Advertising To/The Black

It has become extremely disconcerting witnessing an ever increasing parade of black people being paddled as ‘the market of black diamonds’, well financed and ripe to be usurped through rampant consumerism. It is even frightening seeing black infants dancing for diaper adverts and other pseudo-nutritional foods and bath soaps while half the nation’s children live in desperate poverty. Local media and its incessant minstrel shows has become the hectoring handmaid of the corporate social structure that keeps people enslaved to debt obtained through addictive moral panic caused by not-having-the-in-thing. The class envy that is spawned by most featured individuals depicted in enviable affluence in ads, has strangely manifested traits of narcissistic individualism among black youth, and is happening with preposterously ingratiating absence of pretention.

Enraged liberals might call this an advent characterising the destruction of youth, a dissipation of diverse identities or even a commodification of such identities in the grand project of creating a homogenous identity, therefore ‘market’. But what irks me most is this democratic zeal with which blacks always want to smile and dance on any cathode platform for pretences paid with crummy bills and rusted coins? I understand the psychology elicited by a child seen on an advert, but will all mental response to all devices of brand consumption be met with hungry gullibility?

Of course advertising agencies are arduously looking for provocative material that form representations of black people that can justify white condescension of black people as well vindicate their ‘micro-aggressive’ behaviour that has been rampant of late. This I say because most depictions we are inundated with lack authenticity of any kind, from characterizations based on regurgitated stereotypes from apartheid era Blaxploitation films to polished romantisization of squatter camps and filthy hostels. And considering that most subjects in local adverts seem to be willing advocates of assimilation into upward mobility, most merely resemble puppets that crave reassurance by canon of style and cultured existence, and I wonder what dubious ideas of wealth are harboured by many black people who are already or entering the present capitalist work force.

Notwithstanding the reality that much of commonly advertised retail products we consume are proven to be exorbitantly toxic and unhealthy, are black people being pampered as a willing dumping yard for decayed reject commodities of white affluence? Are we the ones to forever be relegated frozen foods outdated before they reach pots and pans? Are we to be the eternal custodians of factory rejects and knock-offs exposing an ingrained espouse towards catwalk lifestyles we consumed from Fashion TV? That cannot be US, I say. Such depictions of our being will sure fuel intractable social divisions and prejudices which could inadvertently become fatally violent.

But what makes black people have such an insatiable tolerance for such subversion of their representations by white supremacist media? Are we now exhibiting the prophesized schizophrenia and warring identities which Fanon postulated about in his many volumes analysing black identities? I know, I am left with more questions than propositions that can unravel many complexes and socializations we continue to suffer, but would what we have been moulded into be the exemplary model of economic market usurpation?  What I can ultimately conclude is that even though media clumsily appropriates various black traits and cultural forms, from actors to plots and locations, their project is not to advertise the black, but to the black, about what their ‘appropriate black aught be’.