An Ad that Depicted People Of Colour As Criminals Has Been Found To Be Racist, And Duh

The top advertising watchdog has confirmed that yep, a University of Sydney billboard featuring a picture of brown people’s hands and the words “unlearn criminal” was indeed racist, despite a last-ditch appeal from the University to have the ruling overturned.

If you’ve caught trains around Sydney over the past few months, you might have seen the university’s latest billboard advertising campaign. It features a series of things the institution has decided it would be ~edgy~ to “unlearn”, e.g. a picture of a person at an airport with the words “unlearn classroom”, a picture of weed captioned “unlearn medicine”, and the problematic one: a picture of brown children’s hands gripping a wire fence, accompanied by the words “unlearn criminal”.

Back in November, the Advertising Standards Bureau slammed the ad for breaching the advertiser code of ethics, finding that the “overall impression of the advertisement is that non-Caucasian people are criminals” — a message that unsurprisingly breaches racial vilification guidelines.

The University disagreed, though, and tried to appeal the decision by presenting market research showing that “67 per cent of those surveyed were positive about the campaign”. It argued that its target audience was basically smart people who wanted to go to university, and that these people would think deeply about the billboard to conclude that it was actually trying to challenge perceptions of people of colour as criminals.

In a ruling this week, though, the ad watchdog slammed those excuses as…well, excuses. The board pointed out that the ad’s average viewer is not necessarily an extremely thoughtful person thinking deeply about a billboard as they wait for their train, but rather just people glancing quickly out the window of a passing train to see brown people next to the word criminal. The borad’s final conclusion was that yeah, that’s “a depiction of people in a manner that is discriminatory or vilifying of people of that race”, and upheld the ban of the ad.

The University, meanwhile, responded by saying it “respectfully disagrees with the decision”. Maybe it’s time they tried unlearning always being right.

You can read the watchdog’s ruling, as well as USyd’s unsuccessful appeal, here.