Commodity Racism in Advertising: “So Easy a Cavemn Can Do It!”

In Anne McClintock’s fifth chapter, “Soft-Soaping Empire” of Imperial Leather, she describes the role of soap in the replacement of scientific racism with commodity racism.  While scientific racism employed scientific techniques to prove the superiority of the white race over others — such as attempting to find differences of the average IQs within racial groups, or taxonomically categorizing races as if they were entirely different species – -commodity racism used white supremacy as an advertising strategy, implying that white people were superior because of the more progressive products they consumed.
The example McClintock used was Pears’ Soap.  As soap grew into a burgeoning commodity in the early nineteenth century, McClintock asserts, “Victorian cleaning rituals were peddled globally as the God-given sign of Britain’s evolutionary superiority, and soap was invested with magical, fetish powers” (McClintock, 207).  In one advertisement for Pear’s Soap, as referenced by McClintock, a black and a white child are together in a in a bathroom.  The black child is in the bathtub, and the white child, standing above him, bestows him with the gift of soap.  In the after photo, the black child emerges from the bathtub, his body cleansed and white, but his face remains black.
The message of this advertisement is that the product of soap is capable of “washing from the skin the very stigma of racial and class degeneration” (McClintock 214) and the cleansed black boy becomes the object of imperial progress.
I began thinking about examples in which commodity racism exists in modern advertisement and I remembered the Geico ad campaign in which the advertising slogan was “It’s so easy to use geico.com, a caveman can do it!”  In these commercials, a spokesperson says this slogan, and then the camera pans out to a caveman watching the commercial and then getting offended, “that is really condescending.”  In subsequent versions to the original commercial, the caveman becomes visibly more progressive, where in the original the caveman was shirtless, in later versions he is wearing a white suit, or playing tennis.
In the commercials, the caveman attempts to explain to Geico representatives that the slogan is offensive, but they fail to comprehend: “How can it be offensive if it’s true?… Historically, you guys have struggled to adapt.”  The modern characters in the commercials don’t understand that it is racist to infer that the caveman is an inferior race, because they imagine it to be a proven fact.
This ad campaign seems to be satirizing the use imperialistic advertising in the past, where marginalized races were represented as less progressive within white man’s panoptical time.  In using a caveman as the representation of the less progressive race, the link is made extremely clear that the caveman implicitly represents all races which are considered less progressive, but the caveman is a safe choice because he is extinct, so ideally no one will actually get offended.   The imperialist message still effectively comes across, however – if you buy this insurance policy, you will be more progressive!

-Robyn Brush

Panoptical Time=Privileged Invisibility, “Clueless”

This picture represents Foucault’s interpretation of Jeremy Benthem’s architectural plan for a Panopticon- a structure that would reinforce a central control and encourage self discipline. As discussed in lecture, this type of structure was typically thought of as a good source of control for prison facilities, due to the fact that prisoners were visible in their cells at all times regardless of knowing whether someone was watching them from the Panopticon or not. The idea is that prisoners or anyone in general who thinks they are being watched will behave differently in a good way. The unknown of whether one is being watched from the Panopticon or not creates an anticipation of consequences if one was to act in an inappropriate and intolerable way. 

In connection to the idea of the panopticon, McClintock discusses the idea of panoptical time in her book Imperial Leather. In reference to panoptical time, she states that it is “the image of global history consumed-at a glance- in a single spectacle from a point of privileged invisibility” (37). This can be interpreted as due to the fact that some people come from privileged backgrounds, it causes them to rethink things in certain ways and look at things in life from a different lens than the less fortunate people in life. 

An example of this privileged invisibility reminds me of one of my all time favorite films Clueless. Cher’s father is wealthy, and has always given her what she wants so she never has to work hard for anything, also making her very oblivious to the world and other world’s outside of her own. This panotical time that McClintock refers to as “privileged invisibility” is very evident in Clueless when Cher is speaking to her cleaning lady/housekeeper Lucy, and when she cannot understand something she is saying she says, “Lucy, you know I don’t speak Mexican” and she replies “I not a Mexican”. Coming from a privileged background, Cher probably has not taken the time to get to know Lucy, and takes her housekeepers for granted or she would have known that Lucy is from El Salvador and not Mexico. Also, given the fact that she said “you know I don’t speak Mexican” makes one aware that she doesn’t know that Mexican is not an actual language, and that Cher is used to “living in a bubble” and unaware of other cultures besides her own. Coming from privileged backgrounds, it can cause individuals to be “blind” to what goes on outside of their own lives, and see things in a certain way that is uncommon from those who are not as fortunate at they are. While Lucy has probably taken the time to know a lot about Cher, it is clear that Cher has not taken the time to get to know Lucy and probably just sees her just as an employee. Privileged invisibility can cause ignorance and a viewpoint only from a single opinion, and also can cause lack of effort in getting to know other people and other cultures outside of one’s own. 

-Mallory Hart