Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Racism in Advertising

Although race is a prevalent issue in American Society, we have come traveled light-years from where we once were. Businesses of the past sometimes-exploited race to sell a product and by today’s standards, these ads appear to be simply barbaric. While at the same time providing a reference point from where this country and others have come from and shedding light on the darker days of race relations.


This first add touches upon a recent discussion we’ve had in class about representation of Native Americans. This ad is actually a Canadian ad used to encourage donations to the Canadian Patriotic Fund, which was set up during World War I to support the wives and children of enlisted men. They use stereotypical Native American “language” at the top and represent here that a “white heart,” is the same as a good heart.  At the same time the man they show is completely represented to “look” Native American while the background shows a tipi, and a canoe. These stereotypes are blatantly represented and interestingly are ones that we are still aware of and still see today.


Andrew Pears was a brilliant English businessman. Upon observing the way that people obsessed about pure white complexions to avoid looking like they worked outside and the use of powder and creams he thought to create a more gentle soap without lead or arsenic like the ones of the past and his new soap’s clear complexion began his strategy of presenting this as a cleansing soap. During the nineteenth century pear’s built a large market for soaps in the United States and with it a series of alarming racist ads.

This ad shows two children playing gin a bathtub. The white child uses the soap on the black child, making him appear white and then the black child is shown with a smile as he looks in the mirror. This ad suggests that the soap is “purifying” and depicts a dark skin tone as being “dirty.”




Elliot Paint & Varnish Co. came out with this ad in 1935 the same year that The Harlem Race riot occurred. This ad shows a young African American boy painting another African American boy with veneer to promote the way the paint can “cover up the black.” Again dark skin here is being represented as something negative, something to be covered up, and tries to use that as a joke to promote their white paint.


The Gold Dust Twins were a trademark for Fairbank’s Gold Dust Washing Powder products beginning around 1982. They originally showed two African American twins Goldy and Dusty, but by 1900 they became cartoonish, dehumanized, and racist representations of African American children along with the negative slogan “Let The Twins Do Your Work,” a continuously and openly referencing slavery in their ads. An ad from September 1902 asks, “Are you a slave to housework?” They were featured in newspapers, billboards, on the radio, and in the homes of most Americans as it became a top selling brand.










4 comments:

  1. I like the topic of your blog. From those advertisements above, we can see that in 20 century, racism is a strong sense of idea in people's heart. And mostly, White people didn't realize that it is not respectful to Black people and Native Americans. And at that time, those people who are racial discriminated do not have power to confute this idea.

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  2. The advertising industry I believe will continually discriminate because they can do so implicitly. While, many of the ads shown above were not implicitly done, much ads for today's time are. I think that this issue ties in with just media as a whole with implicitly discriminating by constantly persuading others that blacks are dirty, dangerous, thugs, etc. I think that ads are only the cherry on the top when alluding to these sterotypes because ads are seen everywhere: outside on billboards, social media, internet, youtube, stores, etc. Almost anywhere one go, she is bound to see an ad, thus unconsciously soaking in the implicit discrimination making it harder to disbelieve in those stereotypes. I think that as time continues, if we as a whole do not stand aganist this then it will only prevail and grow stronger.

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  3. It's crazy how racist these ads are. It's amazing how far we've come. I can't imagine seeing anything even remotely close to any of these examples today. Unfortunately there is still some racism in modern day advertisement but it is much more subtle and, for the most part, much less intentional (hopefully). I had to take a shower after seeing the ad for Pears' Soap because I felt so dirty after just looking at it for five seconds.

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  4. Unfortunately, these sorts of advertisements aren't necessarily a thing of the past. They've really just evolved, either focusing on different groups or simply redefining the manner in which they're racist. Burger King has aired ads in recent years with racist black and Mexican stereotypes, salesgenie did the same with Chinese stereotypes, Volkswagen did an ad about Arab terrorists, etc.

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