The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

The ad to the right there has been floating around the internet since it appeared in a Dell catalogue. It's an ad for Intel's Core 2 Duo. Intel says that it's supposed to "convey the performance capabilities of our processors through a number of visual metaphors," and, well, one of those metaphors stumbled upon, for many people, is that of antebellum slavery.

I'm not going to sit here and divine the intention of Intel's marketing division with this ad, but I will say that that interpretation is pretty obvious to me, with six identical and identity-less athletic African American men in a pose that strongly resembles bowing all around a smarmy, nerdy white guy. But while I'm not going to pretend to know if this is a shout-out to a *cough* certain white audience *cough*, an outgrowth of the stereotype that white people are smart and in control and black men are good athletes, or just a complete coincidence of imagery and a total mistake, I do have to wonder about the ad department over at Intel and what sort of minority representation there is. Considering how many people would have to look over something like this before it got approved, it can't be a total mistake....

Regardless of Intel's intention, they're presenting an ad like that in a society that fantasizes paranoid about black men, where all of these stereotypes do exist, and where people are going to read it in the context of everything they know. I doubt there'll be any sort of repercussion for this besides a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of consumers, so I suppose we just take this as another footnote in the argument "Racism Still Exists".

Intel has apologized, though, calling the ad a mistake. It's interesting to notice the way this story's been commented on at various blogs. Both Keith Boykin and Gizmodo posted about it and received quite a few comments, and, well, scrolling through them and comparing the two sites one can see that there's still a long way to go when it comes to a national dialogue on race in this country and a lot of education that needs to be done around these issues.