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It's far and away the most high-budget professionalized "It's okay to be white" phenomenon.
Trolling feels too generic for this; is there a term for this kind of "the backlash is the real signal" thing?
I think even viewing it as "It's okay to be white" is a view you can only take a culture warrior whose Time To Fight bell gets wrung by the word genes.
The most straight forward interpretation is clearly "she is hot and slim and has large natural breasts" and her race is only relevant to the extent that you think white girls are/aren't hot. Moving from "she is personally genetically blessed with beauty" to "she is an aryan princess" is such a culture war brained move that it SHOCKS me how many people seem to think it was intended in any way.
Yeah, I phrased it poorly. I definitely don't think the ad agency was explicitly saying that. I do think they were consciously courting the outrage machine as a turbo-booster on the ad. Maybe I'm overestimating the Onlineness of marketers but I'd expect them to be second only to journalists in paying attention to the outrage machine. If they didn't play it like a fiddle deliberately, that's some great luck or great astroturfing.
It's an easy pun that's been done before, as Iprayiam shared downthread JC Penney doing it last fall, no reaction. Of course, that ad had a group, reasonably attractive and diverse but no major standouts. Sweeny stands alone.
We live in a weird culture that made race extremely relevant again after a relative low period; positive statements about certain races are treated as vastly more suspicious than positive statements about other races, and vice versa.
If it had been Halle Bailey in the jeans, the backlash would be limited to one dark corner of twitter and would never reach Good Morning America.
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