader society.”
Bibliography
‘Controversies in Contemporary Advertising; Cats and Dogs on Venus and Mars: Gender and Advertising’ – K. Sheehan, 2004
‘Circuits of Culture and Economy: Gender, Race and Reflexivity’ – C. Lury, 2011
Harriet Sherwood – My Week as a Muslim documentary sparks racism row. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/oct/19/my-week-as-a-muslim-documentary-sparks-racism-row
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/number-of-fatal-shootings-by-police-is-nearly-identical-to-last-year/2017/07/01/98726cc6-5b5f-11e7-9fc6-c7ef4bc58d13_story.html?utm_term=.ce2b1a967d4a
https://archive.is/20100605011949/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DQA/is_2001_August_30/ai_78476081/
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/lor-al-under-fire-for-whitewashing-beyonc-888278.html
http://www.wweek.com/culture/2017/11/03/were-not-here-for-white-peoples-pleasure-on-race-fetish-and-objectification/
‘Soft-Soaping Empire’ – A. McClintock
