A Transport for London (TfL) advert has been banned for ‘perpetuating a negative racial stereotype about black men’. The decision, issued today by the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA), relates to an advert TfL from October last year. According to the ASA it:
‘Featured a video of a black teenage boy on a bus. The teenage boy, who was turned around in his seat, said to the passenger seated behind him, “Am I not good enough for you or something? Why you not chatting to me?”.’
The next shot was of a white teenage boy sitting on the bus with text overlaid which stated, “Would you know how to defuse incidents of hate crime, sexual offences and harassment?”. That text remained overlaid as the camera showed the left hand of a white teenage girl touching her right arm. The black teenage boy then said to her, “I said you look good and you don’t wanna go out with me?”
The camera moved to the teenage girl’s face. She appeared uncomfortable and looked out of the window. The text on the screen changed to “Watch the full film to learn how to act like a friend”. The black teenage boy said, “Can you hear me? Look at me when I’m talking to you.”’
The advert is an attempt to address a real, serious problem in London. According to research conducted in 2023 by the charity Forward, 87 per cent of London women surveyed thought that public sexual harassment was a problem, and 83 per cent reported having experienced at least one form of sexual harassment or assault in a public space in London during the previous two years.
But the ASA has particular rules. One states that ‘marketing communications must not contain anything that is likely to cause serious or widespread offence’. Elsewhere in the ASA’s guidance they explain that the ‘inclusion of negative racial stereotypes is likely to cause serious or widespread offence’. An example they provide is an ‘ad [which] showed a while male prison officer and a black male prisoner interacting in a prison setting was considered likely to cause offence’ because the advert emphasised ‘the prisoner’s race’, which ‘had the effect of perpetuating a negative ethnic stereotype about black men as criminals’. On that basis they ‘concluded that the ad was likely to cause serious offence’. The regulator’s guidance also warns that stereotypes in advertising are ‘unacceptable’ under rule 1.3, which requires that all advertising is ‘prepared with a sense of responsibility to consumers and society’.
The truth is that these lies, however well-intended, prevent us from seeing the world as it is
So according to the ASA stereotypes are offensive, unacceptable and irresponsible. The problem is that more often than not, there is some truth to the stereotypes. In the case of the prison advert, prisoners are disproportionately likely to be black. That stereotype may not be a pleasant one, but it is true.
There is a vast body of research on stereotypes, and ‘stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology’, something which it took the discipline ‘nearly a century’ to recognise. For a very long time academics insisted that stereotypes were inherently harmful and inaccurate, often declaring ‘stereotypes to be inaccurate without a single citation, or by citing an article that declares stereotype inaccuracy without actually citing empirical evidence’. Much of this seems to have been motivated by a belief that ‘if stereotypes are associated with social wrongs, they must be factually wrong’.
But the ASA, like much of the British regime, hasn’t caught up with the science and seems determined to present reality as they would like it to be, not as it is. This habit, this tendency to prefer the kind lie over the painful truth, is everywhere now. This month we learned that NHS staff were told to no longer discourage first cousin marriage, despite abundant evidence it is ‘a major risk factor for congenital abnormalities’ which are known to increase stillbirths. It is also apparent in the rhetoric that we must prepare for war with Russia, despite our soaring energy costs and vanished industrial capacity. And of course the lie that there is no racial or religious element to the rape gangs continues to live on, even after the Casey audit should have killed it.
The truth is that these lies, however well-intended, prevent us from seeing the world as it is. The effect of this ban will effectively be to ensure that only non-stereotypical, or unrealistic portrayals of sexual harassment can be shown in advertising, as in the infamous Army poster where a white woman is shown harassing a black man. Our regulators want advertising to present an unrealistic country. But British society will not be made perfect by a scolding regulator deciding that stereotypes in advertising are ‘unacceptable’. We can’t even begin to address the very grave problems facing Britain if we aren’t willing to be honest about the country we live in.
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