One of my students recently brought to my attention three television advertisements that have the dubious distinction of having earned "The Rudyard Kipling Prize for the Year's Most Racist TV Spot." The prize is awarded by New York University's Department of Culture and Communication in its annual takeoff on the ad industry's Clio Awards.
The winning ads are all part of a campaign by Fox Sports that makes fun of "foreign" customs to attract viewers to the Fox network. One ad, which is set in India, features two blindfolded "contestants" who swing bats at each other and end up attacking their robed and turbaned spectators as an excited "sports announcer" babbles in some unidentifiable language.
Another features a Turkish diving competition in which a contestant is judged on his dive from a high cliff straight into a bare patch of dirt.
And the third is a mock broadcast of some sort of Russian face-slapping contest.
These ads, of course, are supposed to be funny in the way that Polish jokes are supposed to be funny. And making fun of others is hardly anything new in the annals of human behavior.
But what is striking about the Fox Sports ads is that their unabashed appeal to feelings of cultural superiority is made to a generation of youthful Americans who are the first generation to have been raised in an era of multicultural education. If such an audience is indeed persuaded by Fox TV's zenophobic humor to watch Fox Sports broadcasts, then something has gone badly wrong.
And I think it has. Multicultural education, a movement that is now well over a decade old, is intended to foster respect for and interest in other cultures. Its purpose is to show that America's traditional culture, which is European at base with a strong Anglo-Saxon top-spin, is but one culture among many with no inherent superiority.
At its best, multicultural education encourages a curiosity in the workings of any culture while discouraging hierarchical cultural partisanship.
But if the advertising team for Fox Sports is right--and ad campaigns are not created out of marketing vacuums--some of today's youth market is eager for cultural targets to sneer at. And the popular cultural evidence suggests that Fox is right. Just listen sometime, if you can, to contemporary rap lyrics: Whether the targeted group is women, homosexuals, Asians or Jews, youth music is filled with fury against people that the rap audience should have been taught to accept, not revile.
