Anyway, here's a new one. This is a billboard I have seen two places around Tallahassee so far. I snapped this picture on my way into work the other day:
The advertisement isn't hateful outright, of course. A small white boy, who is the focus of the advertisement, appears to be doing some kind of writing project while two white girls, who appear to be in a similar learning environment, look, not at their own assignment, but at the boy's assignment. Their middle-aged white teacher also looks directly at the boy's writing assignment. Everyone in the image appears to being enjoying the scenario. The boy (clever young man that he is) has obviously written or drawn something quite delightful.From here, I look at the text in the advertisement. What do these happy white people want me to buy? NORTH FLORIDA Christian School ...Your best option. It is here where I start to get a little irritated. The phrase "best option" asks me to immediately imagine options other than the one in the image. And what are those options? Well, in Tallahassee, a city with a white population of 60% and an African-American population of 35%, those options would definitely include a school with at least one black kid, I am guessing. There are two middle schools that are fewer than six blocks away from this billboard and neither of them (OBVIOUSLY) has an all-white population. ...And yet this advertisement seems to say that an all-white education is an option. You don't have to send your kids to those other schools. Send them to our all-white Christian school!
The other element that I want to talk about in this image is the androcentrism of the image. Clearly the boy's education is the focus of this advertisement. The woman and the two girls have their attention focused on the white boy at the image's center. But where are the other boys? For that matter, are there male instructors at this school? The image seems to me—and you may call this a stretch if you like—to be deliberately avoiding any notion of homosociality between both boys and other boys or boys and grown men. What is going on here?
Perhaps it is the too-sensitive gay man in me, but I see heterosexism all over this image. Again, this has to do with the ideas the advertisement itself suggests. "Your best option" asks me what the other options are. And what are the other options? Aside from those options including people of color, they might also include other boys or perhaps male instructors. Instead, the image says that those options are not the "best option." Instead, send your little white boy to our school and we will make sure that he grows up without any other males around him! He will socialize only with women and he will grow up to love them and get married!
It should go without saying that the advertisement is not at all interested in the education of either of the two young women in the image.
I find this advertisement fascinating, even stunning. I suppose it is unremarkable, really, but I feel like I have never been around racism as much as since I have lived in the South. It is really intriguing to me. And I find that almost every time I see an image that strikes me as racist, that image is linked somehow with a privileged heterosexuality. I suppose, after all, racism and homophobia go hand in hand. An attempted sexual control over a population is necessarily and inevitably going to be related to a notion of racial purity. I mean, why else even bother with sexual purity except to keep my family from biologically uniting with that family over there.
What do you think?
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ReplyDeleteTheir website looks a little different: http://www.nflschool.org/ (And you should give their performing arts page a quick glance.)
ReplyDeleteLove this article.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I would say though, from my impression of US and its advertising, campaigns, even news articles / debates is that everything seems to be so much more overt than this, certainly more than in UK (main examples that stick in my mind were the stark bilboards that say something like "A baby has a beating heart from x weeks; abortion is murder", and the "debate" that you see in the political arena where people are allowed to seemingly abuse others' policy with unchecked fact and heresay).
If this is what the poster actually means, wouldn't it just come out and say it?
Graeme,
ReplyDeleteYou are right when it comes to a woman's right to choose: people just say whatever they want. This is true of other so-called debates in the USAmerican public sphere as well (things like Thatcher/Reagan economic policies, global warming, the Communist Party, sexuality) but when it comes to race, all bets are off. In the United States, anyone who makes overtly racist remarks or calls something else racist is usually met with a storm of blustery yelling.
The thing is, racism is actually heavily policed in this country. If anyone says "I hate black people," they are jumped on immediately and told to be quiet. It usually isn't okay to say you hate someone because of their skin color here (we, of course, have an EXTREMELY troubled history of race-relations in this country). So, instead of saying outright that they hate black people or other people of color, they say OTHER things that mean the exact same thing and then tell themselves that they are NOT racist and that there opinions are okay.
For example, SO much of the rhetoric of the people on the Right who protested our new healthcare law spoke in interviews about how people "just need to work harder" and that they "didn't want their tax dollars going to pay for people who just sat around all day and didn't try to make their lives better." These kinds of statements are very old and oft-repeated rhetoric that has been recycled from the Reagan administration and his vilification of so-called "welfare queens" who sat around and collected money from the state. But Reagan's welfare queen was always just a specter for racial hatred, an image used to mobilize latent white racism in voters and get them to support his conservative policies.
So when people say that they don't want to have to pay for the healthcare of other people who don't work hard enough, they really mean BLACK people. They just don't say it. Because if they say THAT, then they get called racist. Instead, they are just as racist as they always were, but they've learned how to speak USAmerican codes of racism.
Ok, I think I understand. This is different from the uk where nobody in a majority is allowed to say / do anything that may be perceived as non-inclusive to minorities (a great 'christian' example in contrast to the pro life chat above is the woman working in an airport who was banned from wearing a crucifix necklace as this would be offensive to Muslims). This overzealous policing of 'inclusiveness' has led (I think) to the almost political legitimisation of far-right politics. Do you think this freedom of speech (race aside) allows the US to steer clear of the far-right? Or could this be due more to the 2party system?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, semi-coherent rambling tangent aside, thanks for the cultural heads-up! As I think you've heard by now, it's green-card application time for me in 2011!