What were they thinking
Personally, I don't know which is more bizarre: The fact that the ad
agency thought they could get away with this ad, or that Reuters found
it necessary to explain to its readers exactly what the Klu Klux Klan
is. (And yes, if you are wondering, it really is the year 2000.)
- ed.
Thursday January 6, 7:22 pm Eastern Time
Argentines protest at "racist" suntan ad
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Argentine human rights groups on
Thursday demanded a magazine ad for Hawaiian Tropic sun-tan lotion,
depicting a sun-tanned man being dragged off by the Ku Klux Klan, be
withdrawn because it is offensive to blacks.
The advertisement, designed by an Argentine ad agency, takes up two
pages in the local edition of music and entertainment magazine Rolling
Stone.
It portrays white-robed and hooded members of the white supremacist
group hauling away an incredulous white man from the side of a private
swimming pool -- a bottle of Hawaiian Tropic sun-tan oil in the
foreground.
''The tone is humorous, the idea is: You're going to get so black that
the Ku Klux Klan are going to come after you,'' Carlos Perez, creative
director of Grey Argentina -- the agency that dreamed up the ad -- told
the daily Clarin newspaper.
Human rights groups said there was nothing funny about it.
''It's an outrage to blacks, it suggests that being black means you are
vulnerable to being kidnapped and tortured by the Ku Klux Klan,'' Victor
Ramos, head of the Argentine Institute Against Discrimination (INADI),
told Reuters.
''The content is racist,'' Ramos said, adding that INADI would do
everything it could to make Rolling Stone cut the ad.
The Ku Klux Klan, founded in the late 1860s in the United States, is
most notorious for its harassment, torture, and killings of blacks.
