Yojimbo said:
crumas2 said:
It's always interesting to see how people overreact to things like this. For those of you who feel offended by what was done by who-knows-what MS department or advertising agency, very possibly not even located in the USA and likely isolated from Microsoft senior management, how would you have felt if the original had a white man, and the ad had been changed to replace him with the image of a black man?
Would it have still been racism? Of course not. This is the problem with the current definition of racism in the USA... an action is only racist if it in some way appears to disadvantage someone who is black. If someone who is white appears to be disadvantaged, well, that's okay. And I don't want to even get into a discussion of how we got to this point.
Perhaps the moral of the story is for people to take a deep breath after seeing something like this and really consider *why* it was done. Remember, it's very likely that it wasn't done out of spite, hate, etc., particularly if it was to sell a product. Most of the time this sort of thing is someone trying to achieve a marketing objective, reach a specific audience, etc. It can seem callous or indifferent--depending on your point of view--but I seriously doubt the person who did this was thinking "we absolutely have to get rid of that black man in the picture so that blacks will be under-represented in our advertisements." That would be racist thinking, but that's just not a believable situation.
People seem to have become hyper-sensitive to this sort of thing in the past 20 years or so, and I think it just promotes more tension between the races as whites begin to think that they can't do or say anything without being accused of being racist.
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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.
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I agree. I always find it funny when people use this weak argument because their unoriginality doesn't allow them to come up with a valid point to disprove racism.
I also agree with this.
Everyone defending this has yet to give a solid point on why this is not racist. Someone mentioned trying to meet a deadline? LOL you can't be serious. They have time to photoshop one head but not the other? I've seen people photoshop stuff like this within a matter of minutes. At least come up with a better reason.
