Redesignig Racist Brands
My experience and personal opinion
This article is a translation of the Spanish original article that I wrote for SHARP & SOUR about a project that we did following the Black Lives Matter protests and Spanish antirracist movements happening during the spring-summer of 2020. Since I talk about Spanish brands that may not exist in different countries, I’m going to expand and explain a little bit the project and its context for clarification:
In July, black activists around the world, but specially in the US, started pointing out some food brands which depicted racist stereotypes on their packaging, logos and visual identities. That was the case with Aunt Jemima or Uncle Bens. Same thing happened in Spain, with most of the critiques pointing towards Conguitos, but also others like Colacao or Negrita.
Conguitos (literally translated as “little Congoleses”) is a Spanish brand that has been selling peanuts covered in chocolate since its origins. It’s basically the Spanish M&Ms and received fierce backlash on social media. It is a really old, traditional brand in Spain, to the point that its jingle and melody is well-known and was part of the baby boomers childhood.
Their — outdated and ugly — visual identity depicts a horrid caricature of black people as a mascot/logo. Colacao and Negrita are also two brands with racist identities that we decided to redesign. Colacao, though it has redesigned its brand and visuals along the years, still has a racist illustration on the packaging while Negrita’s naming (“little black woman”) and logo speak for themselves.
We already knew that racism is deeply rooted in the world of advertising, but for some reason — white privilege — we never felt the urge to do something about it. But after listening to black activists
both in talks and in social networks, we decided to educate ourselves and do something actively antirracist. This way, we redesigned the naming and packaging of three Spanish food brands that depicted a racist visual identity. We wanted to prove that it is possible to redesign these very well-known brands, getting rid of its racist graphics, while still keeping them recognizable for the consumer. But further than that, what we really wanted was to foster critical thinking and contribute to the conversation.
When we published Redesigning Racist Brands on our Instagram account we didn’t expect the impact it generated. It’s been more than two weeks and much to our surprise, the post has reached more than 100K people, it’s been shared almost 12K times and has more than 13K likes and almost 1K comments. Something similar happened on Twitter, where the project got more than 2K retweets and almost 4K likes, reaching more than 300K users. It’s specially encouraging the support we received from activists and black people such as Lucía Mbomio, Afrofeminas or Iris Sastre, who appreciated and shared the project on their own social networks.
But besides making us feel happy and proud of our work, on one hand it revealed that there’s a real need to break from our racist and colonialist past, still present in our collective mind, and on the other hand, that this past is so deeply ingrained in our minds and it opposes such a strong resistance to change that many of the comments on the post came from people defending and supporting the brands — not seeing any racism on their designs.
And this is precisely the problem: most people who told us off claiming that it was “too much” did it in an honest way. They do not see racism in Conguitos because they haven’t stop to think about the origin of the brand. They don’t see the offensive caricature that their mascot represents for a black person. And they’re not aware of the colonial context in which black people used to work in sugar cane or cocoa plantations. We want to believe that most of this people’s problem is just simply a — dangerous — lack of awareness.
And it’s even more dangerous if when we delivered facts through our comments and replies, the answer is always a fallacy or a mere insult. Among the most used ones were “there are more important things right now”, “things have been like this forever” or that “changing it would be a lot of work and investment for the brands”. However, the project also received positive and constructive critiques (for example: for some people La Cañera redesign depicts a body that is probably too normative and beneficial for the patriarchy’s interests) that we will try to keep in mind so we can improve and make things more inclusive in the future.
But with this article we wanted to answer to all this people who doesn’t see racism on these brands and debunk and explain why their most used arguments are not valid and they can’t be present in the world that we believe in and are constantly trying to shape through our projects.
But before and as a matter of justice, we think that it’s relevant to point out that the vast majority of people insulting us or displaying racist behaviors and comments were white, cis straight men, while the vast majority of people showing support and sending us positive and valuable feedback were women. And it was not just a matter of sex but also of age. Racist individuals were usually older than the average supporter which for us is simply just another proof of the huge generational gap occurring nowadays and which I personally believe is strongly connected to the access to Internet. But now let’s focus on their main arguments:
“IT’S NOT THE MOMENT — THERE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS”
Yes, the tired, worn-out argument that some people use to claim that since there are “bigger” problems in the world we shouldn’t be tackling the “smaller” ones yet. But who gets to decide what’s important or not for the antirracist movements agenda? Either no one or the wholeness collective, but never white people. Because they don’t think as legitimate that a black person can get offended for things *they* do not consider offensive. Like, you have the right to feel offended for things that generally make them feel offended as well — black children starving on Africa — but you do not have the right to feel offended about a logo or a name. That’s bullshit to them and therefore it should be bullshit to everyone — and there’s no better definition of white privilege than this way of thinking.
The fact that a white person doesn’t consider this important shouldn’t be relevant for the black community, because this belief is based on a personal life experience that had nothing to do with the ones BIPOC people experience through their lives. Therefore, trying to impose a criteria based on your personal life experience erases and makes invisible the experiences of others, black people specially. I mean: it’s racist.
Besides, designers can’t solve world hunger nor create more responsible companies or force them to give equal opportunities and salaries to all its employees, whatever their skin color. And also yes, some “small problems” that are easily solved have to happen prior to bigger, more complex and ambitious ones. And we actually believe they help and contribute to create a global awareness that adds up to the fight.
“IT’S BEEN ALWAYS LIKE THIS AND NOTHING HAPPENED”
This argument is also pretty old and we’ve seen it here in Spain being used for so many things, from bull fighting to sexism. I don’t think tradition is a valid argument, not here, not anywhere. Tradition is ok and we should respect it as long as it’s not opposed to ethical values and human rights. Otherwise tradition is an anachronism and defending it over ethics is reactionary.
It’s pretty relevant a conversation we had with Roberto, a twitter user that firstly complained that he was too old to understand certain things (our project). His main argument was that “how come this is racist now when it wasn’t racist 30 years ago”. “The good old Conguitos”. As I told him on Twitter, we were not even in this world 30 years ago, so if he wondered why this issue was not considered racist back then, he’d better ask his own generation. Because this is precisely the problem: it was always racist, Roberto, you just didn’t see it.
“WONT SOMEBODY PLEADE THINK OF OUR COMPANIES?!”
Finally, the third of this top 3 “arguments”. Defending brands (companies) over people. Those who claim that starting a rebranding process is a huge investment or a loss of brand value are actually putting the capitalist interests of these companies and brands over the rights of real people.
This is in my opinion the worst by far out of the three most used arguments. Because even though the others are still being used everywhere and every time, this is the one that people perceive as more modern or “open minded” when it’s precisely the opposite. People acknowledging the inherent racism of these brands and their designs and still siding with big companies and capitalist interests. They acknowledge themselves as racists because the end justifies the means. It’s not my intention to create debate over this topic, but I think that when in one side there’s the people and in the other it’s the companies the decision is clear.
As a bonus track, I think both companies and supporters lack of the future vision needed to navigate the societies that they live in. The economical cost of a rebranding or a redesign for such big companies with huge profits is not bigger than the price to pay for going against progress and human rights. Even if you feel supported by the main fascist political party in Spain and its members — who reacted to this controversy by posting pics of themselves consuming Conguitos and sending supportive messages to the brand.
To sum up, I just want to state that our goals with the project were mainly two: to contribute to the conversation and generate debate around the topic, and to demonstrate that through design we can actually shape and change society towards more inclusive futures. Ethics is aesthetics but most important: aesthetics is ethics. And design is a political tool and as such we have to use it.
