These caveman Geico commercials are fantastic critiques of racism.
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I wondered if Geico actually had that motivation. The management all look like pasty white guys so what is their motivation? Capture the minority auto insurance market?
The one that pulls the heart-strings is the one with the caveman on the conveyor at the airport.
Buzz Kill
Good questions, someone somewhere must have written on this, prolly in slate or somesuch. Don't you think? I'm interested to know how the ads came about and who the ad agency and the company think they are selling to. Yeah, the airport one is poignant, "always something there to remind me."
Get a life people, this is a stupid commercial, nothing more and nothing less. For you to allege that the Geico caveman is a Muslim, might be interpreted as your own racism as a pasty white revert to Islam and equating all Muslims to being Middle Eastern.
Just playing devil's advocate, the commercials like their previous gecko ones have been quite successful.
 But I'm tired of people being so pessimistic here, life is not the university ivory tower.
Lighten-up GM-Dawg
Maybe you are just being superficial and commericials are the real language of society.
I, myself, do not see the Muslim angle.
I hold my tongue when you go on and on about being gay and who you would so court if he was gay and gay and gay and gay.
Gay men are f-ing obsessed with being GAY!
Who gives a f who you f?
This is a muslim site, not a gay site!
I'm tired of gay men talking so much about being gay! Who cares?
Yes, I live and/or work in/around San Francisco and have to deal with it constantly.
Counter-rant.
In my Linguistic Antropology class, we discussed this alot. The professor is convinced the commercials denigrate minorities who fight for thier rights. They use a caveman to avoid liability for portraying any single ethnicity. (Is "Muslim" an ethnicity these days??)
- A Salafi in worship, a Sufi in society, a Secularist in government.
This is the Chihuahua Che Taco Bell debate all over again.
So the caveman looks a little Talibanish, big deal.
So people here rant about not being able to lead prayer, you signed up knowing in Islam that men hold patronizing attitudes of women, that women are pressured to conform to Victorian notions of the Cult of Domesticity.
And did I mention anything about gay here.
C'mon, we have a major Muslim country that uses Shariah to damn women to adultery if she cannot produce four male witnesses to the act of penetration.
Buzz Kill, I should tell the Muslim progressive womenfolk here to get over the bitching about being confined to a urine perfumed corner in the mosque, right?
This is a Muslim site, and Islam is not about women's rights or gay rights, it's about the hetero male penus privilege club.
You should relocate Buzz Kill, SF is overpriced, but not as pricey as the Third World hole runned by Cuban Republican exiles in Miami, that's a city government synonymous with corruption, makes Republican majority corrupt San Diego seem pretty good.
But I don't see the racism in these ads!
OK, #1 good response
#2 I did not sign up for nor do I tolerate orthodox Islam. I abhor mindless dimwitted religion. There is no superior gender in the Eyes of God nor in my Iranian run Khaneghah.
#3 OK, no gay angle this time. I admit it.
#4 I never have blamed God or Islam for the abuse of women or any other human being or group of human beings, those faults all belong to other humans.
#5 If there is a hetero penis privilege club, I'd be happy to be a member.
#6 At SF prices, I can't afford the dues. I have enough trouble making house payments and slipping the Khaneghah a buck or two. Besides, the HPPC is the other name for the republican party and those people wouldn't have me.
Not as long as I have a conscience.
Buzz Kill
Ay yay yay, I thought it was a good critique of racism and that the caveman was on the news being forced to apologize for his existence as muslims so often are these days.
Y'all just love to take the worst in anything. Why?
Well Muslims do some stupid shit and get in the news for it.
Does it seem to be that "Islamic" political parties seem intent on victimizing rape victims?
In Saudi Arabia, we have the "Girl from Qaif" incident, a Shia teenage from the Eastern Province who received lashes for being raped, but she went public to protest her punishment.
In Saudi shariah, judges are notorious for dispensing arbitrary rulings that fit their fancy, in Saudi Arabia, a male boy raped by men, the perpetrators receive more lashings then when the victim is a female.
But as Muslims, we need to ask why "extremists" have so much clout, why do they monopolize the minbar and the media headlines.
If they are really a minority, then why is this minority so extremely vocal and media savvy and camera spotlight hungry?
Laury, in a Chicano studies class I took at UCLA, I was taught that Teenage Mutant Turtles is anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant.
I'm not taking a stand on mutant ninja turtles, I simply observed that I liked these commercials as I thought they were a critique of racism.
I now can say that white upper-middle class people like me and Buzz are the targets of the ad people and not latino-persian gay men of whatever social class such as yourself. My white gay upper-middle friend--who is at the moment avidly watching a dvr'd episode of CSI on my room-dominating television set--says he thinks the commercials are a great critique of racism. The common factor here is upper-class white people. No doubt, it plays into our need for cultural self-critique to make it through the day. Targeting wealthy white folks, those crazy ad men, what were they thinking?
I don't know if I agree with that analysis. WASP middle market is crammed.
The emerging, "growth" markets are Latino and African American. The great thing about money is it is, more or less, indifferent to race. Business is business. Greed is color blind. You notice more and more Latino characters creeping into the most popular shows (like Gabby and Carlos on Desperate Housewives).
White guilt cannot be a good motivator for goods and services. The Gecko has anglo loving white people covered.
I would say the caveman is a bizarre attempt at getting other markets.
Then again, maybe we are overthinking it. Advertising has always fascinated me. Ogilvy has always seemed like the Devil's Right Hand.
That was cute. Seven minutes ago I just posted that I don't want to sit here and watch more ads. After my van breaks down, I won't need insurance! Then I sat here and watched more ads. The apology ad makes more sense now. And I can see what Laury's saying a lot better!
I think it was homo habilis who first used fire, like a million years ago, literally. Homo sapiens appeared something like a half million years ago. The wheel, I don't know, that seems more like a civilized thing, probably less than fifty thousand years ago. Maybe it was the horseback-dominator-indo-europeans.
It's a lot of fun to assign new meanings to things, and see what happens.
Where's the line between middle and upper class? Between lower and middle?
Latinos are not considered a race by the US Census Bureau, most Latinos are classified as "White" hence why whites still constitute 80% of the population and this would also include Western Asians like Iranians and Asiatic Arabs, regardless of actual skin color.
Race seems harder to pin down the harder one tries. I actually didn't know they don't recognize Latinos. Technically there are a lot more Caucasians in the world than most white Americans would think. The actual DNA differences between the groups we think of as races are very, very slim.
There are 63 distinct racial categories represented by the 2000 census. They allow respondents to choose any number of races or ethnicities to represent themselves.
All federal forms have boxes labeled "White/Caucasian not Hispanic" and "Hispanic"
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2001/raceqandas.html
The census faq on race categories:
Question: Can data users compare data by race from Census 2000 with previous censuses?
Answer: Data on race from Census 2000 are not directly comparable with those from the 1990 census and previous censuses due, in large part, to giving respondents the option to report more than one race. Other factors, such as reversing the order of the questions on race and Hispanic origin and changing question wording and format, also may affect comparability.
Question: Why didn't the Census Bureau allow respondents to report more than one race in previous censuses?
Answer: The decision to use the instruction "mark one or more races" was reached by the Office of Management and Budget in 1997 after noting evidence of increasing numbers of children from interracial unions and the need to measure the increased diversity in the United States. Prior to this decision, most efforts to collect data on race (including those by the Census Bureau) asked people to report one race.
But au contraire,
Hispanics are counted as "White" since some Hispanics are white but Hispanic is an ethnic and not racial category.
An Argentinian of Ukrainian and Polish descent may be different from the Yoruba descended Brazilian mulatto who is different from the Mexican Nahualt-Maya mix.
Non-Hispanic White does not exclude the fact that there are white Hispanics.
Race is not the monopoly of the US Census, race varies and has different meaning in various cultures and society.
In 2000,
98% of Afghan Americans classified themselves as "White" though most of my relatives look "Mexican" by pasty white fish unbelly whites of European descent.
I consider myself Asian though people in America assume Asians are only those of East Asian descent who look "Chinese."
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