| Yojimbo said: Funny when people try to make the racist thing just to black people. I would have thought it was racist even if they changed from white to black or white to asian. They could have taken a new picture or not changed the picture at all. Another thing is that Polen have foreign people so the excause for marketing is not good enough, what about the asian? You cant even complain of things that are wrong now days without being laboured as the sensitive person who cant understand the society. I'm not saying that Microsoft is racist. I am saying that big companies should watch out doing such stupid things. Was it really worth to photoshop that picture? I would like to hear the discussion they had when they changed the picture. |
Regarding the first bolded text, specific to the USA, racism being defined as black/minority disadvantage has been built into our society by Congress for quite a few years, i.e. - affirmative action. We have state laws which dictate that certain classes (race, creed, religion, sex, age, etc.) cannot be used to discriminate when choosing a candidate for hire. Yet the affirmative action laws at the Federal level dictate that companies maintain quotas based on race. That builds into the think of people in corporate America the idea that you need to be careful turning down a minority candidate, but not a white candidate. This has begun to permeate our thinking in other ways as well.
As far as the second point, I have no idea why the did that as I don't have a way to read the mind of the person who altered the photo. It is a good point you raise, but it still doesn't prove that the motivation was racism.
Lastly, the third bolded text is a broad generalization. Microsoft is a company comprised of tens of thousands of employees in many locations, speaking many different languages and living in very different societies. It seems that we sometimes think of large companies as monolithic organizations with impossibly tight communications and control systems that allow the senior management at headquarters to review and approve all decisions and actions in all locations. This is an impossibility. Having worked for a company with 12,000 employees, I can easily attest to how incredibly difficult and impractical this would be. Often times we can't even control what's done by all 2500 employees at our headquarters (where I work). Sometimes marketing campaigns go out that only a handful of people even know about and things have to be pulled when a customer complains.
Simple rules for less stressful living:
1. Most people are NOT out to get us
2. Most people are struggling to get by just like we are
3. Not assuming the worst in people can often go a lot further than trying to coerce them into compliance
4. Trying to live in a PC world creates more stress than it solves... perhaps we all need thicker skins.
