Loose cannon: Robert Kirby
A trusty old verbal objet d’art has been given a new lease of life. Thanks to the Black Lawyers’ Association the word “subliminal” is back in fashion.
The last time the word enjoyed such attention was back in the 1950s when something called “subliminal advertising” was exposed for the cheating scam it was.
Subliminal advertising got its message across by the use of commercial television and film images so fleeting as only to be recognised by the subconscious mind.
Imagine a filmed scene of happy recreational activity, people lying on a sunlit beach or swimming in a mountain pool. Superimposed on just one or two frames was a well-known image, like a Coca-Cola bottle profile.
To the conscious eye this was a visual whisk, a little blip. But the acuity of the inner brain recognised the bottle’s profile and the message not only got home, but worse, sidestepped conscious mental barriers. Pleasurable activity was thereby lodged in the subconscious as being analogous with Coca-Cola.
Or so the advertising people hoped. As I can recall, once it was exposed there was a furore and subliminal advertising was banned in some American states.
So much for this week’s educational insert and back to the recent claims about “subliminal racism” both in this newspaper and in the Sunday Times.
Even the most efficient speed-readers might fail to notice this new and subtle version of racism if it were being applied film-style. Read the following paragraph – an extract from the Institute for Racial Equity’s latest newsletter – as fast as you can and see if you can spot anything subliminal in the way of racism.
“Expanding on the subject of the African `renaissance’ (sic), Mr Thabo Mbeki, DRC, recalled Africa’s blackest days when from ivory towers degenerate White Oppression and European Colonialist land-grabbing were being viciously imposed by means of Germanic solutions on Coca-Cola- Funded native tribal mechanisms in avaricious attempts to cannibalise primitive cultural and [Robert] Mugabe-like social inter-balances by supplying French letters, Dutch caps, Fake Parliamentary Driving Licences, Roman Catholicism and Jew’s harps on innocent Muslim tribalists.”
An interesting new perspective and as free of any discernible racial bias as a crow. Subliminal racism just doesn’t work well in essentially liminal mediums, like print. The obvious question arises: how do the Mail & Guardian and the Sunday Times do it?
It’s quite simple. What the subliminally racist editor does is send out one of his investigative reporters with a specific brief, in this case to try to ambush some civil servant with his or her fingers shoulder-deep in the public trough.
Once the facts have been gathered, the newspaper runs the expos. At no stage in the story is the race of the corrupt civil servant mentioned, even hinted at. The editor sits back with an anticipatory smile. Within minutes of publication the newspaper’s fax machine slams into overdrive as letters of outrage smash in. These take the form of linear denials, indignant counter- statements, demands for withdrawal and apology; here and there some congratulations.
Sooner than later, among these emotionally charged missives, up pops one which blames the whole thing on the celebrated racial prejudices of the newspaper – all the anti-black, anti-feminist, anti-Islam, anti- dwarf-lesbian bigotry which, thinly disguised as social and political comment, infests its pages. Gleefully the editor pounces on this letter, and any others of like disposition, and, in the very next edition, publishes them in prominent positions.
If the letters are distinctly hostile, he might simultaneously run a dignified reply in which he categorically denies these charges. This will, of course, have the immediate effect of reinforcing everyone’s worst fears. No one believes in denials anymore. Not after Sarafina.
At this stage, without detectable compromise of either the newspaper’s editor or its staff, an act of subliminal racism has noiselessly been slithered into the subconscious minds of the newspaper’s readers. Two days later no one remembers who said what about which colour the thieving civil servant was first. The closing rocket is launched three weeks later when, reacting a lot faster than usual, the SABC television news department picks up on the story and trucks in Barney Pityana to throw a mauve wobbly on the 8pm news.
Now that you all know how subliminal racism is done you can help cure it by not sending in any more of these racially inflammatory letters. The M&G’s medical aid scheme has refused to underwrite the editor’s future Valium requirements and we’re desperately looking for other ways to keep him stabilised.