Advertising Industries and Anti-Black Racism in South Africa

This chapter focuses on the representation of Black people in advertising and the political economy of racism in post-apartheid South Africadvertising industra. It examines racist imagery of Blackness and how this reveals the problem of institutionalized racism in the advertising industry. South Africa became a democratic state in 1994, culminating in the dismantling of the official infrastructure of institutionalized racism that had lasted for many centuries. Overt racism, that is, racism in its colonial, conspicuous, violent, and barbaric form, was the guiding norm for the apartheid institutions, including the media and cultural industries. Racism was a normal and acceptable part of cultural production so as to storify the colonial gaze of Blackness. Apartheid’s colonial gaze had to be narrativized through the colonial media and advertising industries to naturalize difference as a signifier of white superiority and black inferiority. The chapter argues that most of the post-apartheid racism is increasingly covert or hidden. Covert racism is often institutionalized, subtle, invisible, and dynamic, but still existing as a system and structure to contain Black agency. Because covert racism is often invisible and less obvious, most of the post-apartheid policy interventions on racism by the Black government are tailored for overt racism, thus leaving covert racism to fester in the media and advertising agencies. Covert racism has also metamorphosed into media racism, an advanced form of institutionalized racism, in which the active demonization, inferiorization, dehumanization, and emasculation of the (ex) colonial Black subjects is a rewarding pastime for advertising agencies and the news media. In post-apartheid South Africa, media racism is in many ways tied to the political economy of the news media, the question of ownership, and allocative control which are central to a sustained inter-institutional and inter-textual program of the naturalization and normalization of anti-Black racism in the public mind. Thus media racism under the post-apartheid order is often ideological and subtle, but also predictable. It is not only evidenced by the consistent selective use of the demonizing and dehumanizing framing of Blacks in advertising and the news media, but also their exclusion ad spend and key-decision making positions in advertising agencies.