Dear Editor,
Please permit me a few column inches to thank Courts Guyana Limited for removing an animated video ad on Facebook that was flagged for racist and sexist portrayals. The video in question was intended as a tutorial on choosing the right spectacle frames to complement facial features.
The transformational power of a good pair of glasses purchased at Courts Guyana seemed to be the marketing strategy, but it was badly executed. One frame in the video ad featured an image of a black male labelled “thug”. The man had a rose tattoo on his left upper arm, and he was wearing a white vest. After a good pair of glasses, a polo t-shirt, and completely balding his head, the “thug” was transformed to “Courts’ Best Employee.”
Another frame in the video ad featured a woman in a red mid-thigh dress with a caption “Easy”. After the Courts-purchased spectacles were applied, the transformed image with the same woman now wearing a black pantsuit read “Hard to get.”
The entire campaign fed off the social disease of respectability politics. The transformation of the “Thug” into “Courts Best Employee” was rife with racist image-profiling that not only attacks natural hair and body art as being ‘thuggish’ but also celebrates and endorses society’s diseased profiling black bodies as criminal or unprofessional simply because of their natural hair.
For a moment, I questioned whether the ad was reflective of Courts Guyana’s hiring policy. I hope I am wrong and this is just me stretching my imagination. As a black man sporting natural hair, the message I got was that if I buy the spectacles, society will accept me as a non-thug black man. But I have to cut off my black locks first.
Even more offensive was the ad’s policing of women’s bodies into categories of “easy” and “hard to get” simply by adding some glasses and length to her clothes.
This not only reduces women’s bodies into sexual objects for the picking, but endorses the dehumanizing absurdity of rape culture that sexual violence, including rape, against women has to do with their mode of dress.
So the message is basically: buy our glasses, add some length to your outfit, and avoid being labelled “easy”, and possibly raped or harassed in the street or office. Again, my far-stretching imagination was left to wonder about the sexual harassment policy at Courts Guyana Limited.
After social media commentators brought the contentious video to the attention of the managers of Courts Guyana Limited’s facebook page on Friday, the concerns were acknowledged by their team with haste, and the video was commendably deleted.
Marketing departments and consultants should be wary not to recreate oppressions. Similarly, right-thinking members of society should remain vigilant against manifestations of social diseases like sexism, and racism.
Yours faithfully,
Derwayne Wills
