Is Microsoft Racist? Probably not..
Software company Microsoft has recently apologised for editing photo by cutting out the head of a black man and replacing it with a white man’s. They then forget to replace the black man’s hand which results in a rather od, white-head-black-handed person. Is it a symbol of interracial harmony or is it racist?
The original image appeared on Microsoft’s US website but on the firm’s Polish website the altered image was present. It could be seen as fair enough to use a different photo on the Polish website due to the racial homogenity present in Poland but this is definitely not the way to do it.
However, who says that the original is in fact the original stock photo? The photo could have been in fact edited the other way round. The alternative could be the original and then edited for the US website?
The truth is that Microsoft probably wanted to save money on getting another photograph to use. There is certainly no racist intent as looking at the demographic data of Poland you can see that almost 99.9% of the Polish population are white Caucassian. The remaining 0.1% is actually in fact mostly Asian. A large number of the black people in Poland are students coming to study. Microsoft are simply advertising to their target audience.
This example shows the power of image editing. Unless you know what you are looking for you would not see that the image has been edited. Editing photos can be misleading especially in teenage magazines where celebrities are overly airbrushed to look ‘perfect’.
Bloody political correctness.
Another similar story – Iowa State University photoshop a black person IN
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I think we need to be careful about judging companies on their marketing efforts. Don’t we want Microsoft to be aware of race relations in different parts of the world? If they had a ad for mainland China-wouldn’t they have different people in it? Not really sure what the big deal is, this is really, really common in marketing.
That being said, this was incredibly sloppy and dumb. Huge companies need to do better!
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admin Reply:
August 26th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Exactly. It’s not racism. People should be able to understand WHY they did it. It’s more the HOW that’s worrying.
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