He insists; I’m not racist but we just don’t need pictures of black people in adverts. He used to work at a place that once had a black person working there so can’t be racist.
Arthur Braynsel was brought up in an era when the only black people on the television were Lenny Henry, Bill Cosby and that bloke from Rising Damp . He doesn’t mind TV programmes and films with black or Asian people in because he knows which they are and can avoid them.
“I hated Tiswas as a child because Lenny Henry would take the mickey out of white blokes like David Bellamy, and I wouldn’t let my children watch Fresh Prince of Bel Air”. His wife wanted to go see Men in Black at the cinema when it came out but he refused.
What does annoy him is when they appear unexpectedly in TV adverts or on posters. “Why do they want to include black people in banking adverts? It makes no sense”. He considers any appearance of a black or Indian person outside of the TV shows or films that they are allowed to be in to be a box ticking exercise.
Major manufacturers and service providers realised that their customers included black, Asian and Chinese about ten years ago. They decided to start including other races in their advertising as a pragmatic business decision.
Is this true or satirical hyperbole?
Sadly it is very true. While the names and specifics are a work of imagination, the basic reality is true. A piece was written previously which happened to use a stock image that contained a black woman. It was the perfect stock image for the piece. When this was shared on Facebook there were a significant number of disparaging comments based on the race of the model in the stock image.
Further Reading
- Tracking Black representation in marketing
- Time to ditch the ‘race-washing’ in ads
- The portrayal of black people in UK television advertising: Perception and reality
Image courtesy of Tima Miroshnichenko:
Note, this is a stock image and this does not represent the views of the model in the photograph