Australians & Racism: Now discussing KFC advert

Ok, going back, you had said "The problem is really the calming of the crowd which is when a stereotype becomes prejudicial because of the implication of positive result, which inherently make the stereotype negative."

Which is the part that I'm not seeing as I'm not seeing 1. that the crowd has been 'calmed' or 2. that that would be a positive result.

"I think that tweaked slightly it is a much better ad, and mroe importantly removes any odor of prejudice. What's really funny though is that E_S first response is "yes we're rascist"
and I'm the one who gets flak for discerning a minor issue with the ad. Apparently people are fine being described as racist in a non specific way, but any identified problem must be ignored or just minute details."
I would think that the point with that is that Australia DOES have problems, this just isn't an example of it. Though I suppose the test of if people feel an identified problem must be ignored would be the Australian stance to something like, say, the Cronulla riots from a few years back.

 

Oh sweet Jesus don't judge us on the bogans from the Cronulla riots. Those guys have something seriously wrong with them.

Super Watto i agree its cruel to make that man wear such a hideous wig

 

I'm just saying that Cronulla WAS a clear example that Australian society has some racism that really needs to be dealt with. Heck, even the Chaser's bit about a mosque in Mosman showed some issues worth addressing.

 

No durrr I didn't know that, If you check every country has racism in it. Its not just us.

 

I remember the gentleman in that segment said they should build it in the South West instead. I don't know about elsewhere, but there's a lot of regional snobbery and rivalry in Sydney.

 

North Shore or GTHO.

ES

 

We are racist, Farrie, this ad just isn't an example of that mate.

ES

 

Personally, I prefer the Northern Suburbs, but that's with only limited experience.

 

Except there aren't two "factions" in the ad. There is one group of supporters, and one guy who feels he's in the wrong spot.

But the trick to the whole discussion is really: how do we tell when an ad is racist? What I saw was one white fellow "fixing" the behaviour of a group of non-white people. Some have rebutted this by saying that I (and apparently American critics) am not taking enough care to put the ad in its proper social context, i.e. that of Aussie cricket. Indeed, I know next to nothing about cricket at all, and the Aussie cricket scene is a complete unknown to me. But if we are to take that scene (and thus the intended audience) into account, it could just as well be warranted to take an even larger social context into account as well, seeing as Aussie cricket does not exist in a social vaccuum either.

Thus, the reason that certain groups pay attention to stereotyping like racism is because of historical power-relationships that have existed along certain arbitrary lines of population. This is why one is more likely to react to a white man "pacifying" black people than a black man doing the same to "white folks" - historically, it was white people who subjugated others and ruled over them based on notions of racial stereotypes. Anything that is reminiscent of this historical legacy will, understandably, stir up emotions, particulary among those who historically got the short end of the stick. Taking that into account, I'd say that the ad was at best insensitive and careless. Now, there have been quite a few comments based on the nature of Aussie cricket culture and "how about getting over it", i.e. all that is historical so why get worked up about it?

Well, in my experience, it is very common in relatively homogenous social groups to have kneejerk, defensive reactions about accusations about hypersensitivity when critique comes from outside, but such reactions say very little about what actually goes on inside those groups in terms of practices. Indeed, sometimes such reactions fill the function of making invisible practices that the group does not want to see. On the other hand, in a political environment of strong polarization, hyperbolic expression is often inflated.

This means that it is difficult to make an assessement of exacty what is going on here, but reflexive rejection of the notion that the ad plays on certain stereotypes because the critique comes from outside a certain community is not sufficient to convince me. In Aussie cricket, I'd be kinda surprised if there wasn't at least some Indian fans, given how big cricket apparently is in India, so if the community is strongly ethnically homogenous in a country that boasts some of the highest immigration rates in the world, I would ask myself why this is the case. And then the ad would take on additional significance in terms of how of the ad company envisions Aussie cricket fans, at least.

 

Danaan, I'd point out that just over 1% of Australians have an Indian ancestry, and Australia as a whole is around 90% ethnically European. I'd also strongly suspect that a sizable portion of Indians in Australia that care about cricket would be fans of the Indian cricket team rather than the Australian or West Indies cricket teams.


Related, I had a very awkward situation last night that ties in to this thread. I went to dinner with friends in downtown L.A., and didn't actually know that the place we were going to eat was a bar and restaurant that is a USC bar. I come from a family that is very pro-UCLA, the cross town rivals, to the point of having a UCLA umbrella with me last night. I didn't feel terribly at ease for much of the meal, and it was particularly uncomfortable when we were waiting to be seated next to a wall covered with USC team posters.

 

Wouldn't have been a problem if you'd brought chicken wings for everybody.

 

I'm pretty sure restaurants have issues with you handing out other food in their place. I was content just that at a certain point, the people at the two nearest tables left and I had better distance from the USC people.

 

Danaan, there's actually quite a lot to talk about under the umbrella of 'Australians & Racism'. It's just a shame this thread was created to discuss a KFC ad which has nothing even remotely to do with racism or the propagation of racial racial stereotypes.

We could talk about "One Nation" and Pauline Hanson. We can talk about the lives that many of the people in our indigenous communities lead in some parts of Australia. We can talk about black deaths in custody. We can discuss the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act by the Federal Government in order for an 'intervention' to take place which among other things quarantined social security payments and barred the sale of alcohol to indigenous people. The UN has even ruled the policy as being clearly discriminatory and a sign of 'entrenched racism' in Australia.

We can talk about the Cronulla riots, the recent series of attacks on Indian people, the refusal of local Councils in Sydney to approve development applications for the construction of mosques and Islamic schools and the public protests against Islamic schools being built in their communities.

We can talk about the effect of actual racial stereotypes which resulted in an aboriginal woman, a prominent Elder, laying unconscious for over 5 hours at a bus stop after vomiting because of a stroke without anybody assisting her. Pedestrians, bus drivers, everyone just left her there because everyone assumed she was just a drunk or a petrol sniffer. Two Japanese tourists actually went to her aid.

We can talk about the Tampa affair and Australia's attitude towards refugees and 'boat people'. We can discuss Australia's immigration policies (E_S has particular insight here).

We could talk about movies like 'Romper Stomper' which depict racial tensions and racial violence, we could talk about movies like 'The Combination' about Lebanese gang violence.

Really, there is so much to potentially debate, but instead ,three pages have been devoted to a micro-analysis of the visual and audio (can't forget the racist audio!) elements of a 10 second ad (amounting to about three scenes not including the opening scene and closing scenes) which is essentially one scene showing an Aussie fan in a stadium surrounded by fans of the opposing cricket team, posing the question:"need a tip when stuck in an awkward situation" which then cuts to another close-up scene with the Aussie handing out KFC with the punchline "too easy". The punchline scene has no audio because it is the..ta da..punchline. There is no evidence of 'correcting behaviour' presumably because we cannot see the crowd in the punchline scene in any case, because it is a close up zoom in shot of the Aussie chap wheras in the previous scene it was zoomed out to capture the crowd (you know, to set the 'awkward' situation scenario) . So, three pages have been spent evaluating scenes which are not even in the ad.

This thread actually reminds me of a party I went to when I was sixteen. We were all dead drunk, there were dozens of empty beer bottles on the floor, cases of beer everywhere, half full bottles of rum and vodka laying about, most of us had passed out or were lying in piles of bourbon inspired vomit and a police officer struts in, pauses, looks around and goes straight for a half full bottle of Coca-Cola and smells it, searching meaningfully for trace elements of alcohol.

 

And again people accuse me of examining things that aren't in the ad while E_s tried to defend his position by saying the game was a blowout.

The cut out the audio because it was the punchline? Really? that's the best you've got? Hey LOH look at the other ads in the series.. they didn't cut out the audio for the punchline. In point of fact you can still here low crowd noise during the punchline, it's only the exuberance of the westies that had been cut out.

Lets take a look at a similar commercial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4Y_mA1rAxI&feature=related

In this the noise comparison is made absolutely clear.. but note how exactly it follows the same audio formula.

And most most amusingly is you can't seem to stop accusing me of calling ti racism. You apaprently require a straw man to go with that tin ear. All in all it's really quite funny.

And Lowbacca I'm so happy to see you somehow escaped that USC bar. They could probably smell the UCLA on you and would have torn you apart if you'd flinched. Stay strong, man. I just I can't match your gang colors sensitivity and fragility of position.

 

The whole reason point is, when you're a backer of one team, and you're surrounded by backers of the other team that you don't know, I'm going to suggest that that is fairly commonly recognized as an awkward situation unless mitigating factors are involved.

 

Oh, come on. We all know you are a secret Cowboys fan here in the heart of Redskins territory.

Kimball Kinnison

 

LOH, all of those points are good - it is, of course, important to discuss all such overt and blatant examples of racism. However, once social momentum builds, those expressions are comparatively easy to address insofar as they are easy to spot. But they are only the tip of the iceberg. It is the unintentional acts of racism that are more difficult to spot, those acts that are made invisible by social acceptance of ethnic stereotypes that result in discrimination on the labour market, or denial of access for certain groups to certain public places. Such acts tend to persist, explained away as "language deficiencies", or "lack of interpersonal skills" or "inferior educational credentials", enforced by the constant reproduction of images of the "other" as less competent in different respects. My primary experiences come from Sweden, a country most people think of as strong in the tradition of social justice and solidarity (indeed, it was one of the foremost critics of South African apartheid), and yet when you look at the labour market, there are occupational categories that are pretty much ethnically clean, and the debate about immigrant integration is remarkably one-sided: Expressions like "we have to integate them", or "we have to utilize them better" are very revealing, saying alot about who is the implicit agents (Swedes) and who is the disempowered group that will supposedly benefit from the charity of thoe same agents (immigrants), as if the latter as dysfunctional, lacking in competence and generally in need of the protective care of the former.

It is informed by such experiences that I watch the ad, and to me it seems that it might be revealing in terms of the Australian public discourse (though one ad is much too small a sample to draw conclusions from). So, you are right that those other points are important to acknowledge and address. But other expressions, unintentional acts, can still have quite some significance in terms of long term segregation, even though they might at first glance appear relatively inconspicious.

 

Actually on the occasion I am sufficiently reminded of football to care who wins, I usually pull for the Packers. More to the point though, living by a military base has lead me to meet fans of all sorts of team, including the Cowboys, here in the heart of Redskins Territory. Hell the guy working at the redskins store I used to talk to was a Patriots fan.

All of this suggest to me that if the presence of sports rivals is enough to set your heart palpitating and your palms to sweating, you do not have a favourite team so much as a mental disorder.