Posts Tagged ‘propaganda modeling’
Intention and responsibility
It is entirely possible for the meanings we create to be beyond our intent and within our responsibility. I’ve said this before, here. You have to read down a ways to get to it, and it’s so fascinating, that I thought I would repeat it.
In the wild of human to human interactions, more meaning is made than can be understood. It’s air and water. It’s simply everywhere. And whether we try to understand and rationally consider the currents of meaning that flow around and through us or not, there is more meaning than we can ever comprehend. The meaning shapes us. It animates us. So when someone says, “that’s not what I meant!” or “that’s doesn’t logically follow from what I said!” it might not matter. It is entirely possible for the meanings we create to be beyond our intent and within our responsibility.
Some of you will find this obvious. Others might find this to be a head scratcher. There are, of course, obvious legal examples. When you enter into a legal or written contract, it doesn’t matter what you intended by saying or writing such-and-such. What matters is what the legal meaning of the words are. These legal meanings are largely out of your hands. We hire lawyers and judges to sort through the words and figure out the meanings. This is not to say that they aren’t interested in intentions. They are. But in the end, you can be found to be legally responsible for meanings you never intended.
There are also obvious non-legal examples. In the context of a WordPress conference, you might intend to be speaking about adding pages, but if you use the language of posts, then you will be misunderstood and/or corrected. The extent to which you are misunderstood and/or change your behaviour is entirely your responsibility. You can’t expect hundreds of thousands of WordPress users to adopt your conventions, no matter how correct they seem to your personal logic.
But it’s not just WordPress, or Canadian law, or an analytic philosophy lecture on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. One might run into these meaning regimes and their pre-existing meanings in any given community. We will encounter meaning regimes in our families and our intimate relationships. We can’t simply ask everyone else to get on board our intended meanings without sometimes being willing to do the same. We share language and we negotiate the conventions and meanings of the terms. The catch is that the more fixed a given community or meaning regime is, the less negotiation there is. Intentions be damned, you will be responsible for your unintended meanings.
Positioning the other, again
So last week I wrote about a bus ad that I photographed and posted claiming that it was racist. But I didn’t really speak to how or why it was racist. And it’s important to be able to say why. Right? Well I think some folks might appreciate it. But it’s not because I want to argue about it. Well, I like to argue a little. But not in a tiresome way. Well, okay, I aspire to be less tiresome. I say this because it can be really tiring to hang out with super critical, righteous folks; especially if they don’t try hard enough to understand you. And I guess I’m feeling a little worried that I’m being that person. I don’t want to be a know-it-all and I don’t want to have to be right all the time. And I don’t want to be self-righteous. And maybe I’m saying all of this because I’m still relatively new to blogging. Or publishing. And some people will never agree with me. And some people will pretend to try to understand but won’t. But, there are some people who are seriously interested. Right?
So I think this explanation of how and why I think the ad is racist is really for: 1) sympathetic readers who see the ad as clearly racist but can’t say why it is, or who perhaps are interested in a different take on it, 2) sympathetic readers who think the ad might be racist but aren’t sure if it is, 3) sympathetic readers who want to understand why the ad is racist but, try as they might, just can’t really see it, 4) unsympathetic readers who think I’m crazy but are still curious about the world and are legitimately interested in the views of others, and sometimes even can change their mind.
The tagline: “GREAT MEXICAN TASTE, WITHOUT THE RUNS”
So the implication of this tagline is that Mexican food gives people diarrhea. And food is made by people. And food is an essential part of culture. Food is also an important way that we racialize people. And perhaps most importantly, Mexican food is invented, mostly, by Mexicans. The thing is that you can’t tell stories about an entire people’s food without also telling stories about those people. So Mexicans are directly implicated in this. And the implication is basically that Mexicans give people the shits.
While many tourists travel to Mexico and have an experience of diarrhea, it’s patently false that all Mexican food gives people the runs. Some readers might think that the tagline is not a universal generalization; it is saying simply that some (not all) mexican food gives people the runs.
But this weaker and more generous reading of the tagline is disingenuous. The reason is that the act of positioning and repositioning yourself in a market place is a common branding practice. The point is not to reposition your organization against some of the Mexican food. The whole point behind the act of repositioning is to be seen as different from most Mexican food. The point is to occupy a unique space in the marketplace. And everyone has a sense for this. Thus a tagline that suggests that this restaurant is unique or different from the vast majority of Mexican restaurants is, in this case, suggesting that the vast majority of Mexican food gives people the runs. The sad fact is that this stereotype already exists among many North Americans and so this kind of racism plays heavily on existing racist ideas.
More then playing on existing ideas, this kind of statement would not be racist without the context of racism that it’s operating in. So for example, imagine an ad for a German restaurant that had the tagline, “GREAT GERMAN TASTE, WITHOUT THE RUNS”. This would have a similar humour about it. And this tagline would be similarly memorable. But it would also be a little odd. That’s because there is no cultural story and no racial stories that the tagline is relying on. And while Germans do suffer from a kind of racism now and then here in North America, it’s on an entirely different level from the kind of racism that Mexicans suffer from. 1
This is how meaning is made. The meaning of our words and images and sounds that we produce, rely heavily on the contexts and cultures and languages that they are situated in. If I privately call my gay lover a fag, it’s really different than if I publicly call my prime minister a fag. Same words, vastly different meanings. And the meaning that is made also depends on the hearers. And writers of ads have a duty to ensure that the words that they write don’t contribute to the images, stereotypes, and falsehoods that propagate demeaning and derogatory constructions of an entire race, culture, gender, nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, class or religious practice.
The ugly meanings that this tagline is both relying on and creating, include 2:
- Mexican food gives people the shits
- Mexican food is dirty
- Mexicans are dirty
If the ad isn’t intended to be racist, then how can it be racist?
The short answer to this question is simply to say that intentional racism is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for racism. So it’s a common and important practice to distinguish between intentions and impacts when assessing whether a particular act or a particular artifact is racist or not. And it’s widely held that while intentions are interesting, it’s much more important to consider the impacts. Considering the impact this ad has on Mexicans is one important test for racism actually. It is common, for example, for people of a dominant culture or dominant race, to not notice they myriad subtle and not-so-subtle acts of racism. Probably most white Canadians who read this ad, don’t see or experience the tagline as racist. But none of this is evidence that the ad is not racist. The impacts of racism are most often felt by those who it is about.
They’re making a joke – how can humour be racist?
The humour card isn’t cool anymore so I won’t spend much time on it. Suffice to say that this kind of thing is usually more funny for the dominant class of people and since many obviously racist jokes are considered funny by some bigot, somewhere, this question of whether something is racist is totally orthogonal to the question of whether something is humourous.
They’re selling Mexican food so why would they be racist against Mexicans?
This is an interesting question! This is really why I was moved to photograph the ad in the first place. Branding and advertising have a history for playing on this kind logic:
- People have racist ideas
- We want these people to be our customers
- We will use their ideas to reposition ourselves as unique and memorable, even if it’s at the expense of entrenching these racist ideas
- We will do this because it’s not our job to make the world just but it is our job to get customers
But the tagline is true some of the time.
Maybe, but it’s implying that this is true most of the time. And that’s messed up
- Granted, I’m not going to argue for this here, and if you disagree with this you will probably find the overall thrust of my argument less convincing. That said, if you disagree with the claim that there is significant problem with the way Mexicans are racialized in Canada and the USA, we might have other deeper communications challenges. Not that these are insurmountable. They’re not. And they’re important gaps to cross, but I won’t try to do this here. ↩
- This why the tagline is effective. What they’re effectively saying is that their food is tasty like Mexican food, but it’s not dirty like Mexican food. My hypothesis is that the ad writers and restaurant owners aren’t Mexican. But importantly, my criticisms of this ad aren’t neutralized if it turns out the ad writers or the restaurant owners are Mexican. ↩
Truth in Advertising
This is a good ad. I love the copy. It’s folksy – the language is down to earth. Heck, it could be my mom talking, the voice of the ad is that good.
“Fact is, truth is an essential part of any successful ad campaign. Smart advertisers have known this for years. That’s why the advertising industry created the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards. For more than 40 years, the Code has set standards for acceptable advertising in Canada. It helps ensure that the ads you see are truthful, fair and accurate. Check it out for yourself. Because the more you know about advertising, the more you get out of it.”
The ASC Code apparently exists to help advertisers, especially the not so smart ones. I guess the free market isn’t smart enough to regulate itself, so it needs a little help so that advertisers tell the truth. I haven’t read the ASC Code yet. And I’m here and now committing to reviewing it. I look forward to it. This particular ad assures me that ads in Canada are “truthful, fair and accurate”. But there is some small, cynical part of me that wonders if this would be worth advertising for if it was actually the case. I struggle with this kind of cynicism though because I do believe in education through advertising. Gosh, I even believe in advertising! But when I really ask myself, if ads are fair, I balk. True, sure. The best propaganda is always true. Let’s raise our standards though shall we? Truth is not enough.
If you don’t already trust ads, will one more ad help?
The question might be, do ads help us to live better lives? Or perhaps, do ads make us smarter? Wiser? These are reasonable expectations. Or the question could be framed on the flip side. Do ads make us stupid? Do they lie to us, despite being true?
This is why the language of “fair” is curious to me. This is a higher standard than true, and if ads are fair that is really interesting. Of course, the ASC might have a very low expectation of fair. What they mean by fair could be really weak – like, it could simply mean legal. Or, even worse, it could simply be another term for true. That would be somehow irresistibly funny since this ad would then be propaganda for the ad industry. It would then be meta-propaganda! It’s a bit of a trust issue isn’t it. If you don’t already trust ads, will one more ad really help?
To learn more about the Code, visit www.adstandards.com or call their recorded toll free information line at 1-877-656-8646. I’m going to.