That’s an older message from this thread, have you seen the later ones where I find that this may be a case of a culture gap between Europeans and Americans?
I think Melizmatic summarize it all well in this message ‘Super racist’ pool safety poster prompts Red Cross apology
It may be.
I deleted a bunch of this post, because nope.
And yes, @Melizmatic does make some good points. She is truly continental.
Having a straight-up factual argument with a trolley seems pointless to me. If I can satire the stupid in one or two sentences, I might throw that in.
Hey, he’s FAIR AND BALANCED.
And his account is NOT almost entirely devoted to weird concern-trolling about race!
see that’s an example
He’s just… not… cool! God! Does everything have to have a reason?
Heh, with the slight tan/yellow cast to his skin and the hair, I assumed he was one of my people (and wearing sunglasses to cover the slanty eyes). But, he’s the only kid at the pool with a frosty one, so who exactly isn’t “cool”?
(but in all reality, glass at the pool is not cool!)
Fair point, though he should totally have it in a plastic cup.
ETA:
Danke!
We’re all mad here.
Damn skippy 
not waving?
I’ll give you a rundown of what went through my head between reading the title of the post and getting to the thread:
Here is what I imagine a lot of other people thought:
I guess you read the conservation like this:
A - Isn’t that kid with the pop bottle white?
B - He reads as non-white to me.
A - Oh, it’s very interesting how different people can read different things from the same poster
B - YOU ARE RACIST SCUM
Reading the actual words used it was more like:
A - Isn’t that kid with the pop bottle white?
B - He reads as non-white to me.
A - You are lying, you know he is white.
B - [Baffled, no option but mockery]
Yes, young boys are definitely told they behave poorly compared to girls. I think it’s a really bad message to be sending to both girls and boys.
I see it as part of a larger issue of boys being protagonists and antagonists and girls being extras. Boys are definitely told they are more likely to misbehave than girls, they are also told they are more likely to be great than girls. I think in the end it leads to a lot of maladaption from men who grow up to realize that in the grand scheme of things almost all of us are extras, and we have to find meaning in our own lives instead of writing ourselves into a heroic narrative. So I see it as a source of feelings of entitlement. And if you can’t be the hero, the other narrative for you is to be the villain. We see a lot of that.
Oh, so wait, you don’t think this is a real problem?
I thought their apology was pretty good too. Straight forward- they messed up, didn’t intend to offend anyone (but not saying the offense isn’t real and justified) , they are sorry, and a plan to correct the problem.
it was refreshing. An actual apology instead of a non-apology.
This is one of the things driving me crazy about the backlash-against-the-“outrage machine”-machine operating on this thread. The Red Cross issued an apology, they took down some posters. You’d think a crusade had been launched against them and the streets were running red with blood (ironically, even). The outrage-at-outrage-machine equates apologies with witch trials.
Breathing while black?
I honestly wouldn’t have noticed the poster. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem. I’d like to think we’re at the point where everybody sees everybody else as individuals, but obviously too many people protest way too much claiming they already do that.
This. And another outrage-machine apparently thinks that only the most important problem should be tackled at a time, and everything else is deflection, never mind that if the poor Red Cross employee just changes a few skin tones and reissues the poster, eventually somebody will complain to the Red Cross that it’s sexist, and they’ll have to do it over yet again.
I think it’s partly a reflection of how fast things are already changing that some other commenters don’t recognize this. It’s fine to generalize me as privileged. If you think of little boys as privileged, that’s not helpful. Especially to some minority communities, where, if you look at things in generalities, little girls go to college, and little boys don’t.
And how is that wrong?
If an image is perceived as racist and sexist… shouldn’t it be changed? What is wrong with equality? Isn’t that what we all want?
On further consideration, maybe he’s holding some other kid under water. Which is definitely Not Cool, but not clearly conveyed on this poster.
I am, of course, out of you-know-what! (Being a woman, and all, using those likes incorrectly.)
There is literally no claim anyone could ever make that won’t divide the world into “agree” and “disagree” camps.
For example, I read the kid with the bottle as hispanic. Others read him as Asian. Still others didn’t come to a conclusion, but acknowledged that he was not obviously white. And many others thought he was obviously white.
Even stranger! Someone said “he looks Asian to me” and one of the obviously white people thought that – the person expressing an opinion – must be somehow factually incorrect or a lie. Think about that one for a second. Someone makes a statement: “my opinion is X”. That is the only person who has the privileged information of what his or her opinion is. And someone else still somehow disagrees that the person’s opinion is X. Somehow “my opinion is X” splits the world into camps of people who believe that the person’s opinion really is X, and people who believe that no one could possible think that X.
So yes, take any image – at all – and ask “is this offensive?” You’ll probably get some people who say “yes” and some people who say “no”.
What you should be considering here in my opinion is the fact that a relatively large proportion of people believe that this particular image is offensive, and moreover are able to analyze it and give specific reasons why they believe it to be offensive. At this point, you could conclude that all of these people have somehow coincidentally arrived at the exact same delusional beliefs as each other, or you could consider the notion that different people interpret the world different ways and that this perspective, while it isn’t completely consistent with your own, is nonetheless a valid perspective in its own right.
The world is big enough to hold more than just what’s in your head.
Now, I completely agree that if changes were made to the poster to correct the (to me, glaring) race issue, some subset of all people on earth might still find something offensive about the image. As I mentioned before, I think this is true of almost any image. However, if the proportion of people who find this image offensive is smaller and/or is less consistent in their analysis of what is offensive about the image, then it seems to me progress has been made, no?
And given the consistency of the reasoning behind commenters’ insistence that there is something wrong with this poster, it seems to me that there is probably some “there” there, n’est-ce pas? If people were just looking for/making up things to be outraged about, then their justifications should be pretty much random, but in this case they seem very consistent. Perhaps you don’t see the problem yourself, or it doesn’t bother you, but if others can identify a problem and seem to independently arrive at the same justification, it seems strange to jump to the conclusion that they must all be making it up…
So i guess I’m wondering: what’s your problem with people analyzing media representations of race to talk about the issue of how race is portrayed in the media and how it impacts people of color?
