This, friends, is a historic time for accidentally insulting black people. Usually our black comrades must wait for the occasional slip of tongue from a B-list celebrity in order to be victims of accidental racism, but things are changing. Today is a brave new world in which there has been a flurry of unintentional racism in advertising.
Not one, not thirty, but seven high profile incidents occured involving the creation of racially offensive ads recently. Of course, no one really noticed outside of people who spend lots of time on YouTube and various internet forums, but, needless to say, these incidents have sent a charge through the black internet nerd community. I know this, because I talked to both of them, and they were totally PISSED.
- Incident 1:
Intel, in order to send the message that their processors would allow your employees to work faster and run away really quickly if need be, came up with the concept of employees in an advertisement being represented by sprinters. Then they took some photographs and designed an ad and wrote the ad copy and approved the ad and sent the ad to some higher ups and got it approved and then sent it to a magazine which saw no problem with it and what came out of all of this was this gem:
Which I guess is another important reminder that just because there are a lot of people and many of them have more money than you, that doesn't mean they aren't all complete idiots who can't see the most obvious things when it's repeatedly shoved in their face. - Incident 2:
Capcom released a new, longer, trailer for their game Resident Evil 5. Just like number 4 in the series, it features a big muscular guy with lots of guns fighting a horde of savage killers. Their problem was that they set the story in Africa and so created a 3 minute clip of a white guy shooting hordes of brainless black people wielding primitive weapons. In the context of the series, this is not racist at all. Outside of this context, it's a 3 minute clip of a white guy shooting hordes of brainless black people wielding primitive weapons.
The black community's response was immediate. Prominent members of black society released well reasoned statements. Some black chick's blog complained about it or something. No one else noticed or cared, but lots of white folks on the internet kept arguing about it anyway.
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