If the Advertisements Had Been Released in a Different Time, How and Why Might They Differ?

WT2, IB essay 3rd semester

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“If the advertisements had been released in a different time, how and why might they differ?”

Racism, it is “the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to the other, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics, it is the belief that different races should remain segregated and apart from one another.” (ADL, 2017). Racial segregation has been seen all along history, movements that fight against it, and movements that fight for it. Discrimination and tolerance have varied according to time, thus through this essay the portrayal of different social classes will be analyzed through two texts and the question that we’ll answer at the end of this essay is that if these advertisements had been released in a different time, how and why might they differ?

How would people react if the advertisement dates had been switched, and they had released the Fairy Soap ad today? I can assure you 100%, that there would be a lot of negative feedback from most of the American society towards this ad, this is because the advertisement portrays a young Caucasian girl trying to take of the black color from the African American girl’s skin with soap. Since the 1950’s, people have fought for human rights, specially, for black lives. To publish something as racist as that, to consider black people as something acceptable to compare with dirt, as they did in the Fairy Soap advertisement, knowing that their strategy was purposely full of discrimination, would make people furious today, because Americans don’t think the way they used to, they now have a low level of tolerance towards discrimination. This shows how changing the releasing dates of this advertisements would have a different impact on the reaction of the American society.

Comparing the reaction from the Dove commercial, if it were released in 1950, would the reaction be different from the reaction the Fairy Soap ad got? For starters, things were different back then, people had different ways of seeing racial segregation. Americans accepted this behavior and embraced it. They thought black people could be compared to something dirty that could simply be cleaned with soap. If the Dove commercial, that showed an African-American woman literally taking her skin off after promoting soap and transforming into a white woman, were released back then, it would have gotten a positive reaction from the American audience, just like the Fairy Soap ad got in those days. This reaction would have changed from the one it originally got in 2017, when people complained about the marketing done in this commercial. Dove even had to apologize because that wasn’t the message