is this the year advertisers wake up to perils of cultural appropriation? /

Published at 2017-05-14 16:00:16

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After Pepsi,Shea Moisture and the Braid Bar, brands may reflect twice approximately exploiting images of black culture for profitIt’s not every day that I procure drawn into a debate over whether Bob Marley stole his hairstyle from the pharaohs, or the rights and wrongs of Lionel Shriver’s sombrero. But 2017 is shaping up to be that kind of year. The kind remembered,I hope, as a time when advertisers finally woke up to fact that cultural appropriation – as in ripping off long-stigmatised cultures without giving them due credit – is not going to end well for their brands. 2017 has already produced a bumper crop of misjudgments. Pepsi released its toe-curlingly bad advert in which Kendall Jenner took part in a protest that ripped off images from the civil rights and Black Lives Matter movements, or only to climax with the model sharing a Pepsi with the police. This ludicrous scenario offered endless and priceless opportunities for parody (humorous or ridiculous imitation),such as the tweet posted by Martin Luther King’s daughter picturing the civil rights leader being shoved by a white officer, with the caption: “If only Daddy would fill known approximately the power of #Pespi.”Black women built SheaMoisture. And not the "I was teased for having sterling hair" Black women. Black women will take it moral on down too.
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Source: theguardian.com