Playstation Billboard

Ryan, Oliver. "The Browser." CNNMoney. 05 July 2006. 3 Oct 2007 .

This image is of a billboard advertisement from Sony. It is promoting the new color available for their Playstation Portable product. However, it does so by showing a white woman showing power of a submissive and frightened looking black woman. This advertisement started much controversy when it came out and some of the ads were pulled from certain countries.

This advertisement is another good example of one of Johnson’s ways to get off the hook in Chapter 8: “It doesn’t count if you don’t mean it.” This billboard was put up by Sony to promote a new variation of its product, the Playstation Portable. When the gaming device originally came out, it was only available in black. When Sony decided to release the product in white, they started an advertising campaign that pictured two women of contrasting colors as the gaming products are: black and white. Sony only meant this advertisement to show the contrast in the two colors as far as their product goes. Their was no underlying racial message that they were also trying to get across. However, because in the advertisement the white woman is being forceful over the black woman and showing dominance, many people found this billboard to be sending a racial message and not a good one at that. It seems to relay the message that used to be widespread in America, that whites have a certain power over blacks. Johnson argues in Chapter 2: “Privilege, Oppression, and Difference,” that whites do still have power over blacks in society and receive certain privileges that blacks are denied. Because of these privileges that are given to whites, blacks are, in turn, oppressed. Although this is not the message Sony meant to get across, as Johnson says in Chapter 8, the message is still there and being put across if other people see it as such. Intent is not the only thing that matters. Johnson says, “They seem to think that if they don’t mean it, then it didn’t happen, as if their conscious intent is the only thing that connects them to the consequences of what they do or don’t do”(114). Even though Sony did not mean for this message to be in their advertisement, the consequences of the racial stir it caused is their responsibility.

I found this controversy very interesting. When I first saw the advertisement, I immediately saw how someone could find racial meaning in it. However, in my opinion, the ad’s racial meaning is gone with the words in the corner promoting Sony’s new product. It is for a gaming device, not the Ku Klux Klan. Although Johnson uses his argument in Chapter 8 of “Call it something else” to the opposite affect, I think this falls in that category but to the other extreme. Johnson refers to people calling real racist and sexist problems by cutesy names to make them seem less of a problem. I see this advertisement being considered a racial controversy as people doing the opposite. They are taking an advertisement for a gaming device and turning it into an issue of race. There are black people and white people in the world. Nothing can change the fact that they are two opposite and different colors, so when these colors are used to show contrast, there should be no offense in that.