For your viewing pleasure, and in light of the response to her video for “Formation” and Super Bowl appearance (backlash to which, according to one Fox News writer, “continues to grow”), here is Saturday Night Live’s brilliant response, “The Day Beyoncé Turned Black”:
Keep in mind that if your workplace is freaking out over the realization that Beyoncé is, and has always been, black, you might need to put on some Adele to sooth them:
Thankfully for fans, this year’s Super Bowl featured some ads to keep them entertained during Seattle’s demolition of the Denver Broncos. Two of the ads, in particular, stood out to me for their recognition of America’s diversity.
The one that has provoked less controversy was for Cheerios and featured a biracial family:
This commercial is actually a sequel to a previous commercial from last spring that featured the same family. The previous ad ignited racist comments online, leading comments to be disabled on the video at YouTube. These comments demonstrate that a casual depiction of an interracial family is still a big deal over 40 years after the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws in its ruling on Loving v. Virginia.
The attention this ad has received is reminiscent of the controversy after Marc Anthony sang “God Bless America” at last summer’s MLB All-Star Game. In both cases people seem to have forgotten that not everybody in the United States speaks the same language or has ancestors from the same part of the world. This was also reportedly the first Super Bowl Commercial to feature a gay family.
While it is great to see these depictions during one of the most-watched television events of the year, there is also an element of calculated risk that it seems General Mills and Coke were willing to accept. That is, airing a commercial that will anger some people will also ensure that people will be talking about that commercial and, by extension, the product. Katie Bayne, Coke’s president, said, “We hope the ad gets people talking and thinking about what it means to be proud to be American.” Oh, and Coke!
The fact that these complaints will be written off as bigoted by the majority of the audience they are trying to reach also reduces the actual risk that they take on and says to consumers, “We think those people are idiots, too. Buy our product.”
Update:Here is a post by Jenny Davis discussing these ads and the way our reaction to them helps us overlook systemic racism.
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Some people watch the Super Bowl for the football game, some people watch it for the halftime show, and some people watch it for the commercials. This year, hashtags were featured in half of all super bowl ads, encouraging the public to talk about their products on social networks like Twitter. The most interesting hashtag, however, was #notbuyingit, intended to call out sexism in advertising. Missrepresentation.org, which started it all, provides a recap here. According to the site, the worst offenders were GoDaddy.com (no surprise there), Audi (are you brave enough for sexism?), Kia (female spokes-robots!), Budweiser (would you like some beer with your women?), and Calvin Klein (notable for sexualizing a man). Maybe Twitter is useful after all.
Just in time for the Super Bowl, a recent Rolling Stone article examines the effects of concussions on young people’s brains. Although the article is behind a pay wall, a video discussing the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, can be seen here. When faced with the evidence from a doctor who specializes in CTE, one father responded “You haven’t convinced me. I’ll need more evidence than that.” It is amazing that when it comes to things like CTE or global warming that threaten the lives of our children or the future of our planet mountains of scientific evidence will not convince us of their danger. I suspect that many of these same people, however, would be outraged by a single picture of a shorter-than-average sandwich from Subway.
Memoirs of a SLACer 