Mind the Gap

There is a great post at Oh No a Woc PhD about the way that often, big brands that are advertised as ethical, fair-trade and organic, actually have less than ethical business practices. Those of us who live in the UK will have noted that Green & Black’s founder Craig Sams apparently has no problem with Tesco’s business practices, which is presumably why he signed a contract with them a couple of years ago.

Then again, it should be immediately obvious from the advertising that something is awry. As Prof Black Woman notes, looking at Aveda’s advertising:
If you go to their website, you will see tons of pictures of smiling indigenous peoples up against wind mills & kitchy handwritten environmental sayings, natural haired, light skin, black women smiling out at you, and even an Asian model on the home page (never mind all those blue eyed white folk on every page, with their chiseled features out numbering all the other images).
This instantly reminded me of another advert I found pretty problematic, the one for Divine chocolate:

So, basically this photo says that you would prefer your chocolate to be offered to you by a comely young Black woman, maybe one of the ones who harvested the beans for you, with a happy, fainly suggestive smile on her face. Then there’s the fact that the photo makes the woman look like she’s made out of the product in question.

It seems to be a recurring theme in these companies’ advertising, none quite so much as that Divine advert. Green & Black’s photos from their website are too big to post here, but they mainly represent pairs of brown hands showing you how great and natural the product is that they’ve harvested, offering it up for your approval.

Not being familiar with Aveda products, I thought I’d do a quick search for some of their advertising too, and found this:

Which is just as bad as the Divine advert, really. Not only is this woman offering up fruits of her land that she’s presumably harvested, she’s being offered as a fruit herself. In fact, she looks like she’s offering herself up. Compare these images to the notoriously advertising for French cocoa drink Banania, and:

Not much difference, except that he’s done in a much more 19th century style, he’s a little more caricatured, his French grammar is less than perfect, and he’s generally pretty terrible, but at least he gets to be enjoying a bowl of cocoa (although probably pre-branded, in its innocent, indigenous state), as opposed to offering up the product of his hard labour for your inspection, and smiling as he does so. Because really, the message of all of this advertising is that brown people in exotic locations enjoy all that hard labour, specifically because they want to offer a great product to the white consumers. That’s what they were born to do. It’s like they popped out of the Amazonian soil themselves and, kazam, offered you a handful of cocoa beans or a load of mangoes and papayas, as you drift down from the heavens.

And do they also enjoy the fruits of their labour? Well, everyone knows the idea of a South American farm worker being able to afford a bar of Green & Black’s or a pot of Aveda cream is a bit of a joke. Mayas don’t actually get to eat Maya Gold. Accordingly, the people consuming the products in the ads are overwhelmingly white, or at the most a little off-white. Green & Black’s actually offer little in the way of visualisation of their clientele, though they do have a couple of pictures of (white) pairs of hands breaking chocolate into squares on their website, and a search reveals quite a few pictures of smiling, rich, white entrepreneurs who are involved in the company.

And Aveda? I guess Oprah Winfrey counts as advertising. Otherwise, there’s this:

And there’s plenty more where that came from, though most of it way too big to post here.

So what exactly is the ethical stance of all these companies then? What exactly does Divine mean with its slogan “Eating Poverty History”, when its advertising still manages to endorse glaring inequalities between the manual labourers producing the goods and the people consuming them? Simply that people should be kept out of poverty enough to sustain their farms, so they can keep producing, for our financial gain and enjoyment? Is that really meant to be enough? Because other than that, there seems to be a tacit (or maybe not quite so tacit) agreement that some people are in their place harvesting cocoa beans so someone can make them into Maya Gold chocolate, and they can become all grizzled and picturesque for when they pose for photos in bright ethnic dress, while others of us are meant to enjoy the fruits of their labour, because we’re worth it.

And this is revolutionary how exactly? If you were transported back in time to Arthur Balfour’s government and you got to be a fly on the wall as they debated over business in the colonies and the place of the brown person biblically speaking, this is the kind of stuff you would be hearing. Oh, there would be much more talk of God and whether or not to administer floggings, that’s for sure, but the basic narrative would be the same. After all, it’s in the interest of any company to keep its staff in full working order. There were plenty of people who thought indigenous people in the colonies shouldn’t be mistreated back then too, mostly for that reason, but not mistreating someone doesn’t mean you think they should have equal rights to you or Sam Craig of Green & Black’s (not to target the guy whose name I happen to know at the expense of equally large scoundrels or anything).

And what, exactly, do “faitrade” or “organic” mean? What do we have to go by? Mainly, the advertising blurb on the packet. Can we trust it? Hrm. Let me see. Judging by the pictures of “Pedro” and “Bonita” smilingly plying us with sacks of oranges, I’d guess not. Do we get to see the “definitions” part of these guys’ contracts, where the terminology would presumably be legally defined? No. It could mean anything. You just give them the benefit of the doubt because they might be slightly better than Nescafe, Cadburys, and L’Oreal. And maybe the products taste slightly better, on account of them not actually being made entirely out of wood shavings and newts’ eyebrows, since they’re slightly more expensive. That’s it: luxury and peace of mind.

As Prof Black Woman concludes,

”So the next time you let some product line, especially one that is selling you a modified beauty standard, tell you that they are saving the planet one brown person at a time . . . remind yourself that consumption does not a revolution make.
If you think I am judging unfairly, let’s go discuss it at Starbucks, they buy organic now too . . . or Wallmart, we can meet in the organic section.
Or you could go find something locally produced, using sustainable methods, in recyclable packaging, and only buy it if you actually need it. While you are at it, if you can afford Aveda, buy two local products, and donate one to the local shelter.”
Although the problem with that, of course, is that you’ll be hard put to it to find a local shop, since they all get driven out of business by the huge chains, whose trading practices are apparently judged completely fair enough by all the fairtrade brands they carry.