How Racism Has Been Reflected And Constructed By Social Culture

In this blog I will evaluate racism and how it has been influenced and constructed by social culture and history. I have chosen to review three older advertisements and one more recent one, which mainly concentrate on everyday items. Racism, especially for black people has been used in the past as a tool for selling goods. In the 19th century, people deeply believed that according to a person’s skin tone, races can be divided into two levels - superior and inferior. Especially in American society, So even though their society status has gradually changed after the civil war, advertisements were still depicting people with black and brown skin in a negative way.
The image above was presumably released in the 1940s for selling fairy soap. In that period of time, black people were usually treated as necessary characters on advertisements to sell household goods. Image one shows, the young black girl looking very nervous (she grasps her dress tightly) and looks glum (she slightly looks down without a smile and watches the young white girl very carefully). In addition, the text “Why does not …. Soap?” expresses that fairy soap is a good product, …show more content…
Three young ladies stand beside each other in order of skin colour, with the picture behind showing a before and after having used Dove soap. When some audiences saw this advertisement, they claim it was a racist advertisement because of the order of they are standing in. It can be portrayed to show the black lady representing before having used Dove soap and the white woman as the after one. Comparing this with image one (Fairy soap), we can see that both advertisements use almost the same way to promote the same product. It follows the theme of inferior, black means dirty and white is clean. Therefore, we could say it is possible to find racism still in current advertisements, whether or not the advertisers deliberately use such old vehicles to promote their products or