Tags
ad campaigns, advertiments, advertisement campaigns, cultural awareness, Honda, power, powerless, prejudices, racism, repression, skin colour, subliminal messages
The Facts
Some years ago (approx. in the second half of this millenia’s first decade) Honda brought out the first “Use Original Parts” advertisement campaign, created by the Garrigosa Studio in Barcelona. The message is quite clear and straightforward: use authentic spare parts on your Honda, everything else will seem unnatural, unauthentic, is unthinkable, in short, it simply cannot exist. To bring the message across, they presented human male faces morphed with animal species. The animal muzzles of an elephant, camel and a pig were neatly placed into where the mouth in a human face would be. (The campaign’s prints were found on Trend Hunter Marketing and Kruzer. Visit the pages for more of the campaign’s images.)
The Question that Stares you in Your Face:
Is it Racist?
Why, just because a man who is coincidentally black is associated with an animal that is stereotypically from the African continent? It could all be a coincidence. Moreover, there are lots of elephants in India and Southeast Asia too, you know.
First Glance, First answer: No.
Now let’s look at some more of the images, seemingly the most popular of the campaign:
Second Glance, Second answer: No, but…
…something about the sequence of these images bothered me. I saw two others but these three struck me. I immediately had some thoughts and concerns about the message underlying this campaign and scoured the internet for further possible information but was unable to find any criticism on it.
The Conclusion: It’s an Unconscious Version of Racism
In other words, racism in disguise. While I cannot find anything specifically racist about each picture, I can definitely point my finger at it when I see the collection of them. Each animal is connected to the ethnicity of the male face in question in a culturally stereotypical fashion. In other words, the images recall in a viewer with a Western mindset concepts that are dangerously close to pre-established stereotypes in our culture. Why can’t the Caucasian man have an elephant’s trunk, the Middle Eastern/ Maghreb a pig’s nose and the black man a camel’s muzzle? Is it only about favourably blending human skin colours with piggy pink, sand brown and greyish black? If the message of the campaign is to alienate us from an unnatural, uncanny human/ animal combination, then surely mixing human and animal skin colours would be even more beneficial for bringing the message across. The campaign as a whole, therefore, has a very silent, very dangerous way of perpetuating racist assumptions about ethnicities. A perfect example of an unconscious version of racism.
In our time and age, it is unquestionable that we are surrounded by images on a daily basis. I find it very unsettling that we are increasingly taking these environmental imagery as a given. More often than not, we consume them uncritically, become blunt, and/ or ignore some of the subliminal messages implicit in them. At a second glance, most of these images (mostly belonging to ad campaigns) carry culturally questionable messages that can only be deciphered if cross-referenced with other aspects of reality. Underlying these images are often assumptions concerning stereotypes, prejudices and distorted images of reality. Beware of what enters your thoughts through your eyes.
©Kenna Lee Edler