Selling Identities: Racing Against Racism

"Okay Boss", 2009. Rebranded

Part One - An Introduction: Meet the Competitors   

       In Stuart Hall’s opinion, the media is a prominent factor in the creation and preservation of racist ideologies. First defining ideology as the synthesis of different ideas into a distinct meaning that controls the social conscious of the individual by feigning truth, Hall goes on to argue that a racist ideology has emerged from the media’s presence in our society. In his essay The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media, Hall discusses “overt” and “inferential” racism and the ways in which they promulgate stereotypes about different races. He claims that the media transforms representations from the past of the “ ‘slave-figure’ ”, “ ‘native’ ” , and “ ‘clown/entertainer’ ” into a modern guise and circulates them to the masses. Hank Willis Thomas, conceptual visual artist and photographer, set out to unmask these revised representations in his Unbranded (2008), Rebranded (2010), and Branded (2011) series. Each of these projects exposes the racist undertones hidden in the naturalized “truth” of advertising images. By removing logos and text from marketing images, modifying different ads, and juxtaposing new and old photographs, Thomas reveals the stereotypes and generalizations about race presented in advertising images.