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Day 928: “Visual Codes For Safety”

The Zurich Golf Classic will soon hit a large patch of well-manicured grass in the Greater New Orleans area.  Needless to say, TV commercials for the event are jerkily inserted between those for, say, Nutri-System and the latest Chevy offering.  Obviously, the ones controlling the Zurich commercial’s appearance on Cox television have never heard of cuts, fades and volume balance.

Forget the form for now and examine the content.  Between overlays of white men teeing off or raising their arms in celebration of a hole-in-one, the only black people in the commercial are in white hats serving food.  Furthermore, that sepia-toned footage of all-black waitstaff appears to be from the mid-20th century.  Why that clip?  Does its creator want to portray an idyllic time when white men ruled golf, servers were black and everyone knew their place in the race-time continuum?

In response to a NOLA bloggers’ email discussion on New Orleans Magazine (which I will not link to, because they’re too uppity for and, thus, undeserving of a link) and their generally sanctimonious and sanitary views of this city and its rebuilding, I mentioned the aforementioned commercial.

YatPundit (whom I will link to, because he isn’t uppity but you may get an inexplicable 403, so be forewarned) had this to say: “All-white ads, or ads where blacks are depicted as minstrels or servants are visual codes for safety.  It implies an all-white locale/setting/function where crazed darkies won’t be shooting everything in sight.”

Oh.  So, that’s what I feel every time I watch this commercial or ads for New Orleans in which the only black people are overly happy horn players, but couldn’t quite elaborate upon.  You see, I’m the first person to pick up on social cues.  No jokes, my cue-dar is way up there at 11 and someone needs to hire me onto a corporate Diversity and/or Sexual Harassment taskforce pronto.  That’s where my usefulness in this regard ends, however.  While I can sniff out a slight, read body language and immediately empathize with resultant discomfort, I have difficulty verbalizing my observations.  The same goes for conversation, programming and geophysics.  A tongue-tied (or finger-tied) savant, there have been many times when I understand and feel a concept through and through, but have great trouble communicating it, coding it, making it a Powerpoint presentation and so on.  This may also explain why I got As in all of my classes, but scored poorly on standardized tests.  Somewhere between grokking the right answer and pinning it down is a sea of misconnecting neurons.  Weird.

Sorry, this was a moment of revelation, and I, well, reveled in it.  Back to the Zurich commercial, now that I picked up on the cue/code and see it for what it is, what next?  I’m not a golfer and don’t watch the game, so not going to the tournament is not an option.  And what’s the point in calling the association and lodging a complaint?  Perhaps I will chalk this one up to Observations And Things To Keep In Mind In Future.  Thoughts?

5 comments… add one
  • Mark Folse March 12, 2008, 12:10 PM

    The race-time continuum. Priceless.

  • YatPundit March 12, 2008, 9:56 PM

    the problem with commercials that feature New Orleans music is spotting when they cross the minstrel-show line. it’s cool that you saw it right away.

    and i’m glad you don’t think i’m uppity. I was re-building the blog today, after adding some widgets to the sidebar menus… :-)

  • Puddinhead March 13, 2008, 6:51 AM

    The main reason it’s a bunch of white guys teeing off and raising their arms is because the tournament is…a bunch of white guys playing golf. I’m pretty sure Vijay Singh isn’t there this year, and Tiger Woods has never seen fit to include New Orleans among the events in which he competes. Should they have spliced in a couple of non-white golfers just to fake a show of diversity?

    Also, this just in…commercials for this year’s Essence Festival will feature African-
    American artists and enthusiastic African-American audience members. This is a visual code for “funky”, and signifies that there will be very few Caucasians in attendance to step on the groove….

  • Maitri March 13, 2008, 9:31 AM

    Puddinhead: You completely sidestepped the problem with the commercial, which is not white men playing golf, but the clip of black waitstaff, a piece of film that could have been avoided altogether. Thanks for playing, drive through.

  • e March 13, 2008, 1:03 PM

    What’s next?

    I don’t know what lodging a complaint will do.
    I also think you can do something useful to augment the mental note you took.

    I read your post and got to thinking. I wondered how many private courses or country clubs in the New Orleans area are still racially exclusive. Perhaps it would be helpful to extend the visual codes of the commercial to more tangible biases in membership policies, etc.

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