PSP Ad Draws Charges of Racism 537
Lord Kano writes "The Guardian Unlimited is reporting that a new Sony ad for the upcoming white PSP has caused an uproar because of claims that it carries racist overtones. The ad depicts a white woman, clad all in white, grabbing the face of a black model in a dominating pose." From the article: "It's questionable whether the world is ready to explore themes of race and domination in the context of a videogame console ad. Although not as wilfully controversial as Benetton's infamous 'United Colours' campaign, many viewers will be unwilling or unable to decode the imagery until it becomes about two different colours of plastic." What do you think about this latest in a long line of PSP ads of questionable taste?
You Americans Need to Lighten up (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I am Canadian from a small border town near Niagara Falls.
Let's look a little more critically at the world. (Score:3, Interesting)
And as such, this ad is incredibly problematic. Anybody who doesn't recognize at least that is ignoring history itself.
Re:Leeland Yee said it...best? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yep, Racist America (Score:2, Interesting)
I sorta wonder who came up with the idea... (Score:2, Interesting)
What has to be understood the colours black and white in the asian culture represent a dichotomy of forces rather than ethicities. So, when a person from the isle of Nihon looks at the picture, they're reminded of old Zennist mythos. Or a person from China proper will be reminded of the stories by Lao Tzu about the Tao and so forth. So, in reality, this is not an intended racist grab, but rather a vast gap, in my evil evil opinion, between cultures. It's sad really, because in our culture, we're still tribal as ever yet claim to be oh so intelligent. I suggest folks consider deprogramming themselves of such preconceptions by atleast getting a wider cultural background (or read Rand's essay on the origin of Racism, which is very intriguing.).
-- Attis
Re:Slavery (Score:4, Interesting)
Get a clue (Score:4, Interesting)
My daughter looks hispanic (though she's not) and she doesn't even *HAVE* citizenship papers. Neither do I, but I'm pasty white, so I get to go anywhere I want without question.
The proposal was defeated, but Jaremchuk has considerable local support... especially among the police and the anti-hispanic vigilante types who like to cause trouble in the low-end housing where there's a high percentage of illegal aliens... Jaremchuk is a rising star in Elsmere politics, and his entire platform is thinly veiled, weasel-worded white supremacy (he'd probably say "traditional cultural values" and "equality").
Elsmere also has the distinction of having the strongest curfew laws on the East Coast, but the curfew is only enforced on brown kids, as far as I've seen. We live less than ten miles from Elsmere, which is NOT below the Mason Dixon line - this is the industrial northeast of the USA here.
If you think color-line racism isn't alive and growing in America, you are living a very sheltered life. The 9/11 atrocities have proved the perfect wedge to drive racial profiling back into the mainstream of acceptability; in fact Ordinance 447 mentioned 9/11 specifically as justification.
Re:One ad of three (Score:2, Interesting)
Racist? Maybe not. Stupid? Hell, yes! (Score:1, Interesting)
I am a white conservative, and even I am somewhat offended by the ad.
What the hell was Sony smoking when it came up with this?
Microsoft has officially won the console wars.
Re:Yep, Racist America (Score:3, Interesting)
First, an apology: I was maybe a little bit sloppy in my phrasing. This "apology for slavery" crap is a straw man, often thrown out by people making the exact argument you just did, and it was the use of this straw man that intended to reference. Yes, you will find people who call for an apology. I am not going to argue the point, because the idea itself is the concoction of politicians trying to score in-group points, and the prevailing arguments on both sides of the idea are consequently and necessarily worthless bullshit.
Japanese killing Americans, and Germans killing Russians, is not at all the same thing as whites subjugating blacks in various ways for several hundred years in North America. Those instances were clashes of nations and nationalities-- they were fights between separate, enemy societies. In the United States, there was one society with two tiers, and one group was deliberately, systematically put and kept on the lower tier for generations.
One of the things that people such as yourself do not seem to "get" is that preferential treatment-- by which I assume you mean affirmative action programs and the like, because you usually do-- is an attempt to accelerate the integration of an oppressed subculture into the mainstream, not suck up to the disadvantaged out of misplaced guilt. In a situation where you have an ethnically distinct population at a social and economic disadvantage, it is a bad scene for the society as a whole, especially when that disadvantage was deliberately manufactured by the mainstream and both groups know it. It's absolutely useless to tell people to "get over it" when they are still feeling the effects of institutionalized oppression that-- again-- ended only forty years ago (not with the abolition of slavery on which you seem to be fixated).
When I say that it will take a few generations for the emotional memory of oppression to fade, I say that because only distance from the oppression can lessen that emotion-- there's nothing we as a society can do to change that. When I say that it will take longer to right the social and economic wrongs that were committed, I do not mean to imply that the descendents of one group personally and individually owe anything to the descendents of the other-- rather, that real integration can only happen if the disadvantaged group is provided a handicap in order to catch up to the rest of the game, and that for the sake of the cohesion and advancement of the society as a whole it is critical that such integration occur.
It's a bummer that those of us in the advantaged group might have to give up a tiny bit of that advantage in order for this all to happen, but it's not like we have to trade places with the disadvantaged group or anything. Nobody's asking you, for instance, to be poor. All this whining about how unfair it is strikes me as incredibly crass and deeply ironic, not to mention an incredibly short-sighted and self-absorbed way to formulate social policy.