Monday, June 04, 2007
(6:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Commercials and Race
Lately I've begun noticing a trend in commercials. Whenever there are both white and black characters in the commercial, the black character is in a subordinate position.I first noticed this in the series of Volkswagon commercials where they showed accidents -- a white guy is driving, his black friend is making fun of him for saying "like" too much, and then they crash. Then there was another commercial with a white driver and black passenger -- the (I believe) Toyota commercials where they go around the expressway onramps multiple times pretending it's a racetrack. Just now, I saw a commercial where there's a wedding reception with nothing but Honey Nut Cheerios for refreshments. The bride throws a cereal box instead of a bouquet, and a white woman fights to grab the cereal box away from a black woman.
It's like a parable of "integration" -- every dutiful white liberal wants to be able to say they have a black friend, but they want to be in control of the situation. Blacks are present in the interest of diversity, but not in roles that allow them to challenge the overall power structure.
At the same time, it's obvious that simply reversing those situations won't work. If a black man is driving, it's as though he's serving as a chauffeur, even though the same connotation obviously isn't present with the white guy driving. Similarly, if the black woman were to fight the white woman for the cereal box/bouquet, it would be perceived as playing into stereotypes that black women are very "sassy" or else masculine.
So it's as if the only way to "include" blacks in a way that doesn't thematize their race and mobilize stereotypes is to "include" them in a subordinate position -- which then resonates with the dominant white stereotypes of docile blacks who accept their station (manifested in nostalgia for segregation, the false propaganda that slavery "wasn't that bad," etc., which liberals disavow but which is still given a hearing in the mainstream). In the very attempt to avoid the particular stereotypes, these commercials directly mobilize the very fantasy that underlies them all -- in total abstraction from any concrete personality traits or behaviors that are supposedly distinctively "black," the subordination of these characters is experienced as natural simply because of the color of their skin.
Am I making this trend up? Can people think of more examples, or of counter-examples?
