SA will never be able to stem racism and other forms of discrimination within the country’s advertising sector if a punitive approach is not adopted by the state.
This is according to EFF MP and head of policy Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, who on Monday addressed the SA Human Rights Commision’s provincial hearings on racism in the advertising industry.
The five-day inquiry, which is being held in Rosebank, Johannesburg, focuses on the production chain within the advertising sector to look at ways to eliminate racism, tribalism, homophobia and sexism, among other forms of discrimination.
“A punitive approach is now long overdue. A racist must be punished with the full might of the damage of his or her racism. Portrayal of blacks continues to be based on blacks as poor, as a mass, as noisy,” he said.
In recent years the EFF has held protests aimed at fighting racism within the advertising industry, including its successful push for the closure of H&M SA stores following an advert featuring a young black boy wearing a hoodie bearing the words “coolest monkey in the jungle”.
The party also staged a protest after Clicks published an online advert for TRESemmé hair products in which African hair was depicted as “dry and damaged”, leading to the closure of the pharmacy chain for a few days and the temporary removal of TRESemmé products from its shelves. Clicks also agreed with the EFF to donate sanitary towels, sanitisers and masks to informal settlements.
Ndlozi said racism was not only limited to narratives but also to advertising spending, as black audiences were viewed as cheap.
“If we do not reach a practicable punishment we will never resolve the racism that we see in the advertising sector,” Ndlozi said, as he called for the industry to be forced by the state to pay damages. The proceeds would go to marginalised black-owned media companies that were purposely sidelined in terms of advertising spend.
Ndlozi said black creatives in the sector had fallen into anti-black stereotypes because they failed to “adopt a black conscious approach” to storytelling.
He lamented that the failure to transform the economy has contributed to the continued depiction of black people as consumers and labourers.
Antiracism and hair activist Zulaikha Patel earlier blamed the lack of consequence against racism perpetrators in the country for the continued racist practices that find their way into the influential advertising industry.
Priceless SA’s Petronell Kruger painted a dim light of the Advertising Regulatory Board’s (ARB) independence, saying it had not been effective in dealing with many other complaints and lacked powers over those it had to regulate.
“We don’t want to create the impression that we are bashing the ARB. I am quite happy to know that they do amazing work when it comes to trying to remove gender stereotypes in some of their decisions. We criticise because we love,” she said.
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