A person watching their favorite sit -com on television is interrupted by a commercial break. Before they grab the remote to change the channel, one of Geico’s caveman commercials catches their attention: the caveman’s frustrated behavior from Geico’s attempts to use their quote, “Geico.com… so easy a caveman can do it”, as bait for viewers of all types and ages to buy their car insurance. The commercial appears to be a funny attention grabber- up until a deeper look at it is looked upon. The skin tone of the cavemen is fairly on the dark side. “But oh no”, one might say. “That’s nothing because Indians and tanned white people could look similar to that complexion.” We wonder again, “but wait… the texture of the cavemen’s hair looks somewhat akin to black people’s hair... There’s no other race with hair texture as African Americans’ for sure.” It is clear that the cavemen in these commercials physically resemble African Americans.
Throughout the Geico’s cavemen commercials, the cast of actors is almost predominantly white (unless you noticed the Asian woman walking past on the billboard commercial). There’s not one black extra seen or maybe Geico considers the cavemen as African Americans in the scenes. So why wouldn’t they put other black people in the commercial? They wanted the cavemen to stand out and they know by blacks and cavemen having similar attributes that would not have worked in the commercial. Between the therapist actress and the caveman dialogue, she tells the caveman that it is just a commercial. He asked her “well, what if it said, ‘Geico.com… so easy a therapist can do it’?” Of course that wouldn’t make sense, right? “Therapists are smart” the caveman sarcastically concluded. It neither makes sense for cavemen to be portrayed as dumb but playing chess and the piano in the same scene. It seems that Geico just chooses to be insulting to cavemen or black people really.
Geico could argue with us that even though their stereotyped cavemen have attributes as a black person, cavemen are not humans. So how could anyone come up with the idea to compare a ‘non human’ caveman to an ‘actual human’ black person? By definition from the American Heritage Dictionary, a caveman is ‘a prehistoric or primitive ‘‘human’’ living in caves’. From images, books, and animation, all cavemen we have seen sort of appear as the ones in the Geico commercials. A source from Wikia states that cavemen are from the monkey family. Even without that source, it is not hard for us to see that cavemen have features of a monkey from the three-dimensional eyebrows to the trademark mouth of the monkey family. Therefore, many people conclude that cavemen are from the monkey family, which could agree with Geico ‘non human’ theory. So yes, cavemen can be compared to monkeys, but check this out: In history and present day, what animal might one consider or familiarize a black person as: a monkey maybe? Try this exercise: Get on the internet. Go to yahoo’s home page. Turn search assistant on. Type ‘black people look like ‘and allow search assistant to finish off the phrase. What happened? Perhaps search assistant gave you ‘monkey, apes, and gorillas’. In the past, when racism was stronger than it is today, white people blatantly called black people ugly, dumb monkeys. There’s an image on the internet of a t-shirt with graphics illustrating a monkey with a banana and writing that says ‘Obama in 08’ (Obama is U.S.A 2008 presidential candidate).
With all this in mind, what is Geico is throwing at us? They are furtively portraying that cavemen equals monkey and monkey equals black people. Why would they do that? What does that have anything to do with helping their car insurance quotas? Let’s take a look.
In Social Problems by John Macionis, African Americans SAT scores are 300 below the average of Caucasian and Asian students (which two averages are around the same) with the Latino’s and non Latino’s trailing just behind the Caucasians and Asians (381-382). What does this say to society? African Americans are the least intelligent race making it harder for them to own a house, have an established career, buy cars and let’s not forget- obtain car insurance! Of course Geico know this. Is Geico just insulting a particular group of people? So why should they care if black people believe that they are portraying them as cavemen. That doesn’t matter to Geico because if the black race entirely found out whom their commercial cavemen really are, what would they lose? In their eyes, not much since African Americans would be on the bottom of the list of other races to obtain car insurance. Our opposers may argue with that statement claiming that education has nothing to do with anything. To back that up, they will say “it is seen in the commercial that the cavemen are playing chess, the piano, and talks rather good English. Those are all mind simulated and intellectual tasks.” If that is so, why does Geico use the quote “Geico.com… so easy a caveman can do it”? It is like they are making fun of them for being intellectual because if that is the case, is playing chess and piano also so easy a caveman can do it. Geico are on the lines of “yea, I see you guys are trying to educate yourselves, so we’ll just take away confidence by bringing you down”. An example of this is in the commercial where the anchorman and the caveman has a short dialogue, “How could it be offensive if it’s true…historically, you guys have struggled to adapt” the caveman responds, “Yea, right… walking upright, discovering fire, inventing the wheel, and laying down the foundation for mankind”. Since our definition clearly mentioned above states that cavemen are human, Geico might as well have said ‘Geico.com…so easy a Mexican can do it, or Geico.com… so easy an Italian can do it.’ In fact, that is what they are saying but just a little differently racial wise, “Geico.com… so easy a black man can do it.’ To push even deeper than that considering the cavemen/ black people are smart, what does that say about media in our society? It’s says that no matter how smart blacks may appear, due to prejudice, they still are dehumanized. They could have easily used other categories such as animals, careers, or even a baby due to a lack of maturity. At least in those scenarios no one could have been seriously harmed.
The depth of Geico’s cavemen commercials is not noticed enough by its viewers. Rather the commercial was unintentional or intentional by Geico, it may hit home for some African Americans. If we continue to view it as a familiar, regular funny, ‘Great news… I saved tons of money on my car insurance’ Geico commercial, then anything can manipulate our minds by negativity through humor. We would easily be able and persuaded to do anything others want us to do. We are smarter than that because it was just seen that we thought outside the box to sum up where appearance, education, and relation to other characters of cavemen was interpreted from maybe unconscious common prejudice and stereotypes. In a world today where we strive for unity, commercials like these only continue the furthering and separations of races.
RESORCES:
http://www.blackvoices.com/blogs/2008/06/17/barack-monkey-sock-monkey
http://www.halo.wikiua.com/wik/caveman
Macionis, John. Social Problems. 3rd. NJ: Pearson, 2008.
www.bartleby.com/61/55/c01/755500.html
www.yahoo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment