Even though it was more or less statistically in the general ballpark, for a TV ad. This right here is why we can’t have a decent discussion about anything in this country anymore.
The arresting images combined with the crackle of what everyone immediately recognizes as old audio made everyone at our Super Bowl party stop and watch. Dodge, I’m sure, had good demographic analysis of their audience, so they knew they could go godly with the message and encounter little backlash.
Should there have been a backlash for mentioning God? That the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal even hints that there should have been says quite a bit.
So God made a farmer, and also the advertising agencies who will use him to sell trucks. Quibbles aside, I’d rather have this kind of Americana than GoDaddy’s bizarre antics.
Hey, we agree. But that’s as far as the agreement goes. Here come the quibbles.
But there’s a problem. The ad paints a portrait of the American agricultural workforce that is horribly skewed. In Dodge’s world, almost every farmer is a white Caucasian. And that’s about as realistic as a Thomas Kincade painting.
Stipulating that visual inspection is a rough measure for the complex genealogical histories of people, I decided to count the race and ethnicity of the people in Dodge’s ad. Here’s what I found: 15 white people, one black man, and two (maybe three?) Latinos.
So it wasn’t all-white. Just close to all-white. Or something. Whatever. Somebody’s writing for the pixel count.
I couldn’t help but wonder: Where are all the campesinos?
Last I saw, they were bored with romance.
Madrigal drones on.
The ethnic mix Dodge chose to represent American farming is flat-out wrong.
It’s true that whites are the managers of 96 percent of the nation’s farms, according to the USDA’s 2007 Census of Agriculture. But the agricultural workforce is overwhelmingly Mexican with some workers from Central America thrown in. The Department of Labor’s National Agriculture Worker Survey has found that over the last decade, around 70 percent of farmworkers in America were born in Mexico, most in a few states along the Pacific coast. This should not be news. Everyone knows this is how farms are run.
And yet when a company decided to pay homage to the people who grow our food, they left out the people who do much of the labor, particularly on the big farms that continue to power the food system. You want to tell a grand story about the glories of working the land? You want to celebrate the people who grow food? You want to expound on the positive ‘merican qualities that agricultural work develops in people? Great! What a nice, nostalgic idea!
Now, did God make Mexican farmworkers or only white farmers? Is the strength and toughness that comes from hard work God’s gift to white people only?
Sheesh. It’s. A. TV. Ad. Designed. To. Sell. Trucks. And a very good, countercultural one.
Obviously, a Dodge ad isn’t on the level of the government’s deportation programs or the long-time cognitive dissonance of American immigration policies. But it’s the kind of cultural substrate in which our laws and prejudices grow.
Some journalists are just wastes of perfectly good carbon, and seriously need to get a life.
Farmworkers are not farmers, and you can’t compare a migrant who hoes a field of beans for a couple days to the owner who tilled, planted, fertilized, irrigated, knifed, and harvested those beans. When you consider the man-hours involved in a year’s worth of farm work, it’s not even close.
Further, the fiction that “big farms” feed the system is just that: fiction. According to the EPA, 90% of all farms are family operations, 6% are partnerships (which could also be a family operation), and 3% are large corporations (though 90% of those are family corporations).
Farms in America may have changed over the past century, but a lot of what we expect farms to look and operate like are still very, very true.
Agreed. Farmworkers are not farmers.
What I want to know is why they left out the Hutterites and the Amish- oh right, they don’t buy big Dodge Ram trucks, either.
It’s an advertisement, not a public service announcement for crying out loud!
But I would bet that any Hispanic, Native American or other minority farmer who took a look at this said, “Damn straight, Paul.”
Protesting the racial composition of an advertisement is what professional race-baiters do. Real people work, and appreciate it when others take the opportunity to tell them that what they do is valuable.
Dear lefties: when you’re ready to join the rest of us in the 21st century by no longer caring about “race”, let us know.
“I decided to count the race and ethnicity of the people in Dodge’s ad.”
First, that’s just weird. Who counts things like that? People aren’t toothpicks, and you, Sir, are no Rain Man.
Second, I don’t think the gigantic, faceless farming operations that employ migrants by the truck-load are the sort of operations the ad was meant to honor. The speech wouldn’t even make sense in that context. If you look at the average family farm in this country, I’m sure the ethnic makeup of the ad is right in the ballpark.
Most importantly, who the hell cares what color skin anyone has in the first place?
Most importantly, who the hell cares what color skin anyone has in the first place?
Why, racists, of course. To racists, the color of people’s skin is the single most important thing about them. Everything else is secondary.
On those obnoxious (and racist) government forms that require me to specify my race, I select “other” and write in “human.” There is only one race and that is human. We are all members of the human race.
You are going to end up on a list somewhere!
It’s people like this “reporter” that sees race first and person second that has driven our society to racial divisiveness that we have today.
Sad really, because in my estimation, America is much better than this.
What about the racial complement in the Go Daddy ad? Or the Taco Bell ad?
Here’s the deal. Paul Harvey was a populist, conservative voice for many of us here in red state flyover country. To the tiny, drug-addled brain of a modern journalist, that automatically means racism. And the blather grows therefrom.
Now here’s the other deal. We don’t care what The Atlantic says any more. We’re not going to change a DAMN thing to satisfy them.
Yes, it’s “horribly skewed” – whites did it. Carmel, CA is “frighteningly white” says the HuffPo. Too many whites.
Ta Nahesi-Coates writes racist articles at The Atlantic a couple times a month and breezes through without a quibble.
Try invoking this identical principle and saying Detroit is “frighteningly black” and black Americans have a “horribly skewed” vision of America in their literature, articles, films and plays, though they constitute only 13% of the population.
“What size hood do you wear, sir? And do you prefer the large eyeholes, slanted for effect, or what?”
Liberals are raging hypocrites when they wake up in the morning and before they’ve opened their mouths. The Atlantic: making friends, influencing people and preaching to a choir of nitwits.
I was more offended by the football teams that don’t look anything like America.
You look at this *ssh*l* HERE – CLICK
whatever.
The huge number of “farmworkers” who are Hispanic are mostly pickers. They don’t drive trucks and they don’t do all the stuff Harvey was talking about in his classic piece. Mostly they pick fruits and veggies that would be bruised and damaged due to machine harvest, and they do a great job of it.
They don’t drive a lot of brand-new heavy-duty American trucks, last I checked. And they don’t need to. Farmers, on the other hand, do. Lumping farmers in the same category as pickers makes as much sense as lumping physicians and physician’s assistants into the same category – they work in the same industry and need one another, but their jobs are worlds apart – and they buy very different stuff.
Besides, if you’d had authentically-portrayed campesinos in the background or foreground of this commercial, it’d have been called racist even faster – because, as the writer of the piece himself said, 96% of farm managers in America are white. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.