Race is the new sex

Posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, 07 July 2006 00:35.

For a while now I have been rolling the idea around in my thoughts that race is today, particularly in regards to marketing, what sex once was a couple of generations ago. It is a topic that is taboo, yes, but one that is so biologically unavoidable that it presents a huge untapped resource to those who are willing to broach public (or elite) opinion and use it for creative, commercial ends. My theory is that at some point someone will take the plunge, and if and when the coast looks clear for the more timid, many more will stamped in as well.

Recent developments suggest that companies may be close to the edge of taking the leap; at least one now has:

[N]ew billboard advert for Sony’s white PSP has caused consternation across the US videogaming community. The ad shows a white model dressed entirely in white threateningly grasping the face of a black model. Next to them are the words, “PlayStation Portable. White is coming”.

The ads were developed by agency TBWA, which seems to have a very high-risk outlook. From their site, they provide an view of their philosophy:

Disruption is a tool for change and an agent of growth: a working methodology and a life view philosophy.

The word is difficult, uncomfortable but “Disruption” is not destructive. It is creation. Disruption is a means of creating something dynamic to replace something that has become static.

Disruption is the art of asking better questions, challenging conventional wisdom and overturning assumptions and prejudices that get in the way of imagining new possibilities and visionary ideas.

...

Disruption is a system for people who hate systems. Similar to the concept of open-source software development, Disruption has evolved and matured as communities around the network use, adapt and reinvent Disruption tools for specific market or client needs.

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Comments:

Posted by Stanley Womack on Fri, 07 Jul 2006 03:13 | #

Zach, you are definitely on to something. Fifty years ago, race was not the shocking third rail that it is today. At that time, sex and unmarried pregnancies and “bad reputations” were the shocking third rail in American society. A divorce would end a political or pastoral career.

As morality goes, race has become a vastly overly-mentioned unmentionable, and sex has become glorified and an almost oppressive presence in the lives of younger and younger Americans.

At this point in the analysis, this is not particularly a Majority Rights issue. But in the New Marketing as explained by Zach Maulsby above, it is a very big deal for Majority Rights.

Consider the new Washington Mutual TV ads. A young African American man is shown herding a large group of stupid, greedy, older European American men, meanwhile mocking them as bankers past their prime.

We gave the “Julius Streicher Award” to the ad agency that produced these TV ads on the ground that they describe European American men in kidnapping, trapping, herding, and a variety of other criminal victimizations.

If you’d like to see this, go to this web site for our take on the issue, and you will find links to the ad agency’s web site that show the ads.

http://www.resistingdefamation.org/sub/g49.htm

Posted by stari_momak on Fri, 07 Jul 2006 04:30 | #

Zach this is a great post. With all due respect to others here, this is both pithy and enters new territory, something that has been lacking of late.

As for the Washington Mutual add, I wholeheartedly agree with stanley.

Posted by dfasfd on Fri, 07 Jul 2006 06:25 | #

u racist crackers shut the fuk up yall kkk bitches

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 07 Jul 2006 07:44 | #

Interesting, Zach. Perhaps one should bear in mind that TBWA’s interest in tipping over entrenched group-thinking is paltry commercialism ... in other words, the replacement of one idée fixe among the suggestible with another.

Our problem goes deeper than this, to suggestibility itself, our susceptibility to it and its gift of cultural suzereignty to others than ourselves.

The opposite of suggestibility in this respect, and the eternal remedy to it, is that natural holding before the eyes of our ethnic genetic interest. The question, then, arises as to how and why suggestibility and “forgetting” is so characteristic of us at this point in our history as Europeans. Was it always so, or is there perhaps something to the notion that latter-day individualism or modernity or somesuch is damaging our capacity to intuit our real group interests? If, for example, the solicitorial pressure of commercialism is one of the factors which tend to distract from natural thinking then Disruption, as it appears on the page at TBWA, is an addition to our woes.

That’s not to say it might have some utility in challenging the present tranche of received ideas. But EGI it can’t inculcate, since to “have legs” that has to arise naturally, from the soul.