Good analysis of a corporate weasel apology over at Jezebel: An Australian cosmetics company ran an ad featuring a model in blackface, then pulled it, then trotted out a “sorry-if” and finally reinstated it. SorryWatch agrees with Jenna Sauers’s interpretation, but just for fun, let’s parse the company’s statement, sentence-by-sentence!
We thank and acknowledge your comments regarding the above image. (Verbs! “Thank” and “acknowledge” say, “You said things! We NOTICED that you said things! We do not ACCEPT them, but we NOTICED them, and THANK YOU for them!”) Obviously it was never our intention to cause offence (“Obviously” is not a good word in apologies, unless the words that follow are “I did something horrid.” The one thing you need not apologize for is spelling offense wrong. We know you are foreign.) “Illamasqua has always celebrated the right to self-expression (“Sorry you don’t believe in SELF-EXPRESSION, haters!”) and we continually push creative and artistic boundaries (“Sorry you don’t understand ART, plebes!”), priding ourselves on working with models of many ethnic backgrounds (“Some of our best friends are black!”) to reinforce this point. Alex Box, Illamasqua’s Creative Director, has emphasised that this campaign is about colour ON the skin, not colour OF the skin, depicting polarity between the two images (both images are the same model) not race. (BZZZZT, INCOHERENT AS WELL AS INSENSITIVE. People who do not live with white privilege are aware that colour — and color, too! — is not something you put on and scrub off with makeup remover. Not only do you reveal a lack of sensitivity to the history of racism involved in white people doing blackface, but you’re offering up the “we’re all the same under the surface” cliche (they’re the same model! coincidentally, the white default model!) which dismisses the lack of equivalence in historical position and perspective. But polarity! Wait, what? FANCY WORDS DO NOT EXCUSE YOU! Of course, since you’re not really apologizing, this is all irrelevant.)
Some of Jezebel’s commenters side with the company, and some parse the problems of the ad pretty well. The entire comments section is a good (if sometimes distressing) read.
