1) Anti-Harold Ford Ad Draws Racism Charges
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/200601024_harold_ford_ad/
2) Microsoft Edits Black Person Out of Ad; Everyone Offended
3) Black Newspaper Portrays Nina Turner as Aunt Jemima
4) Cartoon of Obama in Russian ice cream ad is being called racist
5) Anti-racist advert in black and white
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1376473/Anti-racist-advert-in-black-and-white.html
2) Sony under fire for "racist" advertising
http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/06/sony-under-fire-for-racist-advertising/
3) Racist Advertising
http://raceatrhodes.blogspot.com/2009/04/racist-advertising.html
4) Intel Ad Might be Racist, but Boy Does It Make Me Want a Core 2 Duo
http://gizmodo.com/284037/intel-ad-might-be-racist-but-boy-does-it-make-me-want-a-core-2-duo
5) Kids Company guilty of racist advertising says ASA
http://www.ligali.org/article.php?id=1979
Article #1
Equality board defends racist posters
THE COMMISSION for Racial Equality yesterday defended its decision to launch a racist advertising campaign which suggested that black people were rapists and compared them to orang-utans, prompting more than 30 complaints from the public.
The government-funded race relations watchdog said the pounds 250,000 poster campaign was designed to shock the public into thinking about racism and challenging it when it occurred.
The posters, which went up at 192 sites in cities across Britain on Friday, were yesterday covered with the message, "What was worse? This ad, or your failure to complain?"
But the exercise was criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority, which said the commission could have the "dubious honour" of becoming the first organisation to be forced to have its campaigns vetted.
An authority spokesman said: "It is a shame that the CRE did not work with us within the guidelines laid down. The complaints we have received have come mainly from irate members of the public and there have been others from race relations organisations."
The three posters, which were spoof advertisements for bogus companies and did not mention the commission, prompted more than 30 complaints to the association.
One of the posters for a rape alarm shows a white woman sitting on a bus with a black man in the foreground. The accompanying slogan reads: "Because it's a jungle out there".
Another, for sports footwear, shows a black man jumping at a basketball hoop and an orang-utan in a similar pose reaching for a branch. The caption reads: "Born to be agile".
The final poster goes under the guise of a recruitment company's advertisement. It depicts two businessmen, one black and one white, climbing a ladder. The white man is treading on the hand of the black man with the caption reading: "Dominate the Race".
The commissioin was unapologetic. A spokesman said: "We have been hitting our heads against a brick wall when trying to get British society to pay attention to [racism]."
Sir Herman Ouseley, the chairman, said: "The campaign is designed to force people into considering their own personal attitude to racism and is specifically intended to provoke a reaction - preferably complaint or condemnation.
"There were still thousands of people who must have seen these posters and thought about complaining but couldn't be bothered."
Brett Gosper, who led the team that devised the advertising campaign, said its message was aimed at the "passive majority".
If a racist joke was delivered among such people in a group, they would not protest: "They will perhaps laugh and move on. The statement in this campaign is: condone or condemn, there is no in-between."
Sir Teddy Taylor, Tory MP for Southend East and Rochford, said the commission should be closed.
Article #2
Ford workers angry as blacks are whited out
When Henry Ford launched his Model T automobile, he told customers they could have in any colour they liked - as long as it was black.
Mr Ford's comments will be seen as bitterly ironic by British workers who were photographed to launch the "Everything we do is driven by you" advertising campaign in 1991.
Five members of ethnic minorities were invited to appear in the picture to show the racial mix of Ford's workforce at Dagenham, but in an "ethnic- cleansed" version of the photograph last year, the black and brown faces had been mysteriously replaced by white ones.
Four of the five workers still working at Dagenham have since registered their anger over what they perceive as blatant racism.
Bill Morris, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, yesterday condemned the incident as "deeply offensive". He said: "This is an appalling situation which reveals the depths of racist attitudes in our society."
He said the union had elicited fulsome apologies from management and a pounds 1,500 cheque for each of the workers, in compensation for their hurt feelings. "We shall be equally vigorous in tackling racism in future, wherever it surfaces."
The dramatic transformation in the picture was first noticed by Noel Sinclair, a worker at Ford's Dagenham plant, when he walked into a showroom in Essex.
Mr Sinclair took the new brochure back to the paint, trim and assembly department at the Essex plant and showed four of his friends, who had readily agreed to pose.
Douglas Sinclair, a 56-year-old black man who has worked at the plant for 30 years, said his body remained in the picture, but a white, bespectacled face had appeared on top of it.
"My body was there, dressed in my overalls, the rings on my fingers were still there, but I had glasses on and a white face. It was embarrassing. People at work started to come up to me and call me 'Two Face'."
Patricia Marquis said she felt "humiliated and angry" when she saw that her face had aged 20 years, that she had put on 10lb and turned white.
Article #3
Yesterday's racist ads are today's Collectables
There was a sharp intake of breath, and a muttered "Jesus". Bernie Grant, militant black MP for Tottenham, was reading the caption on a postcard that showed five black toddlers sitting in a row. It said: "God made the little niggers, he made them in the night. He made them in a hurry, and forgot to make them white."
Then a rueful smile began to play on Mr Grant's lips, and he shook his head. This was not some racist propaganda from the present day. It was a postcard from 1929, part of a collection of black ephemera due to go on sale at Bonham's the auctioneers in London on Tuesday.
The Independent on Sunday had asked Mr Grant, veteran campaigner for black people's rights, to give his verdict on the collection. It includes books, songsheets, advertising posters and packaging from Europe and the US, dating from the 1880s to the 1960s.
Taken as a whole, the collection provides a fascinating insight into the way white society's attitude to black people changed over the years. Such material is usually snapped up by black American collectors, say the experts at Bonham's, who expect it to sell for more than pounds 2,000.
"Maybe they're buying this stuff to get it off the shelves," Mr Grant said at first. But his views changed as he saw more.
The earliest items in the collection are trade cards and packaging for goods such as soap and boot polish, dating from the 1880s. Beautifully illustrated, they portray young black men as exotic, almost superhuman figures from faraway lands, riding on giraffes and elephants. They are at one with nature - or, as Mr Grant said, "like animals".
Some are dressed as dandies, minstrels or huntsmen - which would have seemed amusingly outlandish to white Victorians. Many ads show products such as cocoa and cotton with the Africans who produced them, for authenticity. Others use shock tactics. Few show slaves in chains, but several portray black subjects as menacing. "The idea is to shake people up, in advertising terms - to attract their attention," said Mr Grant. "It's similar to what Benetton do now."
Some of the packaging mirrors the Victorian fascination with tales of brave missionaries "civilising" the savages. One ad entitled "The Birth of Civilisation - A Message from the Sea" shows a black man clutching a bar of Pears soap, washed up from a shipwreck. "The consumption of soap is a measure of the wealth, civilisation, health and purity of the people," says the caption.
Items from the turn of the century onwards show a fascination with black children rather than adults. The two most popular themes of the period are children eating watermelon - still an exotic food in Britain at the time - or being eaten themselves, by crocodiles.
"There was colonial unrest," Mr Grant said. "The missionaries felt that these people were sub-human, but they were still people. Portraying them as happy, smiling children, always eating, meant that they were not threatening. They needed educating, and there was no need to worry about them as a threat.
Two Stephen Fry-fronted TV ads for Twinings Tea have been cleared by the Advertising Standards Authority after a complaint that they presented a negative stereotype of a black man as sexually promiscuous.
The watchdog accepted the arguments by ad agency Lowe that "race was not central or relevant to the ads", which were based on Fry's character being "older and less cool" than the young black American man he featured alongside.
Twinings ad: features Fry talking to three women about tea In the first ad, Fry was shown alongside the man, called Tyrone, and speaking to three white women sitting at the counter of a teashop about tea. When he comments that they are "well informed" one of the women says: "Tyrone's been filling us in."
The women are then seen laughing and looking at Tyrone who drops a tin of tea to the floor with Fry commenting: "Oh has he? Has he indeed?"
A second ad showed the same teashop and featured Tyrone writing on a blackboard the words "Earl Grey puts the Zing in your ding-a-ling".In the course of a discussion about the phrase and the quality of the tea, Fry urges Tyrone to "feel" the taste. Tyrone responds "In your ding-a-ling?", with Fry retorting: "No Tyrone. Not in your ding-a-ling."
According to one viewer, both ads were offensive and harmful because she believed they played a negative racial stereotype of a black man as sexually promiscuous and, in the case of the first ad, also existing to provide sexual services for white women.
According to Lowe's submission to the ASA, this was the first complaint that the Twinings campaign was racist.
Lowe said that the character of Tyrone was picked as an opposite to Fry and was "intended to be a way of contemporising the brand and making tea cool".
In its ruling, which cleared the advertisement of breaching its standards code, the ASA said: "Although we acknowledged the innuendo was mildly sexual, we did not consider that it was reliant on the young man's ethnic origins or a racial stereotype.
"We noted the character of Tyrone was shown as an attractive, confident young man and ... clearly enjoying the attentions of, and flirting with, the women.
"We did not consider that his or the women's enjoyment of the situation implied that his character was there simply to provide sexual services for white women, but rather that he was a young man enjoying the confidence-boosting attentions of a group of women."
We considered that Tyrone was shown as a positive character and, because neither ad was reliant on race for its humour, viewers generally were unlikely to believe the ads implied that black men were promiscuous or there to provide sexual services for white women.
"We concluded that the ads were not harmful or likely to cause offence to most viewers."
Article #2
Guinness faces lawsuit for KKK advert
A former pub landlord is suing Guinness because he claims the company's advertising led to a boycott of his pub.Paul Doherty said students organised the boycott after a poster featuring a image of the Ku Klux Klan was put up in his pub.
Mr Doherty is claiming the poster, part of Guinness's "Not everything in black and white makes sense" campaign, was put up by a Guinness sales representative while he was away on holiday.
The poster was a reference to a cinema advertisement that showed a Klan rally with the comment: "44% of Ku Klux Klan members were delivered by a black midwife".But Mr Doherty said that because the poster in his pub showed the Klan image but did not display the statistic, it could be interpreted as racist.
He said several customers had asked him what the poster was doing there."I got asked a lot of questions like 'Does Guinness support the Ku Klux Klan?'" he said. "The poster was nothing to do with me personally but there is a minority of people who think if something like that is displayed in your premises then you are responsible for it."Guinness is contesting the action and the case is expected to last five days.
Article #3
Court lambasts 'racist' Land Rover advert
Land Rover has been forced into an humiliating climbdown after an advertising campaign it ran in South Africa was judged racist and "a mockery of African culture".
A South African court has ordered the company to withdraw the offending advert, which showed a semi-nude African woman whose elongated breasts are blown sideways in the tailwind of a Land Rover.
But in an unprecedented move against an advertiser, the court also ruled the company must publish a statement that amounts to a humiliating public apology in all the publications the three-page advert originally appeared in.
The replacement adverts will contain a ruling by the country's Advertising Standards Authority, which judged the advert "irresponsible, exploitative and constitutes racial stereotyping and violates human dignity".
It added: "The insensitive portrayal of the woman makes a mockery of African culture."
ASA executive director Deline Beukes said this was the first time such a move had been ordered and that the sanction reflected the severity of the case.
Ms Beukes said the new sanction was a reaction to accusations the ASA was a toothless organisation.
She said it would discourage so-called "hit and run" advertising, where the desired shock effect is achieved before the ASA has the time to ban an advertisement.
