race/ethnicity: Blacks/Africans

Michaela N. alerted us to the Oreo Barbie. According to Monica Roberts at Transgriot, Mattel once marketed an Oreo-themed Barbie (image here):

The doll sold so well that Mattel decided to make a Black version (image here):

The Black version of the doll triggered protests.  Monica explains it nicely:

…Oreo has another connotation in the Black community beyond just being a slammin’ cookie.

Calling someone an ‘Oreo’ is fighting words. It means that you are calling them Black on the outside and white on the inside. Translation, you call a Black person an Oreo, you are accusing them of being a sellout or an Uncle Tom to the race.

The doll was eventually recalled. (This was all about four years ago.)

Did Mattel intentionally produce a doll that embodied a well-known insult in the Black community?  If they didn’t (and let’s just go with that theory), it means that no one at Mattel involved in the production of this doll had the cultural competence to notice the problem.  This points to both (1) white privilege and the ease with which white people can be ignorant of non-white cultures and (2) a lack of diversity on the Mattel team.  Less employee homogeneity might have saved Mattel both face and money in this instance.  Diversity, then, is often good business.

For more on Barbie and racial politics, see this post inspired by Ann DuCille.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Amy D. sent us this really fascinating South African commercial for a light truck:

Contextualizing the commercial, Amy remarks that, given race relations in South Africa, many companies probably do operate as this team does at the first job with the white home owner. Yet, the commercial presents the black and white men as partners, switching roles so as to maximize their customer base. There’s an irony, though: While the partners seem to be cooperating, their cooperation naturalizes an (in this case symmetrical) preference for those within one’s own race.

Amy is optimistic about the impact of the ad:

The tagline “the bakkie that helps build the nation” is a great play on words. Literally, it refers to the fact that many small contractors – builders, pavers, electricians, plumbers – use this small truck as it is cheap and reliable. Figuratively, the need for nation-building in South Africa is crucial. Although we are 15 years into democracy, there are still huge social and economic gaps between racial groupings, and there is a tendency for people to segregate themselves. The way I see it, the two men in this advert are therefore achieving this nation-building by firstly, breaking racial barriers by running a business as partners, and secondly, in the meta-context, by subverting our racial stereotypes through humour.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Thomas Sander at the Social Capital Blog writes: “Obviously the $1,000,000 question is whether these behavioral changes are likely to continue beyond the Obama candidacy.” I think the answer to this, at least as far as racial composition goes, is yes. What we see here is a two decade long trend, not a blip inspired by Obama.

Data compiled by the the Pew Research Center, via Thick Culture.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Michael G., Sarahjane C., and Marlow sent us this commercial, designed for a small market, advertising a furniture store called The Red House. It was produced by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal. It is a real commercial, though it was designed to self-consciously spoof the many poorly-produced and weirdly-sloganed commercials that we’ve all seen advertising local small businesses on late night television. Word on the street is that the commercial has been maligned as racist. What do you think?

McLaughlin and Neal felt obliged to respond to the accusations of racism in another video. In it, they make a distinction between “racist” and “racial” and suggest that the video only seems racist if any and all talk that acknowledges race is considered bad.

This is an example of how the internet operates as a public sphere and can facilitate discussion about difficult topics. Without youtube, attention to this commercial would have remained local and/or restricted to a two minute discussion on the nightly news. Instead, the commercial has been viewed over 1.2 millions times and the response has been viewed over 50,000 times (as of today). Blogs all over the internet have picked up on the controversy and people are chiming in. I wouldn’t say that the discussion is all that sophisticated, but it is really interesting to see so many Americans discussing racism at all.

Then again, maybe the commercial has gotten so much attention because most people conclude that it is not racist. That is, are race and racism more likely to be widely discussed when the collective conclusion is “not racism”? Do we see such wide discussion of clearly racist material?

What do you think? Is this an example of the revolutionary power of the internet? Or just business as usual?

Hoshi sent us concept artwork for some new characters, all set to be musicians, in development for the online game, RuneScape.  Here they are:

Hoshi notes:

1. The caucasians are well dressed and most likely designed for the cities. The people of color are wearing tribal gear. In other words, they fill the “exotic” and “primative” section in the game, while the white people are the “refined” upper class.

2. The women look like they just finished dancing. They both have one hand on their hips (slightly seductive) and the other hand is in a “flowing” movement. Conversely, the men have balled up fists with their arms held slightly apart. They may be smiling, but their body language shows aggression.

Hoshi started a discussion thread with this observation at RuneScape and her comments have been met with significant opposition.  Summarizing the comments, she explains:

One of the most common arguments that it *isn’t* racist is that this game is set in a medieval setting and there wouldn’t be people of color in the cities. Frankly, I think that’s an absurd excuse. This game freely utilizes magic, monsters, gods, and all sorts of unrealistic things. If you follow the players’ logic, that means it’s more believable to have talking cats than to have a person of color dressed nicely in a city. That’s just messed up.

For more examples of race and gender stereotypes in video and online games, see here, here, here, here, and here.

Jay Smooth speaks to the Asher Roth tweet about “nappy headed hos” and offers some great insights as to how to maintain proper boundaries when blacks and whites form mixed-race communities.

NEW! More with Don Charnas (found here):

Birdseed sent in this photo he took at a grocery store in Stockholm (which he posted at his blog as well):

The product is a new beverage, Fanta World Pineapple: Inspired by Jamaica. The two guys in the photo were hired to promote it at the little tiki-style counter. Johan says,

A couple of things leap out at me straight away:

* The continued (post-)colonial association of Jamaica with its plantation produce. The “inspiration” seems limited to the fact that pineapples are grown there for the consumption of the global North. (Canned goods like pineapples still have the charming moniker “kolonialvaror” (colonial merchandise) in Swedish retail jargon.)

* The ridiculous (verging on blackface) stereotypical representation of “Jamaicans” that the kids are suppsed to portray. It seems to have been done with extreme sloppiness – for instance, the Polynesian lava lava (a type of sarong) that they wear has absolutely nothing to do with Jamaica at all, but rather acts to represent an identity-less generalised tropics, dehumanised exotica.

The music was, of course, bad reggae.

I think Johan hits on an important issue here–how often the cultures of non-Westernized countries are mixed together into an undifferentiated image of exoticness–for instance, “tribal” fashion and “traditional” handicrafts often supposedly represent “Africa,” which is a meaningless category given the enormous diversity of cultures, languages, clothing styles, artistic motifs, and so on. But if you put some geometric designs and maybe an elephant on some cloth, it evokes “Africa.”

it’s also interesting that a certain hat shape and dreads have become such easily-identifiable shorthand symbols of Jamaica, and that Fanta is commodifying the idea of Jamaica to sell a product that has no reason to be more “inspired” by Jamaica than anywhere else pineapple is grown–Hawaii, Mexico, Costa Rica, etc. etc. etc.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

In this cartoon, titled “Plane Dumb” (1932), Van Beuren’s Tom and Jerry put on black face in order to disguise themselves in Africa.  Putting on black face affects their intelligence as they go from being smart to dumb. Idoicy ensues. The “natives” come out at the very end:

Thanks to Steve W. for the link!

For more vintage racist cartoons, see these clips from Fantasia, these Bugs Bunny stills, this racist reinterpretation of Snow White, and this Bugs Bunny cartoon that caricatures the Japanese.

And this one’s just for fun.