Commission for Racial Equality (1998)

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Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) Logo

In the United Kingdom, the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) was a non-departmental public body whose purpose was to combat racial discrimination and encourage racial equality. The Commission was founded in 1976, and dissolved in 2007 when the newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission took over its functions.

The mission statement of the commission was: "We work for a just and integrated society, where diversity is valued. We use persuasion and our powers under the law to give everyone an equal chance to live free from fear of discrimination, prejudice and racism". [1]

Anti-Black Racism Ad

In November 1998, Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) launched a poster, which depicts the face of a black man with the slogan: "Scared? You should be. He's a dentist."

Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) Ad in 1998

The poster is said to take a different approach to the shock tactics adopted in CRE’s last campaign, which caused an uproar of deliberately racist publicity. The CRE said it was hoped that the posters would lead people to question the way in which black people were being stereotyped. [2]

The poster addresses our fear of 'blackness,' a primordial myth perpetually reinforced by hundreds of images of drug-related black street crime, tabloidpanics of mugging and violence. In addition, Hollywood images of gangsters in films such as Boyz n the Hood and New Jack City (the whole genre of film from the 'blaxploitation' of the 1970s onwards) portray black culture in the US in gross physical terms of sexual and aggressive action. These are the very attributes that have been perpetuated as stereotyping throughout the colonial period; the construction of the black body as physically powerful and threatening, and with enormous sexual energy, can be seen to persist in these genres. [3]


That being said, CRE emphasized that the ad was an ironic and humorous challenge to stereotypes. [4]

Controversy

The campaign provoked one of the largest number of complaints ever received in this area, with people not only complaining about the racism of the teaser, but also the denigration of dentists and the danger of discouraging children from visiting the dentist. [5]

As the main body responsible for implementing and monitoring anti-racism in the United Kingdom, the use of racial stereotypes by the CRE has been controversial, albeit not always in the manner expected. The main arguments are that the use of stereotypes by the CRE is based on questionable evidence, on a problematic conception of positive and negative images, and that it fails to consider how images can be read in a variety of ways. The CRE seems to rely on a quasi-essentialist view of race and racism and, as a result, its anti-racism appears static and unable to engage with racism in its various forms. [6]

Reference