The title of this article isn’t meant to be clickbait. But have you ever stopped to think whether your font choice is considered racist?
Whether you are a designer or not is irrelevant to what emotions a font design can add to a product.
When Nazi Germany came to power in the 1930’s their official font choice was ‘Blackletter’. This became part of their propaganda posters and you could say that, blackletter was never used the same way again.
“Hitler liked Futura”
Even today, if a design used the blackletter font it would be introducing it’s self to the history it carries to the viewer.
So blackletter is racist?
I’m not indicating that the font itself is racist but the stereotype attributed to it can be. It was Hitler himself who didn’t even like blackletter as a font choice but rather had an interesting favourite.
Judith Schalansky wrote “Hitler liked Futura”. Hitler even managed to arrest the Futura designer, Paul Renner in 1933 after he spoke against the Nazi’s.
Years later. World War II ended and people were still recovering from the horrific events that took place. Blackletter as a font in design was considered a massive taboo and unfavourable to marketing firms. More recently in 2005, blackletter was used in a Reebok campaign worldwide but was replaced with monospaced san-serif only for the German market.
So blackletter is out… what else?
Below is a little self test I want you to try. Without saying which ethnic group it belongs to, can you guess who I am referring to?
Did you guess Chinese? If you did then well done!
I refer to these types of typography as stereotyped fonts we attribute them to a group of ethnics rather than used for everyone.
But it’s a font, why the fuss?
In 2002 Abercrombie & Fitch created a line of T-shirts with the ‘Chop Suey’ typeface featuring Asian caricatures with texts like “Two Wongs Can Make it White”. Along with some of the other t-shirt designs they published, the collection primarily featured roles and caricatures ‘considered’ to be associated mainly with Chinese people.
A spokesman for Abercrombie & Fitch apologised in an attempt to limit the scale of the PR disaster with the following statement.
“These graphic T-shirts were designed with the sole purpose of adding humour and levity to our fashion line. Since some of our customers have been offended by their content, we are pulling these shirts,”
I’m not suggesting using a standard font like Helvectia would have made the racist T-shirts less racist. But can you imagine the ‘chop suey’ font being used in a western upscale company as a brand font? Even the name ‘chop suey’ implies a racist intention behind it.
Its down to the global leaders and marketers to promote a positive and neutral feel to all groups rather than using a font which can be seen as racist.
Simiularly, the same is done with Africa and Native Americans. Below features some example of popular posters which use a more ‘African’ style font choice.
Companies spend millions of dollars to make sure their branding is done correctly, which comes down mostly to font choice. We associate font choices with many things such as luxury, lower class, futuristic, war or even alien.
Just remember this, fonts aren’t racist but ethnic fonts can lead to racist designs or used for ethnic stereotypes which prevents them having proper representation. This could even lead these minorities being treated with lower respect to their dominant culture counterparts.
Next time ask yourself, is the font I’m choosing based on my western white privilege? If yes, use Helvetica, it’s neutral.
