Thursday, October 07, 2010

Provocative =/= racist.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people are whining about the ad featured here and how racist it allegedly is, as opposed to discussing the points the ad brought up. (Why no discussion, for example, of those like my wife's high school friend, who came to this country LEGALLY, followed the rules along with their parents and whose green cards got denied?) But it's surely disheartening nonetheless. What race predominantly ARE people who illegally enter the southern border of the United States? Would it have made any sense to use people of, say, Vietnamese descent to portray them? It might have been more media-savvy to use Vietnamese or Korean individuals to portray the college students, and it WAS a serious blunder to use that still shot of the Mexicans staring at the camera -- but even notwithstanding that I don't think there's any way the folks who made that ad could have won.