Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign masks real racism
In the three days since Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” video went online, it’s received over 3 million views and prompted discussion about inner beauty and self-esteem issues for women. Many viewers have called it “beautiful” and “eye-opening.”
“You are more beautiful than you think,” the video attests.
But if Dove’s entire point seems borrowed from One Direction; the viral video, in which a forensic artist illustrates the way women downplay their own appearances, is cloaking something more serious than the idea that women don’t know-oh-oh what makes them beautiful.
In the video, the forensic artist, who can’t see the women he’s drawing, asks them to describe their physical appearances. The adjectives the women use to describe themselves are pejorative: big, freckled. When they describe each other, however, the words change from negatives to positives: “protruding chin” becomes “nice thin chin.” Bystanders comment on how “nice” and “pretty” the women’s eyes are. One woman, looking at the two portraits of herself, comments that the self-described portrait is “closed off and fatter…sadder, too.” The other one is “more open, friendly, happy.”
After they see the two photos, the women stop describing themselves in purely physical terms. One of them states that her “natural beauty” impacts everything else in her life, from her profession to how she treats her children. “It couldn’t be more critical to your happiness.”
Some viewers, however, aren’t convinced that what Dove is offering up as “natural beauty” in this instance is what they should be buying. On Tumblr, jazzylittledrops has eloquently argued for a different reading of the video, as less a deconstruction of healthy self-esteem and more an insidious reminder that even when being told they are beautiful, women are still being valued by their physical attributes above all else—and that those attributes have alarmingly racist connotations.
![“Yo, Is This Racist?” Andrew Ti sounds off
For Andrew Ti, his invective-laden Tumblr Yo, Is This Racist? and identically titled podcast offer an exercise in extremes.
“I should really just make that the tagline for the website: ‘Fun and Depressing,’” laughed Ti, a 32-year-old Chinese-American, forced to stare deep into the Internet’s ugly, discriminatory depths several times daily for his material. “Totally out of nowhere, fun, and depressing.”
Ti launched the Wusthof-sharp Tumblr in November 2011. The format was simple: Readers lobbed anecdotes and ideas at Ti, and he told them whether or not something was racist. It was an instant success. Within 24 hours, Yo, Is This Racist? had 2,000 followers and hundreds of questions. One year later, Ti has thousands more followers, a semi-regular gig writing about race for Grantland, and podcast on the Earwolf network, probably best known for being home to comedian Scott Aukerman’s Comedy Bang Bang, not to mention a backlog of over 30,000 questions.
“I’ve stopped hoping of answering them all; it’s not even in the ballpark of possible,” he said. “I did not think anyone was going to look at the blog, honestly. I thought maybe 20 of my friends would check it out and it would be fun for a couple of weeks, and that would be it. I had no, and even still currently have no, real concrete plans for it. There’s no road map for it.
And it’s kind of mildly depressing that there’s enough material to keep it going.”
But it’s a credit to Ti that Yo, Is This Racist? is rarely actually dispiriting to read. In lesser hands, a Tumblr with its premise might be a soul-sucking slog—or an overly dry, academic take on race relations. But Yo, Is This Racist? is blunt, profane, and endlessly hilarious.
The comedy springs from Ti’s unruffled dismissiveness of race-baiting trolls, the Tumblr’s excursions into absurdism, and his casually frank responses. (“Q: Yo, why can’t we all just get along?” “A: One reason is how racist a lot of people are, but I’m sure there are others as well.”)
“I do wanna stress that I’m not at all an expert in this stuff,” Ti explained. “I’m just a guy with a slightly different perspective than a lot of people, and maybe a more succinct way of putting it. But there’s a lot of very educated people that have way more actual formal knowledge about race relations or social justice. That’s not my background.
“But also, I never say anything I don’t believe. I answer things in my own dumb goofy way sometimes, but it’s still an honest reaction, and I hope it’s helpful in some way.”
The Yo, Is This Racist? podcast has a similar modus operandi. Listeners call in—to an actual landline answering machine—with questions, and Ti tackles them, with help from a rotating cast of guest hosts that has thus far included the Sklarbro brothers and Howard Kremer of Who Charted? Ti’s answered questions ranging from whether white musicians covering hip-hop ironically is racist to whether Fruit Ninja fetishizes feudal Japan. Earwolf initially approached Ti with the idea of starting a podcast, and Ti responded by planning a show significantly more ambitious than the format he ultimately went with.
“My first idea was this concept that was horribly impossible to produce,” Ti recalled. “I wanted to this radio play-kind of thing that would be sort of a sketch show, with characters. And logistically as soon as it started to come into focus I was like ‘This is a bad idea that’s going to be impossible to do.’ The format we went with has been right for me. There’s always a new question to keep it moving, which is good for me because I can’t do that freeform talk-for-45-minutes thing that some podcast hosts can do.”
Part of why Ti struggles with that is that, well, he’s not a professional, and he’s well aware of it. Prior to starting the podcast, he’d had no real performing experience, and it’s an intimidating experience to go from never hearing your own voice to attempting to be funny alongside a crew of standup comedians. So far, though, Ti’s acquitting himself well.
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