An Analysis of Racial Stereotyping in South African Broadcasting

1 Introduction Outline of Arguments, Theoretical Moves, and Research Sources A theoretically-informed analysis of stereotyping in advertising is a largely unchartered territory. Coupled to this problem is a complexity deriving from the fact that a variety of instruments (be they administrative. technological, ideological. or theoretical) when enacted in the South African context, often lead to counter- intuitive results. Tints, regressive ethnic stereotypes may have been “good” in certain South African contexts and progressive ones “bad” in others. The incorporation of “black” ethnicity in advertising in the West is held to be largely symbolic and masks the lack of real incorporation. Yet in South Africa, in certain circumstances, it prefigures black incorporation given the rise of the black consumer. A discourse geared towards stereotypes of minorities in a dominant ethnicity context, which sees them as bad, may be functional in a multiracial and multicultural context. Instances such as these are symptomatic of a more general problem encountered in the application of theories from First World contexts to the South African context (Muller and Tomaselli 1990: Louw, 1991). Third World countries might not always follow the same patterns or even stages of development that have previously occurred in the advanced industrial states. Third World countries will be profoundly affected by current development theories and policies practised in advanced industrial or post- industrial states. From a globalisation point of view, technological developments that have rendered certain modes of production and their attenuating labour reproduction requirements obsolete, inevitably hear influence upon Third World countries. While not underestimating the level of South African sophistication in industrialisation and business management, these observations must to some extent hold true about future development of the South African social formation, Care should therefore be exercised in the application of theories and concepts from abroad. Theoretical insight might be enhanced by establishing how concepts such as ‘racial stereotyping’ or apparently more established critical approaches to advertising relate to their own originating contexts. This approach 2 can be informative about the manner in which such concepts relate to the South African context: whether they do so in a sufficiently similar manner as to the contexts that gave rise to their original formulations, or whether some adaptation is required.1 By developing approaches based upon what might he called ‘relative analogy’, or ‘contextual interrelationship’ techniques, it may he possible to overcome the danger of clouding over of local practices with foreign meanings. The application of mis-matched, anachronistic or strategically inept theories to local contexts should thus be avoided. At the same time the scrutiny of foreign critical concepts (rather than their unquestioned assimilation) should not be regarded as a new or further form of ‘separate development’. In this instance the intention is to facilitate conceptual clarity and thus better understanding about the relationship of local advertising practices to South African reform processes. How does one apply ‘relative analogy’? It is an approach which as far as possible also takes cognisance of the original contextual processes that gave rise to the theories being considered. Theories, then, are selected and applied by assessment and comparison to find out how appropriate their contextual relationships are to local contextual processes. The purpose of this general introduction is to rehearse in summary the arguments and topography of the thesis and sketch in skeletal form the main theoretical moves being made. An analysis of racial stereotyping in advertising commercials on television in relation to ‘reform’ in South Africa, requires the consideration and interrelationship of many areas of study: stereotyping theory, theoretically-informed advertising criticism, political economy. Post-World War II South African history, reform, broadcast media, local marketing/advertising practices, and film theory. The first theoretical move will consist of establishing some sort of relationship between a stereotyping critical approach and the main corpus of theoretically-informed advertising criticism. This process of exploration is initiated in Chapter 1 with clarification in three aspects of primary relevance to this study: the definition’ of the concept of stereotype; the relationship of stereotypes to ideology; and the nature of ‘racial stereotyping’. The genealogy of the concept of stereotype is traced from what seem to be its earlier origins, to its more formal 1 Tomaselli (1992) gives a critique of South African intercultural communication theory’s unproblematised distortions of American instances. 3 definition by Walter Lippmann (1922), and to Perkins’s (1979) important reassessment. After a review of Perkins’s (1979) examination of the conception of stereotypes, it becomes apparent that certain stereotypes its more closely related to dominant ideological forms than others. The positive stereotypes in the mass media with which we so readily (and often unconsciously) identify, might be understood to articulate something similar to what Althusser (197]) conceived of as an imaginary relationship to our conditions of existence. One way of regarding such stereotypes would be that they are agents of what Althusser (1971) has called interpellation. These positive stereotypes play a role in ‘class formation’, or in the forms of socialisation that give the appearance of classless social structures in post-industrial societies. In the mainstream media representations of the predominantly liberal political economies of western countries, pejorative stereotyping (especially racial stereotyping in its pejorative sense) has little basis2. Such pejorative stereotypes are either residual from earlier eras, or might emanate from more extremist- inclined groups situated outside the mainstream of political discourse. In South Africa, during the period from 1978 to 1992, overt pejorative racial stereotyping also came to be incongruous with mainstream media practices. However, although not overtly pejorative, the forms of racial stereotyping directed at the indigenous population during this period tended to be defined by ethnicity3 or by departures from this tendency. 2 In the United States, conservative political forces in the latter 1970s and during the 198Cc have indeed made inroads upon social programs instituted in the 1950s and 1970s to redress the mainly black disadvantaged (Leiman, 1993:2). However, it would be outright political insanity for this attack to become represented as pejorative racial stereotypes in the mass media. Characters on U.S. television have always been inclined to be middle or upper middle class; now, in the 1990s, black people have become an equal and everyday part of this upwardly mobile world (Jhally & Lewis, 1992:131). The current tendency in television media practices in advanced industrial democracies in general seems to be to reflect an ideology that emphasises progressive self-reliance and upward mobility of blacks. 3 The term ethnic has its roots in the Greek term ethnikos, which originally meant ‘national’ or ‘of a nation’. According to Williams (1976:119), this term was widely used in the senses of heathen, pagan, or Gentile, until the 19th century, when this sense was generally superseded by the sense of a racial characteristic. Ethnics came to be used in the United States as a polite term for Jews, Italians and other less breads’. The apprehension of ethnicity obviously requires the existence of a ‘non-ethnic’ or someone from another, usually more dominant culture or nation. From within the vantage point of their own culture, an ethnic group is not likely to be able to regard any major ‘otherness’ in themselves. In a South African context during the period of apartheid, the motives of the government were to racially differentiate groups in the country, as a means of preventing absorbtion or elements of the indigenous black population into the white nation-state, in order to ensure European and particularly Afrikaner hegemony within this state. Government institutions articulated this policy with an emphasis upon the preservation or resurrection of aspects of the traditionally-based tribal cultures of the indigenous population. English- 4 For analytical purposes it is helpful to consider the forms of South African racial stereotyping in terms of the following category framework: i) pejorative; ii) ethnic; iii) ethnic middle class; and iv) non-ethnic middle class. It was observed above that the South African context may in some instances be found to differ from the political economies of the advanced industrial states. The hesitant movement in SABC-TV commercials from separate advertisements, featuring ethnic categories of racial stereotyping (and their accompanied discourse of ‘structured absences’), to the apparently non-ethnic, non-racial, black bourgeois or affirmatively- inclined stereotypes of ‘integrated’ advertising, may to some extent be consistent with this observation. The terms of economic and social change entailed by ‘reform’ might be expected to manifest specific idiosyncratic tendencies when enacted upon a context in some respect still subject to a form of detached colonisation. Pejorative racial stereotypes, similar to those of the advanced industrial democracies, have at times also been present but

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