Perhaps the most recent advertising controversy was low-budget fashion giant H&M releasing an image of young black boy modeling a sweatshirt bearing the slogan "Coolest Monkey in the Jungle." The Internet, as it often is, was outraged. Celebrities chimed in, breaking contracts with the company (Diddy purportedly offered the boy a contract with his own line). But of course, the hot-button topic quickly unraveled, seeing backlash from those who didn't see the problem and from those who did. Rachel Dolezal, most famous for wearing blackface and presenting herself as a black woman when, in fact, she's white, released a hoodie that reads "Coolest Prince in the Hood," positioning it as the "woke" alternative to the offensive article in question. Of course, the Venn diagram of "people offended by the H&M hoodie" and "people who are offended by Rachel Dolezal" is approximately a single circle, so a negative response ensued. Then, to top it all off, the young model's mother stated that she is fine with the hoodie, and thinks the surrounding controversy has been blown way out of proportion.
Because the social media news cycle functions at such a breakneck pace, this has already been more or less forgotten. But it will be replaced by another problematic advertising campaign (the Dove campaign in which certain shots make it look like their soap is designed to turn you from a black woman to a white one? The Pop chips campaign where Ashton Kutcher dons brown face?) and we'll have the same debates. It boils down to this: the side in defense of the contentious images will claim that "it's not what it looks like."
And I'm here to say, once and for all: visual content is what it looks like. Literally.
Advertising, television, and film are all visual mediums. They have internal context--the narrative of the images and sounds they're presenting--and external context--the sociopolitical narrative of the environment in which they air. Similarly to how words and symbols (the n-word, the Confederate flag, the swastika) can't exist in a vacuum, divorced of their perverse and traumatic meanings, so too must ads, TV shows, and movies function with the weight of their ideological predecessors. In essence: everything is happening all at once. We'd like to think that what we say and do is only happening in the year we're in (2018, in this case, which still sounds like a fake year from The Future), but in fact it's also happening in 1918, and 1818, and all the years that came before this one. Human beings assign meaning to things, and just because we assign new meanings doesn't mean the old ones immediately go away. I think a lot of the people on the side of "it's not what it looks like" think that slavery and the Holocaust and the suffrage movement and Stonewall all happened, like, a thousand years ago. In reality, it's only been the last 150 years that all of those things ended. In the history of humankind, that barely registers as a blink of an eye.
Speaking of eyes (ugh), as I was saying before, this controversial content is defined by how it looks. While "Coolest Monkey In The Jungle" is a fun, whimsical hoodie design on its own, you can't have a young black boy model it in a year where hate crimes are on the rise for the second year in a row. Ashton Kutcher darkening up his complexion and attempting a deeply offensive accent to play a Bollywood director (also--to sell chips? Who the %^@# came up with that one?) may not have been intended to hurt people, but it came in an era where brown people were (and are) still not represented, underrepresented, and misrepresented in the media. That Dove ad, when put into its larger context, clearly didn't have racist intentions. But if you can pull a couple of sequential screenshots from an ad campaign and make it look like a #woke soap company is trying to sell black people skin whitener, then you need to fire your marketing guy.
Just as there are SO many non-racist Halloween costumes for you to choose from, there are SO many non-racist ad campaigns you could come up with. When ESPN anchors debated whether their network's real-life fantasy draft mimicked a slave auction (black athletes standing on a stage and being more or less auctioned off to a mostly white audience), the conservative commentator offered the same plea that every other conservative offers in these arguments: "It's not what it looks like."
But that's the thing about a picture. It's got a lot of jobs. But its first job is to be is what it looks like.
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