RACIAL UNDERTONE IN ADVERTISEMENT IN UNDERDEVELOPED

WORLD

ABSTRACT:

There is considerable racial discrimination that is being experienced in different walks of life.
Advertisement is one of the fields that experience this undertone. Some reasons for the
phenomenon are suggested so as to understand where the advertising industry stands with respect
to racial discrimination which is essential to deal with the present scenario. The possible
remedies and solutions are thereby given so as to overcome the shortcomings brought about by
racial discrimination.

INTRODUCTION:

The present day world is not an even platform, and hasn’t been for hundreds or rather, thousands
of years. The whole world revolves around worshipping Western culture and emulating them. Is
this because the Western race encourages this behavior and perpetrates it? Or is it because the
rest of the world idolizes them and has elevated them to this state? One hypothesis is that the
long years of Colonial Occupation have trained the colonized peoples that the ―White Master‖ is
superior, and this culture prevails with them to this day. Another line of reasoning suggests that
the ―heavy purse carries more weight‖ – that is, since the Western world is economically more
well off, the other cultures follow an ―imitation is flattery‖ approach in order to curry favor with
them. This is definitely unethical, when analyzed using the Equity Theory which advocates
―equal rights for all‖.

HISTORY OF RACISM:

Before attempting to emphasize racism in mass media and advertising, one must understand the
history of racism. Race has become an institutional part of society. Since time immemorial, race
has played an integral part in shaping the consciousness of civilization. Even Jesus Christ was a
victim of the racial prejudices of the Romans.

THEORIES OF RACIALISM:

David Goldberg's Racist Culture:

David Goldberg's Racist Culture argues that ―Racial discourse may be interpreted as aversive,
academic, scientific, legalistic, bureaucratic, economic, cultural, linguistic, religion, mythical, or
ideological.‖ He also stresses that racialized discourse and racist expressions towards certain
segments of society have been widespread. Race matters exist in different places and at different
times under widely varying conditions.
Marxist Theory:

Marx argued that society has two classes: the exploited or working class, and the exploiters or
owners of the means of production. He further stressed that one class will ultimately overpower
the other using any necessary means. Looking at today’s society the development of the two
class system is clearly seen. In the Colonial days there were slave owners and slaves, and racism
served as a means to overpower the exploited class. Today, there are the educated upper and
middle classes, and the poor lower classes, and the poor are sidelined and segregated on account
of their economic and educational shortcomings.

Segmentation Theory:

In the 1980's, Michael Reich developed the Segmentation Theory or the Divide and Rule
Theory, which attempted to explain racism from an economic point of view. In this theory,
Reich proposes that the ultimate goal in society is to maximize profits. As a result, the exploiters
will attempt to use any means to:

(1) suppress higher wages among the exploited class,

(2) weaken the bargaining power of the working class, often by attempting to split it along racial
lines,

(3) promote prejudices,

(4) segregate the black community,

(5) ensure that the elite benefit from the creation of stereotypes and racial prejudices against the
black community.

Reich argues that major corporations (e.g. Time Warner, Coca Cola, General Motors, etc.) all
have at least one member on each other's corporate boards of directors. As a result, it is in the
interest of these members to maximize profits while employing the above devices. The mere fact
of these corporate executives' sharing economic corporate power, combined with the quest for
economic profit has now paved the way for economic discrimination. But the question still
remains, is the media one of the tools used to promote racism? Do the elite use the media to
ensure profits are maximized by corporations?

MEDIA AND RACISM:

Media have stereotyped the lower class as shady, criminal, destructive influences on the society.
As a result of such treatment, the media have crushed the prospects of this class of people for
future employment and advancement. They have focused on the negative aspects of this
community while maintaining the cycle of poverty that the elite want.
There are no universally accepted and recorded codes or rules, which apply to journalists in news
selection and production. The media have devoted too much time and space to "enumerating the
wounded" and too little time to describing the background problems of the underprivileged.
Unless news is a crisis, it is not usually reported and unless it can be made visual, it is often not
televised. The news media respond quickly and with keen interest to the conflicts and
controversies of racial stories. For the most part, they disregard the problems that seep beneath
the surface and focus only on the sensation – that is, the "live" news story.

TODAY’S STATE OF AFFAIRS:

Whatever be the reason, the undertones of racism are prevalent in almost every walk of life.
Even mass communication media like advertising contain subtle elements of this emotion, as far
as the watchdog organizations will allow. This is especially deplorable, as it spreads the seeds of
these negative feelings from the creator of the advertisement, to many vulnerable and ignorant
minds. Such viewers may use the propaganda to instigate bias, unfair conduct or even violence
and riots against a section of people. Many examples of such conduct happen all around us,
everyday. The widely publicized case of racial discrimination against Shilpa Shetty by Jane
Goody in the celebrity show ―Big Brother‖ is a classic example of racial undertones in mass
media. Some other examples are listed below:

RACIAL BIAS TOWARDS AFRICAN-AMERICAN EMPLOYEES:

An exhaustive new study of America's advertising industry released today has found dramatic
levels of racial discrimination throughout the industry. Bias against African-American
professionals was found in pay, hiring, promotions, assignments, and other areas.

The study was initiated by a coalition of legal, civil rights, and industry leaders who
created the Madison Avenue Project. The Project was created in 2008 to address advertising's
deep-rooted racial bias and today.

Overall, the findings reveal that racial discrimination is 38% worse in the advertising
industry than in the overall U.S. labour market, and that the "discrimination divide" between
advertising and other U.S. industries is more than twice as bad now as it was 30 years ago.

Specific findings include:

Black college graduates working in advertising earn $.80 for every dollar earned by their
equally-qualified White counterparts.

Based on national demographic data, 9.6% of advertising managers and professionals

should be African-Americans. The actual percentage in 2008 is 5.3%, representing a
difference of 7,200 executive-level jobs.
 About 16% of large advertising firms employ no black managers or professionals, a rate
60% higher than in the overall labour market.

Black managers and professionals in the industry are only one-tenth as likely as their
White counterparts to earn $100,000 a year.

Blacks are only 62% as likely as their White counterparts to work in the powerful
"creative" and "client contact" functions in advertising agencies.

Eliminating the industry's current Black-White employment gap would require tripling its
Black managers and professionals.

The study found the primary source of discrimination to be agencies' implicit

assumption that the cause of Black under-representation is a shortage of "qualified" Black job
seekers. In reality, the problem is not a shortage but a "persistent unwillingness by mainstream
advertising agencies to hire, assign, advance, and retain already-available Black talent."

An appropriate response, the study concluded, "will require fundamentally transforming

the workplace culture of general market advertising agencies." Specifically, agencies must root
out the stereotypes that make race, not ability, determine employment potential; halt the "buddy
system," in which personal relationships and social comfort often count for more than job
performance; and eliminate the assumptions that racial minorities can't succeed in non-ethnic
markets.

ISRAEL JEWISH RACIAL FERVOR:

Racial fervor in Israel is extending to the extent that the Government dictates which race an
Israeli citizen can marry.

The Prime Minister's Office and the Jewish Agency has unveiled an aggressive advertisement
campaign for the Masa project which is designed to strengthen Jewish identity among youths in
the Diaspora and their bonds to Israel.

One video clip likens Jews who marry outside of the religion to missing persons, with fake
notices and pictures which drive home the point. As part of the campaign, similar "missing
person" notices will be plastered on walls around the country.

Masa hopes that the campaign would spur the public to commit to the cause of preventing
marriage to non-Jews, which Jewish Agency officials believe is tantamount to a "strategic
national threat.‖

According to figures compiled by the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, over 50 percent of
Jews in the Diaspora marry a non-Jewish partner.
 Studies show that Jews who participated in the extensive programs in Israel deepen their
Jewish identity and strengthen their bond to the country. Most of them marry Jews and send their
children to Jewish schools and become politically and socially active on behalf of Israel-related
causes.

The head of the campaign, Motti Scharf, compared assimilation to the critical water
shortage. "Even though this is an existential problem, the public in Israel is displaying apathy
towards it because the process is slow and not dramatic, out of sight," he said. "The time has
come to put the issue on the table."

LOREAL DISCRIMINATION:

L’Oréal, the French cosmetics giant, whose advertising campaigns proclaim ―because you’re
worth it‖, was found guilty of racial discrimination for considering black, Arab and Asian
women unworthy of selling its shampoo. Only 4.65 per cent of the hostesses hired for Garnier’s
campaign were black, Asian or Arab.

France’s highest court was told that the group had sought an all-white team of sales staff to
promote Fructis Style, a haircare product made by Garnier, L’Oreal’s beauty division.

The word went out that Garnier’s hostesses should be BBR — ―blue, black, rouge‖ — the
colours of the French flag. The expression is widely recognized in the French recruitment world
as a code for white French people born to white French parents, a court was told, in effect
excluding the four million or so members of ethnic minorities in France.

La Cour de Cassation, the equivalent of the US Supreme Court, said that the policy was illegal
under French employment law, upholding a ruling given by the Paris Appeal Court in 2007. That
image already suffered a battering when L’Oréal executives were forced to deny claims that they
had lightened the singer Beyoncé Knowles’s skin for a campaign last year. The ruling also hinted
at widespread prejudice among French shoppers since L’Oréal believed that they were more
likely to buy shampoo from white sales staff, the court was told. The court was further told that a
L’Oréal executive had sent a fax to its headquarters in 2000 saying that Garnier’s hostesses
should be aged 18 to 22, wear size 38 to 42 clothes (British sizes 8 to 12) and be ―BBR‖.

The ruling will fuel anger among black and Arab French people, who complain that they face
widespread discrimination when seeking employment.

The court ruled that Adecco, the temporary recruitment agency which hired the hostesses, was
also guilty of racial discrimination. The Paris Appeal Court had fined both L’Oréal and Adecco
€30,000 and ordered them to pay a further €30,000 each in damages to SOS Racisme, the anti-
racist campaign group, which brought the case. The court upheld the fines but told the appeal
court judges to reconsider the damages.
Such prejudices fuel unrest and disharmony among people especially in the cosmopolitan
cultures prevalent all over the world today.

INDIAN FAIR SKIN MANIA:

Skin lightening products are popular, and very much part of the cultural landscape in most of the
South-East Asian countries. The Indian skin care market alone is worth an estimated $300
million, with companies such as Pond’s, Avon, Garnier, the Body Shop, Jolen, Olay, L’Oréal,
Elizabeth Arden, Revlon and Estée Lauder all producing lightening creams. Seventy per cent of
every dollar spent in a beauty salon in India goes toward skin lightening products. About 60% of
Indian women use these creams daily, according to research from L’Oréal India, as reported by
the New York Times. And India is not alone: in an Internet survey, 30% of the Chinese
respondents use skin whiteners either daily or weekly, as do 18% of Japanese, 52% of Koreans
and 28% of Philippines.

Such biases are rooted in the age-old desire to please the opposite sex. In Malaysia, 74 per cent
of men are attracted to women with fairer complexions, according to one survey; 68 per cent of
Hong Kong men and 55 per cent of men in Taiwan said they preferred paler partners. In India,
advertisements seeking brides or grooms for arranged marriages often request fair skin as a
sought-after attribute, along with professional qualifications and a specific clan or social order.

In southeast Asia, fair skin has been a symbol of wealth for centuries because only the rich could
afford to stay inside rather than work in the fields. In the Philippines, certain women—the
binukot—were kept out of the sun and were whiter than their brethren: the name literally means
those who have been segregated. They had wealth, prestige and power. They were
knowledgeable too, they were responsible for memorizing the folklore that preserved local
history and the great Philippino epics. When the Europeans invaded, colonization didn’t
introduce racial prejudices, but it exacerbated and codified them. In fact, the word ―fair‖ is a
synonym for beauty, while ―dark‖ is a synonym for ―evil‖ or ―sinister‖. This clearly shows the
deep rooted prejudices of society towards dark-skinned races.

This story plays out in other Asian countries too: India has long had similar racial distinctions—
the fairer Aryans are at the top of the social hierarchy, and the darker Dravidians dominate the
lower classes. Religion reinforces these racial divisions. In Hinduism, deities often divide
according to skin colour: the positive gods, such as Sita Lakshmi or Saraswati, are fair, the
negative ones dark. Indeed, the goddess of death and destruction’s name, Kali, actually means
black in Sanskrit, although she is not viewed as evil in all of her manifestations. Once again,
colonization didn’t introduce these divisions, but it also didn’t help. The pale-skinned English
dominated the positions of power, and this hierarchy affected ideas about race long after the
initial power structure collapsed.
In a written statement to Maclean’s, Unilever said that its creams catered to demand, and many
companies manufacture similar lightening products. Previously, the company has said that its
commercials are not ―intended to suggest any correlation between skin colour and beauty.‖

However, this is in direct contrast to the advertisements of most of the fairness creams, in
particular Ponds’ and Fairever, The usual storyline of these ads play out with a heroine who
experiences failure in life (jobs, jilted love etc) because she is dark-complexioned. She uses the
fairness cream marketed by the advertisement and attains a fair complexion, which immediately
brings the previously unattainable goals to the palm of her hand. These advertisements imply that
a fair complexion is essential to success in life, which is an unfair and unjust bias. They play on
the resident inferiority complexes of the gullible young population for the sake of maximizing
the sales of the product and the profit margins of the company.

EXAMPLES IN TELEVISION MEDIA:

Example 1:

The ad promotes Ovaltine, a popular malt chocolate hot drink powder. In the ad, the mascot,
Ovaltine, a classic English maid, comes to the rescue of an English missionary who is in the
clutch of savage, uncivilized tribes in a tropical jungle. Ovaltina saves the missionary using
Ovaltine as a weapon. The ad implies the superiority of the Western race over the heathen folk.
Also the heathen folk are depicted as backward and uncivilized.

Example 2:

The ad promotes Fair & Lovely, a fairness cream widely used in Asian countries. In the ad, the
heroine takes a picture with a boy that she fancies. The boy is repulsed by the picture which
contrasts the difference between their skin tones, tears it apart angrily and leaves her. Enter an
Angel, who advises the girl to use Fairever cream. The girl uses the cream and gets miraculously
fair skin. The boy who jilted her on account of her dark complexion returns apologetically, woos
her and begs for another chance.

This ad implies that women can attract members of the opposite sex only if they possess a fair
complexion.

Example 3:

In the ad, the protagonist makes the following statement – ―I realized before my fourth interview
that my obstacle to achieving my dream job was my dark skin‖. She uses Fair & Lovely
fairness cream and achieves success at her job. This implies that fair complexion is an essential
to attaining success in one’s career. This clearly underlines that objectivity is not present in
promotions and task recognition – rather, a racial undertone is present in the workplace with
regard to the skin tone of the person concerned.
EXAMPLES OF RACISM IN PRINT MEDIA:

Example 1:

This is an advertisement of ―Colored kids” leather shoes. The usage of colored kid here is a
racist pun ,the company purposely used the picture of these Negro kids(African American) in
this advertisement. The words describe the colored kid leather used to make shoes. The ad hints
at a double meaning of ―kid leather‖ and ―Negro children‖. It shows a callous attitude towards
child labor by the Negro children in the manufacture of this leather.
Example 2:

This is an advertisement of Jell-o jelly which is another example of class distinction among the
races, depicting a black slave boy and a white plantation owner. The slave boy proudly brings a
plate of jelly to his master, with the words ―Mammy sent this ovah‖.

It emphasizes the fact that Jell-O can be afforded by the black slaves, yet is the only article on
their diet that is classy and dignified enough for the plantation owner’s table. The accent of the
Negro slaves of the time portrayed in this ad is another element of racism present in this
advertisement. This clearly points at the racial and economic class distinctions prevalent at the
time.
Example 3:

This is the advertisement of Amway which depicts a white family as the ―classic
Americans‖, thereby questioning the citizenship of citizens of other races. This clearly implies
the racist attitude of the ad which implies that only Americans are ―first class citizens‖ while
others are deemed as ―second class citizens‖ and are not accepted as part of the social fabric.
Further the racial economic divide is seen where the family in the ad is well of while the African
– American people in the foreground of the picture do not appear that well off.

CONCLUSION:

As advertisement is an industry whose motive is to promote better sales and publicity, it is not
possible to follow a specific set of guidelines. This is because of the reason that according to
taste and preferences of public, changes will be brought about in the system.
It is difficult to quantify such a creative industry and bring about a definite checklist of
guidelines to follow in order to ensure racially unbiased functioning. Hence rules and
regulations, when it comes to advertisements, are expected to be flexible which lead to the fact
that racial discrimination in the field of advertisement is not possible to remove out of the
system.

However, when racial discrimination leads to unfair loss of jobs, opportunities etc it cannot be
justified. Any such denial of opportunity should be performed only after presenting valid
reasons. Such practices should be monitored and taken care of by an independent, unbiased body
of a heterogeneous nature.

The public should be given greater awareness about the independent organizations that exist all
over the world – non-profit and voluntary organizations (such as Advertising Standards Council
of India – ASCI, a self regulatory voluntary organization of the Indian advertising industry) that
monitor the activities of the companies and sue them when the public complain to them of any
perpetrated conduct.

REFERENCES:

http://newsfeedresearcher.com/data/articles_w37/israel-jewish-israelis.html
http://www2.macleans.ca/2008/11/14/the-quest-for-a-lighter-shade-of-pale
http://en.afrik.com/article15880.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS177135+08-Jan-
2009+PRN20090108
http://youtube.com
http://www.yale.edu/ypq/articles/oct99/oct99b.html
http://www.ascionline.org/