A racist stereotype

Large article in today's Guardian in which Aida Edemariam interviews poet Benjamin Zephaniah.

Benjamin Zephaniah describes how he has moved to the Lincolnshire countryside and openly talks about being "the only black in the village" (a self-evident truth to anyone who has been to Lincolnshire, or indeed any other rural county).

Black people do not live or work in the English countryside ("black" meaning African or West Indian heritage). There is of course at least one "Black Farmer" and you can buy his sausages in Sainsburys.  But statistically black people do not register outside of urban areas.

Which makes the current television commercial by Confused.com all the more interesting http://www.confused.com/press/our-latest-advert

This advertisement, entitled Farmyard, shows a large cast of animated farmhands with approximately a third of them portrayed as black.  A "large woman of color" seems to be part of the Confused.com branding, and we might perhaps disregard the animated ethnic cleansing as a clumsy attempt by their ad agency to be "diverse" and "socially aware" and all the other buzz words that will appear as tick boxes on the campaign briefing document.  But there is more...

If you look carefully at the animated dancing farmhands you will see that the genital bulges at the crotches of the black farmhands are enormous, whereas the crotches of the white farmhands are so slight as to make them seem emasculated.

It is of course a racist stereotype that black men have enormous genitals - a stereotype related to the black experience of slavery.

So it seems odd that Confused.com in seeking to challenge the "hideously white" stereotype of the English countryside should in the process promulgate one of the most insidious (and demeaning) racial stereotypes of black men.

Confused.com are shooting themselves in the foot, it seems to me.