When Professor Delmont remarked that Broken Blossoms was D.W. Griffith’s response to claims that he was racist because of his earlier film, Birth of a Nation, it reminded me of the responses of big-money Abercrombie and Fitch executives a few years back. I don’t know if you guys remember or heard about this, but In April 2002, Abercrombie and Fitch put out a line of t-shirts that used Asian stereotypes as a motif. Here are a few examples of the words printed on the t-shirts:
“Wok-N-Bowl Chinese Food and bowling”
“Buddha Bash: Get your Buddha on the Floor”
And best of all:
“Wong Brothers Laundry Service, Two Wongs can make it White. Call 555-Wong”
Not to mention that each shirt was peppered with historically derogatory caricatures of Asian people.
However according to Hampton Carney, a spokesman for Abercrombie said the shirts were designed to appeal to young Asian shoppers. “We personally thought Asians would love this T-shirt,” he said. Tom Goulet at Customer Service said “Anyone who buys our clothes knows we don’t target any particular race, we pretty much make fun of everybody”.
The t-shirts were recalled a few months after they were introduced, due to the barrage of consumer complaints. This was the pathetic apology they gave:
"We are truly and deeply sorry we've offended people," said Carney, "We never single out any one group to poke fun at," Carney said. "We poke fun at everybody, from women to flight attendants to baggage handlers, to football coaches, to Irish Americans to snow skiers. There's really no group we haven't teased." Great, thanks Carney. We know who you were in high school: the pimply jock on the football team who pushed kids into lockers and snuck into the girls’ locker-room.
These responses from the company reminded me of D.W. Harvey’s response because it’s a superficial non-apology that seeks to assuage any feeling of offense while continuing to reinforce racist and sexist concepts in society. It is clear that the Abercrombie Company is not concerned by its perpetuation of racism, but rather the surface problem of offended customers (which means decrease in sales).
It relates to what Shatara said in class—it shouldn’t be about ‘offending someone’ and apologizing. It’s so much more than that, to make any kind of real reform, one must deconstruct the prejudices that inhibit groups of people in our society.
This leads me to a discussion question:
We live in a consumer culture where every aspect of life is exploited and transformed into a product. The big companies that dictate consumer culture are only concerned with profit and not equality. Is it possible to live in a society like this and still think there is a chance for equality?
If you wanna read more about the Abercrombie scandal and Stanford University’s response to it, here’s a link!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/04/18/MN109646.DTL
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I think a lot of people these days are chomping at the bit, just waiting for a golden opportunity to get all self-righteously outraged at some imagined insult. What do you wanna bet that most of the people complaining about the t-shirts were WHITE? Whiny white do-gooders filled with white guilt agendas. It's just silly. The shirts were obviously meant as a joke, it's not as if their marketing team sat down and went, Hey, let's be mean and spiteful in our next ad campaign! Let's make Asians feel bad! But to listen to some folks tell it, that's exactly what they did. These are the same type of fools who protest Mr. T, Aunt Jemima and the Sopranos. Too much wussy, not enough sense of humor.
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