Advertisers And Desires

In relation to Naomi Klein's remarks about the demands for diversity of her 90s dissident campus politics becoming a "gold mine" for advertsers and the saviour of global capitalism, the ad here, 1963 Ebony can remind us that in the Cold War era, there was a precedent for this expropriation.

The text of this Apex cosmetics ad is also worth quoting for a reminder of an era before the white bourgeois-narcissistic, solipsistic assumptions dominating bourgeois dissident "political theory" and punditry now had become respectable:

We cannot live with ourselves until we learn to live with eachother.

If a century was not enough to wipe out the sin of centuries, then it must be done overnight.

Anyone - black or white - who had felt the hot, sick knot of anger in his stomach when his child asked the inevtable questions, knows that it must be done.

And it must be done because it is right. Not for political purposes, not for economic reasons, not because other nations are watching us, not even to keep the peace: but simply because it is right, and there can be no compromise.

Prejudice may not end, but it can be put to shame. Injustice can be made despicable. The time must come in this country when the words "segregation" and "integration" have nothing to do with the division of people.

The time is now.