SA will never be able to stem out racism and other forms of discrimination within the country’s advertising sector if a punitive approach is not adopted by the state.
This is according to EFF MP and head of policy Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, who on Monday was addressing the SA Human Rights Commision’s provincial hearings on racism in the advertising industry.
The five-day inquiry, held in Rosebank in Johannesburg, is aimed at zooming in on the production chain within the advertising sector to look at the causes and ways to eliminate racism, tribalism, homophobia and sexism, among other forms of discrimination.
“A punitive approach is now long overdue. A racist must be punished with the full might of the damage of his or her racism. Portrayal of blacks continues to be based on blacks as poor, as a mass, as noisy,” he said.
Over recent years the EFF has waged protests aimed at fighting racism within the advertising industry, including its successful push for the closure of H&M SA stores following an advert featuring a young black boy wearing a hoodie written “coolest monkey in the jungle”.
The party also staged a protest after Clicks published an online advert of TRESemme cosmetic hair products in which African hair was depicted as “dry and damaged”, leading to the five-day closure of the pharmacy chain and its payment of damages after a mutual settlement with the party in the form of “reparations to the poor” in the form 10,000 sanitary pads and banning of TRESemme products.
Ndlozi said racism was not only limited to narratives but also the expenditure of advertising as black audiences were viewed as cheap.
“If we do not reach a practicable punishment we will never resolve the racism that we see in the advertising sector,” Ndlozi said as he called for the industry to be forced by the state to pay damages whose proceeds would go to marginalised black-owned media companies that were purposely sidelined in terms of advertising spend.
Ndlozi lamented that black creatives in the sector had also fallen into anti-black stereotypes because they failed to “adopt a black conscious approach” to storytelling.
“Things must come out as they appear. To them the world is self-explanatory and must simply be reproduced,” he said.
He lamented that the failure to transform the economy contributed to the continued depiction of black people as consumers and labourers.
Antiracism and hair activists Zulaikha Patel had earlier blamed the lack of consequence against racism perpetrators in the country for the continued racist practices that find their way in the influential advertising industry.
Priceless SA’s Petronell Kruger painted a dim light of the Advertising Regulatory Board’s (ARB) independence as she said it had not been effective in dealing with many other complaints and lacked powers over those it had to regulate.
“We don’t want to create the impression that we are bashing the ARB. I am quite happy to know that they do amazing work when it comes to trying to remove gender stereotypes in some of their decisions. We criticise because we love,” she said.
