Watch the video before reading anything below. It has sound but takes a few seconds to come up.
Is this video racist?
My coworker (Johnny Demonic on KMC) says the video is not racist. He sees two people that were given jobs by a successful family. He says it would be racist if it could somehow show that those two black people were slaves. He says that even at the end, the black dude was smiling and cheesing it up indicating no slavery and great working conditions.
I say it's racist because of the history behind the confederacy and how long that organization has been around which was shortly after the Civil War. The fact that the only two people working for the white people are black further solidifies my point that it's racist. It's almost not subtle but overt racism, imo.
He said that I'm treating it like they lynched the black dude for smiling at the family and that I'm going too far by looking for racism in everything. He said that if it was Michael Richards (Kramer) playing the father, I may have a point.
If the black girl had said 'Here you go massah!' while delivering the lemonade as the black guy was picking cotton in the background would definitely make this racist.
My understanding of racism is if someone is being denied equal accces.
One would assume these are paid positions or some sort of live ins in exchange for labor of some sort.
We don't know if the tried to hire white servants. But yeah, with the music and the company name, I could see how some folks could be uspset with it. Wonder with many athletes making millions from the south that are blacks, do they have servants and are the same race as the millionaires or different?
I would not have called it racist if it did not come up with "Conderate Families". It would have just been an unfortunate advertising setup if it was some other type of organization.
It's quite taboo to show black people serving white people in advertisements. In movies, too...but it has to be done tactfully or be a period piece if done in a movie.
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It seems like a joke
But yeah...showing the family with "Confederate People: Protecting a people..." then cutting to their gardener and writing "...and their property", has very unfortunate, racist, implications. May not be intentional, but to me it does seem like it was done on purpose, but trying to cover it a bit, with "plausible deniability". Either way, unfortunate, and they should do the right thing and can that commercial as I am sure it will be offensive to many people that view it.
The horrible worry is that it was directly aimed at those people that would like to go back to the "good old days".
Commercials are fiendishly constructed: every detail is considered, nothing (or virtually so) is by chance. My guess is, they're trying to slip in a subtle dig. I mean, why even show a gardner at the last second?
Either that...the way the gardner smiled at the end...I felt the commercial could've been an SNL skit.
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Last edited by Mindship on Sep 3rd, 2011 at 12:04 PM
There's nothing inherently racist about them having black people who work for them even if they want to call themselves confederates.
Overlaying "and their property" when only the black guy is on screen is blatantly racist (blatant enough that I seriously doubt its a real commercial).
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