Ignore the political aspect of the video, the topic of this thread is simply: "Is this ad racist?", there is plenty of heated political debate on this forum already.

Apparently Karen Tumulty from Time thinks so, and makes the case in her article entitled "McCain Plays the Race Card". Her explaination:

"This is hardly subtle: Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman."

Seriously, am I missing something?  Or is this woman just that out of touch?

She's reaching on that one.

The use of colour does say something. I don't think it's being racist but it is trying to use fear imagery by the dark on red images followed by the light grey image. They could have (and would have) done the same thing using a white man though so to claim it is racist isn't right.

I'd put this in the grey area between "more intentional than lipstick on a pig" and "less intentional than the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull."

I could see this being a mistake made by one person in the editing room, but I could see everybody else in the editing room going "Wait a sec... this can look really bad," and have a billion opportunities to easily fix it.

Maybe a racist editor snuck in and made the ad when nobody else was around.

Could just be sloppy editing, like ABC.

Amazing frustrated Obama shots though.

That's pretty subtle, i wouldn't have thought anything of it. I can see people agreeing with Time chick just for fear of not appearing to be racially sensitive.

A lil' subtile but.. nah, i hate nitpicking. The ad is pretty lame, but doesn't contain more racism than everyday's life.

So you think it is racist then?

I think it was a sloppy accident that should have been avoided, but I don't think it was intended as racist.

Another non-issue.

Unless of course we want to assume that that's exactly what they thought we would think, and they wanted to sneak in as much subtle racism as they could without getting people like me mad!

As a black individual I don't find the advertisement racist , it's not exactly "anti" black in any form.

What is apparent is McCain is using race to smear obama , maybe in an atempt to make him look less apealing to the white voter . I didn't notice racism but what I did see was whole Black Vs White thing goin on .


I don't think Race should be a factor when it comes to choosing arguably the most powerful individual in the world ( race shoudln't be a factor in choosing anything) but it's obvious that we live in race concious societies and the candidates will use any and every angle they can to gain the upper hand.

I gave it a little more thought, and I think this is just as dumb as the lipstick on a pig controversy. I highly doubt it was intentional, but this is definitely a touchier subject and more easily avoidable since it was edited in advance rather than said live. I'll go with bad editing and lack of sleep.