13471: Google’s Biko Birthday Bash.

Google salutes the 70th birthday of Steve Biko—while maintaining apartheid-like conditions with its own workforce.

12855: Incomplete Picture On Apartheid…?

To explain this campaign for the Apartheid Museum, the advertising agency—The Open Collaboration in South Africa—wrote the following:

In 2015, there is an all-too-common tendency to believe that the history of Apartheid is no longer relevant, and that it doesn’t affect contemporary South Africa. We were tasked with creating a campaign that would re-affirm the relevance of the history of Apartheid in contemporary South Africa. In so doing, we would be able to attract more people, especially the younger generation, to the Apartheid Museum. We compared the social context of Apartheid-era South Africa with the state of South Africa today. Very quickly it became clear that the imperative to understand the history of Apartheid has never been more urgent. As a country, we are still battling against destructive patterns established during Apartheid, which continue to manifest themselves in modern South African life: ‘riot’, ‘strike’, ‘murder’, ‘mob’ and ‘massacre’ are unfortunately still a part of the country’s lexicon.

Okay, but it seems odd to present images about Apartheid without White people.

From Ads of the World.

9781: Post-Apartheid South Africa.

Democratic Alliance Students Organisation—a part of DA Youth in South Africa—sparked controversy with the poster depicted above. Commentary can be viewed here, here, here and here. Plus, the image that upset so many South Africans turned out to be a stock photograph of a couple that is probably not even South African.

7057: Color Commentary From Sanford Moore.

From Adweek…

Apartheid Alive and Well on Madison Avenue

By Sanford Moore

During the time when America was segregated, the late, great Nat King Cole’s groundbreaking television show was canceled because Madison Avenue and its clients would not sign on as sponsors. At the time he remarked, “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark.” Not only was his comment painfully correct, but also eerily prophetic, given that 50 years later Madison Avenue is still discriminating against black Americans.

The streets of Madison Avenue are like the segregated graveyards of the past, filled with generations of unrecognized black contributions, talent and ambitions. The New York City Commission on Human Rights, in successive investigations dating from 1968 to 2005, has documented the consistent pattern of racial discrimination enforced by the major ad agencies and their corporate holding companies. They control a constellation of marketing, media buying, communications, lobbying and PR firms in which there is also a dearth of African-American executives.

Now, it’s time to get agencies where it counts—their wallets. Recently, I appealed to Bill Thompson, the New York City comptroller—who manages pension funds, which collectively own some $100 million of agency holding companies’ stock and some $6 billion of 46 of their clients’ stock—to pressure the agency CEOs to end the illegal and discriminatory practices of their affiliates. Like the fight to free the blacks of South Africa, which was aided by the divestiture movement led by the institutional investor community, we must now employ the same tactic in freeing black Americans from the insidious grip of the Mad Men.

Workforce statistics and documented discrimination fail to put this flagrant and purposeful discrimination in its proper economic and societal context. In 1968, the year of the first New York City Commission on Human Rights investigation, the seminal book, The $30 Billion Negro, was published. This revealed for the first time the extent and existence of the black consumer market. In 1979, when the commission’s follow-up report declared that a condition of “de facto segregation” existed for blacks on Madison Avenue, a sequel to the book, The $70 Billion Negro, was published. So while the Mad Men and their corporate clients had no aversion to reaping black dollars, they were averse to hiring black employees and executives.

The black consumer market has since grown exponentially and is currently worth almost $1 trillion to Madison Avenue’s corporate clients, according to Target Market News. Yet, Madison Avenue continues to denigrate the importance of African Americans and their consumer dollars. Madison Avenue agencies are still “afraid of the dark.”

This prejudice, this remnant of Jim Crow, not only discriminates against black employees, executives and vendors, but also is propagated on the greater American society. It is manifest in the paucity of black leads on network TV, and in the disproportionately low use of black models in television commercials and magazine ads. It is reflected in the rate and revenue disparity Madison Avenue forces on black radio stations as documented by the Federal Communications Commission. In fact, Madison Avenue has created and perpetuated a “separate and unequal” marketing paradigm. It is evident in its advertising, workforce, executive ranks and allocation of client ad dollars.

As reported by Nielsen, black-targeted media received some $2.3 billion in 2008. This figure represented 1 percent of measured ad spending. The figures for Q1 2009 reveal the same “niggardly” level of spending being allocated to black-targeted media. Of the $1.3 billion spent by the federal government via Madison Avenue prime contractors in 2006-07, only $6.1 million found its way into black media vehicles, according to Nielsen.

When confronted with these figures, Madison Avenue agencies attempt to rationalize their policies with media gibberish about “impressions delivered” and meeting arbitrarily concocted media criteria. What is being done is the same as when blacks were declared three-fifths of a person in the Constitution. Despite Jim Crow having been declared illegal more than 40 years ago, Madison Avenue continues to enforce a condition of marketing “peonage” on black Americans and the media that serve them.

Let us not forget that one of the differences between totalitarianism and democracy is the extent to which a free media system is supported by paid advertising. Also, let us consider the historical context since Cole uttered his scathing remark. Changes include the U.S. Voting Rights Act being passed, black rule in South Africa, black CEOs running U.S. corporations, black creative expression setting the tone of America’s pop culture, and the U.S.’s first African-American president. Yet Madison Avenue refuses to lift the “cotton curtain” of discrimination.

We have had 40 years of pious pronouncements by the leaders of the industry, 40 years of investigations, reports and obfuscation, 40 years of denying the significance of the black consumer market. It is time to return the favor. It is time to make the CEOs of the holding companies pay a price with their own money, to affect their compensation packages and their company’s stock price.

Thus my appeal to Thompson. As the youngsters say, it’s all about the Benjamins.

Sanford Moore is an industry critic, former agency executive and current black talk radio co-host. He can be reached at thecutmancv@hotmail.com.

7018: District 9—Sci-Fi Or Non-Fiction?

From Politics Daily…

District 9 and Racism: a Thoughtful Look Through a Sci-Fi Lens

By Donna Britt

Warning: For the sake of enjoyment, don’t let anybody—even me—tell you too much about the strikingly original new movie District 9. You’ve never seen anything quite like it. Then again, maybe you have.

Have you met anyone who is compassionate and caring—but who drops that warmth like a scalding-hot coffee cup when something sparks his unthinking prejudice? Has an unexpected event ever forced you to see life through the eyes of someone whose feelings—whose humanity—you’ve barely considered? Have you ever marveled at how quickly those who’ve been unfairly discriminated against can become themselves become blindly discriminatory?

If you said “yes” to any of the above, you’ll relate to District 9, a gripping sci-fi thriller that is this summer’s most political popcorn flick. Not only does it boast secret government agendas, violent cultural clashes and brief, gory vaporizations, it’s the perfect movie for an August in which “patriots” demonize and shout down their fellow citizens in the name of freedom.

The basics: A humongous spaceship appears from the heavens to hover, silent and menacing, over modern Johannesburg. Wary scientists board the ship to find it broken and teeming with starving, weakened aliens with no discernible leader or motives for visiting earth. The aliens’ tentacles and scaly appearance earn them the nickname “prawns” by the contemptuous humans who install them in an enormous, barbed-wire shantytown that quickly devolves into a slum.

The newcomers are aliens, but what happens next often occurs when humans confront less-powerful newcomers whose looks and behavior baffle them. The hideous outsiders are ostracized and barred from most businesses. People living near their chaotic camp want more distance. Humanitarians demand that the visitors—who adore cat food, eat garbage and who are largely peaceful despite possessing massive weapons—be treated fairly. Most people just want them gone.

When the government decides to move the interlopers to a more distant settlement, officials puts a desk jockey in who charge unintentionally learns more about the newcomers-and his fellow countrymen—than he ever wanted.

A critical hit, District 9 promises to be like “The Hangover”: a smash whose talented, unknown cast bodes ill for Hollywood stars whose huge salaries no longer guarantee major box office (just ask Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell and Christian Bale). The movie’s blend of complex ideas, great visuals and stunning special effects-all produced on a comparatively miniscule budget and shot mostly in a Jo’burg landfill—has the Michael Bays of the world quaking.

Even more encouraging: District 9 audiences should leave the theater pondering weightier questions than how many of its stars opted for Botox. In a culture that often prefers its heroes uncomplicated and its bad guys easily distinguishable, characters in District 9 are surprisingly like those in real life.

Every group has its heroes and its jerks—sometimes existing in the same body.

There are the sadistic soldiers who enjoy abusing the largely helpless visitors. There are heartless government officials whose lies are so reflexive, they’ve stopped realizing that they’re lies. The ostensible hero is Wikus van de Merwe (played by gifted newcomer Sharlto Copley), a clueless bureaucrat whose disgust for the creatures he’s relocating is masked by an obsequious grin. Decent enough to protest the creatures’ mistreatment, he’s also cavalier enough not to mind that the “improved” new community he’s pressing them to move to is even worse than their current digs—“more like a concentration camp.”

He’s like lots of people: Unmoved by what happens to unfamiliar “others” until a twist of fate forces him to care. Especially unsettling is the portrayal of a group of cruel, greedy Nigerians who set up shop in the alien’s camp, selling them goods, buying their weapons, and generally exploiting them. It’s no accident that the movie is set in South Africa. Writer-director Neill Blomkamp grew up in Johannesburg during the nation’s white minority rule; the blatant racism and authoritarianism of that time and place shaped his creative vision.

“It all had a huge impact on me,” Blomkamp, 29, told Chris Lee of the Los Angeles Times. “The white government and the paramilitary police, the oppressive, iron-fisted military environment....

“Those ideas wound up in every pixel in District 9.”

In the movie, black citizens brutalized under apartheid’s tyranny don’t blink when they tell TV reporters that the aliens—whose habits and living conditions are indeed repellent—deserve no rights and should get the hell back to where they came from. Without preaching, District 9 explores the slippery infectiousness of intolerance and every human being’s potential venality.

Philippe Bonhomme is a Silver Spring, Md., accountant and music producer who saw an early screening of District 9 and was surprised when the movie invoked for him the struggle for independence in Haiti, his parents’ birthplace. One of the Caribbean’s most brutal slave colonies, Haiti was for decades ruled by French colonizers who made fortunes from slaves’ unpaid labor and agricultural knowledge.

Haiti’s famed liberator Toussaint l’Ouverture “was educated, a slave who worked as a carriage driver and joined the Spanish army to abolish slavery,” Bonhomme, 24, explained. “The movie’s main character came to learn both sides of the struggle between the humans and the aliens, just as Toussaint l’Ouverture was privileged but saw the devastating effects of oppression on his people.”

Cool. But who goes to a summer sci-fi movie to, well, think? Director Blomkamp told Entertainment Weekly he wasn’t trying to make a movie about apartheid that “beats people over the head. I’m just trying to portray science fiction in a way that feels like it might have actually been real.”

Bonhomme would say he succeeded. “I didn’t expect [District 9] to go as deep as it went, but I’m happy it did,” he said. “A lot of people are going be challenged by this movie. It makes you look at oppression and racism in a different light.

“I was shocked,” Bonhomme said, “but in a good way.”

Me, too. And I can’t remember the last time I could say that about a no-budget summer movie.

6360: Something Stinks In France.

Earlier this month, MultiCultClassics noted the comments from Publicis Groupe Overlord Maurice Levy on Obama’s victory:

“Congratulations on such a great choice. Once again the American people have proved that they are right there when it comes to turning points in history—and they know how to make history. ... I have always thought politics, that is something I should not get involved in. But I had to because this is so fantastic. It erases all the bad images, the bad pictures of the last eight years with one vote. It is a wonderful demonstration of the strengths of America, a formidable lesson for the world.”

At the time, Levy’s remarks seemed hypocritical and patronizing given the lack of diversity in his U.S. advertising agencies. Now Associated Press points out Levy’s entire country is messed up on the diversity front.

France’s diversity chief says nation risks social upheaval if discrimination isn’t fixed

By Associated Press

PARIS — France’s equality chief said Wednesday the country was heading “straight into apartheid” and toward a major social explosion unless changes are made rapidly.

Yazid Sabeg issued a wakeup call to the French nation, which has already suffered major rioting from alienated immigrant youth in the country’s social housing projects.

He stressed that the current financial crisis will hit those suffering from discrimination and lack of opportunity most severely.

“We are creating a social civil war in this country,” said Sabeg. “I believe that today we are digging a ditch that leads straight into apartheid.”

Sabeg spoke during a program on the Parliamentary Channel in which he responded to reporters’ questions.

Sabeg is the son of Algerian immigrants and is known for his efforts to bring equality to the workplace.

President Nicolas Sarkozy appointed Sabeg in December to the newly created post of diversity and equality commissioner. He is to oversee a government action plan aimed at putting more ethnic minorities on TV screens, in political parties and in elite schools that lead to jobs in government and industry. Details of the plan are to be presented in March.

Sabeg said that France has been given four alerts over the past quarter-century, the latest in 2005 when fiery riots ricocheted through housing projects across France.

French of immigrant origin, most often from Muslim North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, fill the projects which ring major cities, and those who live there feel isolated from the mainstream. Many French had previously been unaware of the despair and anger locked up in the projects.

Since the 2005 unrest, France has taken a series of measures, but anti-racist groups and experts say discrimination and lack of opportunity remain largely entrenched.

Sarkozy gave broad outlines of the plan in December.

On the agenda is making elite education more accessible to minorities by forcing schools to reserve 25 percent of their places for students receiving state aid.

Among other measures, political parties will be asked to sign a “diversity charter” that could become a criterion for receiving public funds, and TV stations will be required to spell out diversity goals to the country’s audiovisual watchdog.

Businesses will be encouraged to accept anonymous resumes so that names and addresses don’t keep candidates from a first interview.

Sabeg, like Sarkozy, also wants researchers to be allowed to gather data on ethnic minorities — currently taboo in France which forbids the categorization of the population via ethnicity.