In Which There Just MIGHT Be A Conspiracy Against Black Fatherhood...

Source: News One

This is weird.

I'm not one of these social conspiracy theorists(partially because I believe that evil is usually obvious, open, and popular and doesn't need conspiracies, just marketing) but this sort of thing would make me believe in them if I was so inclined. Cointelpro, is that you?

Basically, the image above shows two products from a company that specializes in baby wraps and slings. The left image features a lone black woman and baby, while the right hand one features a whole white family.

Of course, I've seen this a bajillion times on facebook and twitter with all of the usual comments about how there is a conspiracy against black fatherhood and black women are only ever portrayed as single mothers and holy mother of Christ did you see that the one with the black woman has the nerve to be made of cotton, too? Somebody's out to get us!

Now, considering that there are folks on my Facebook who believe that Obama is a fundamentalist Muslim in disguise, I looked at all those comments and scoffed and thought, surely this is just an unfortunate coincidence. One look at the website(after the jump) will surely...

...um...

..well...

Okay, wait a second. There's nothing really wrong with any of these photos. In fact, they're lovely. But there is definitely a certain demographic skew going on here. Take a look at the official photo gallery and tell me what you see. I see a lot of happy white moms, a few happy black moms, one gorgeous yet generic brown chick who is possibly Southeast Asian or Latino, and slightly more smiling white dads than I would ordinarily expect on a baby product website. Traditionally baby products are marketed to women anyway, so frankly I'm always surprised to see dads on stuff like this. However, there are no men of color whatsoever, and one of the black moms is holding a very clearly multi-racial baby.

Once again, nothing wrong with any of that, but in a gallery that seemingly goes to great pains to appear diverse, what's NOT there really stands out, especially since this is several days after the media storm that the viral image unleashed upon the company.

The weird thing is that when I looked at the fan photo/testimonial section, one of the first submitted images there is of a black man looking very proud of a very happy baby. So clearly there's a market there.

Now, I am still not about to jump on the Facebook faketivist bandwagon and say that this is a sign of the Conspiracy Against Non-White Fatherhood that black folks seem to take for granted exists.(And given my own experiences growing up with a father in the home and being treated as though he wasn't there, probably does.) But I will say that this says a lot about our perceptions of fatherhood and how companies choose to market parenting products. I can't figure out if they just didn't think that they needed a non-white male model to sell to their target demographics or if it was a genuine oversight in their campaign. All of the other product boxes apparently feature only mom and baby--only one product box features a family, who happen to be white. (Although the company's official response states that they're interracial, as the man in the photo is "Hispanic". Weak sauce. Hispanics can be white. Also, this is none of my business, but for some reason I hate the word Hispanic. It seems old fashioned, like "colored" or "oriental". )

Also, I think it's interesting that there are NO photos of East Asian people whatsoever and precious few family shots. It's like the K'Tan marketing team got together and tried to make a diverse campaign without having any real idea of what diversity is. This is a diversity informed by soundbites and McDonald's ads, I think.

So basically, I don't think this is racism. I don't think this is part of a media conspiracy against Black fatherhood. I just think it's a lazy attempt at being "diverse" by a company that can only be bothered to barely toe the line rather than actually understand that a wide array of people have babies and wrap them up in something to carry them around. As a "diverse" person who is generally immune to mass marketing due to a)previous poverty and b)stubborn insistence on trying to be a classy bird, this whole thing kind of feels like nobody in the company really gives a shit about diversity because it's not part of their reality but they know they have to attempt it or they'll get complaints. It has nothing to do with actual human diversity and everything to do with maintaining some sort of arbitrary minimum standard of attempting customer care. And unfortunately, I think that sort of thinking in prevalent in large chunks of the world.

It's not racist. But it's weird, and lazy, and a little bit unsettling.