The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 10 (1999)

Racial Boundaries and Stereotypes:
An Analysis of American Advertising

Yasuko I. TAKEZAWA

What they [the media] produce is, precisely, representations of the socialworld, images, descriptions, explanations and frames for understanding how theworld is and why it works as it is said and shown to work. And, amongst otherkinds of ideological labor, the media construct for us a deﬁnition of what raceis, what meaning the imagery of race carries, and what the “problem of race”
is understood to be. They help to classify out the world in terms of the categories of race (Stuart Hall, emphasis in original).1

I INTRODUCTION
In order to categorize, store, and retrieve information, humans apply
boundary making, a universal phenomenon indispensable to their cognitive mechanisms. Cognition of other human beings also relies onboundaries constructed in their minds. However, the basis of boundary
making as it relates to others signiﬁcantly differs in space and time. Since
the European advent of colonization and expansion of territories, themost signiﬁcant index of boundary making has been the concept of race.
Among other characteristics, the color of skin has served as the major
factor dividing racial lines in the West, although obviously in reality
races referred to as “white”, “black”, and such do not actually have skin
Copyright © 1999 Yasuko I. Takezawa. All rights reserved. This work may be
used, with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of thiswork may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
77

78

YASUKO I. TAKEZAWA

colors accurately described by such color terms. Racial boundaries haveremained ideologically ﬁxed for an extended period as demarcation lines
to describe “essential differences.” 2This paper approaches the study of racial boundaries by focusing on
racial stereotypes, which I regard as representations of “races” that are
conﬁned within ideological boundaries. Stereotypes with racial markers
serve to conﬁrm, reproduce, and invent racial differences.
In an earlier paper on stereotypes, I discussed the historical changes
in the images of ﬁve groups as seen in advertising and jokes, physical orexternal stereotypical elements, and the roles of “ethnic markers” andtheir relationships with ethnic symbols.3 Drawing on this past study andbased on my research in progress, this paper is an initial attempt to better
explain the white-minority relationship either explicitly or implicitly
portrayed in advertising by combining both qualitative and quantitative
approaches. In Section IV, I apply the decoding method originated by
Judith Williamson. Williamson’s study combining contemporary general advertisements with Saussure’s concepts of signiﬁer and signiﬁed
was inﬂuential in the ﬁeld of semiotics in advertising.4 My research
involves reviewing advertisements published in several mass-circulation
American magazines from the 1900s until World War II, so as to examine the meanings of signs used in these advertisements and analyze theideologies which support those meanings. In Section V, I discuss the correlation between races and patterns of representations in advertisements
by presenting statistics calculated by examining advertisements depicting racial minorities in magazines circulated between 1920 and 1931. By
utilizing these two approaches, my goal is to delineate deep and widespread patterns of racial boundaries and their underlying ideologies.
My approach to advertising focuses on its performance as a reﬂectionof American ideologies and its role as a mechanism that produces andmaintains ideologies. Advertising functions as the accumulated knowledge of what people seek and want to identify with as consumers who
try to achieve their desires to transform themselves by purchasing certain products. Magazine advertising concentrates on getting the reader’sattention and inﬂuencing purchasing decisions in order to sell more products. Sut Jhally argues that advertising is part of “a discourse throughand about objects” because it shows the ways things are connected toimportant domains of our lives.5
In America, a white-dominant capitalist society, those with power
maintain and increase their privileges by selling products and accumu-

RACIAL BOUNDARIES AND STEREOTYPES

79

lating wealth. Therefore, I believe advertising is one way to investigatesocial discourse and is particularly effective in examining features thatpertain to race because of its strong visual images.
II MAGAZINE ADVERTISING IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
In the late nineteenth century, the newspaper and magazine industry
advanced rapidly due to technological developments in the printing
industry, transportation diffusion via railroads, and growth in the number of department stores. Furthermore, published popular journals andwomen’s magazines saw consecutive growth ﬁgures in sales volume andvariety commencing around the turn of the century. In the period
between 1900 and 1930, the aggregate amount of national advertising
revenues skyrocketed from $200 million to $2.6 billion, much of thisgrowth coming from expanded periodical circulation.6
From the end of World War I through to the beginning of the Great
Depression, the advertising industry made signiﬁcant developments.
National magazine advertising in amount of pages alone increased six
times during the decade between 1916 and 1926.7
A number of scholars point to the 1920s or the 1920s and 1930s as
having particular signiﬁcance in regard to the study of advertising and
its relation to modernity. Stuart Ewen argues that in the 1920s dramaticchanges leading to higher wages and shorter working hours took place,which in turn became linked to general tendencies to promote consumption by workers. It is during this period that “marginal utility” economic beneﬁts such as fashion, taste, status-giving functions, suggestionsof sensuality, and the broad range of commodities or of consumption
itself—heretofore beyond the utilities achievable by people in their daily
lives—surfaced in their public consumption patterns.8
A second important aspect also related to modernity that came to lightin the 1920s is the change of the nature of advertising. According toJhally, whereas the initial period of national advertising from the 1880s
to the 1920s tended to focus on the “reason why” in a celebratory manner regarding product purchases, advertising created during the 1920s
featured “representation of people who ‘stand for’ reigning social values such as family structure, status differentiation, and hierarchicalauthority.” Jhally argues that in this stage the advertising industry had
to educate consumers in how to read commercial messages. By the endof World War II, consumer education was complete and advertisingYASUKO I. TAKEZAWA

80

strategy shifted towards more cryptic forms, using written text as a “key”
to the visual “puzzle.” 9For these reasons, I chose the time period between 1920 and 1931 to
examine advertisements for the statistical analysis presented in Section
V. However, this by no means implies discontinuity in the patterns ofminority stereotypes observed in advertising over a much longer time
span. It is important to bear in mind that latent racial ideologies are notvery susceptible to historical contexts that exist on a rather surface level.
It has been reported in a number of previous studies of racial or ethnic
images in advertising that little signiﬁcant change can be observed in
ethnic or racial images prior to the beginning of the civil rights movement.10 Seiter attributes this to the fact that a dominant group’s position
is relatively stable and unproblematic.11 Therefore, one partial focus inthis paper is to examine advertisements in the ﬁrst half of the twentiethcentury for the purpose of decoding advertisements and identifying theideologies behind them.
III

SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS OF RACIAL GROUPS IN THE EARLYTWENTIETH CENTURY

Let us brieﬂy overview the socioeconomic status of racial groups inthe period examined for the following advertising analyses. In 1920, 47
percent of native-born whites, 60 percent of blacks, and 53 percent totalof Indian, Chinese, and other races were engaged in gainful occupations.
With regard to occupations stereotypically associated with racial minorities, in 1920 only about 25 percent of the number of janitors and sextons
were blacks, whereas 44 percent and 31 percent were composed of native
whites and foreign-born whites, respectively. Similarly, only 20 percentof those in the waiter category were black. Blacks portrayed as cooks
and porters and other service occupations were signiﬁcantly overrepresented in advertisements (see Table 1).
In the two categories related to laundry, Chinese people working as
laundry operatives and as laundry owners, ofﬁcials, or managers wereover-represented compared to their relative population ﬁgures. The
Chinese people made up approximately 10 percent and seven percent
respectively of those engaged in these professions, despite the fact that
the Chinese population comprised only one percent of the entire U.S.
population at that time. In 1930, blacks made up only 24 percent of maledomestic occupations, whereas 46 percent were native whites and 26 per-

43,208

29,302

398,475
228,985

Porters, domestic andprofessional service

Chambermaids

Cooks
Waiters

100.0
100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

104,677
113,049

10,596

8,268

8,150

78,604
63,253

26.3
49.4

36.2

19.1

59.5

44.0
52.4

80,877
66,149

8,130

9,083

4,189

54,91019,397

20.3
28.9

27.7

21.0

30.6

30.7
16.1

Number Percent
distribution

FOREIGN-BORN
WHITE

202,435
45,836

10,45325,405247

44,11025,332

50.8
20.0

35.7

58.8

1.8

24.7
21.0

Number Percent
distribution

NEGRO

397
94

36

20

3

95
73

0.1
0.0

0.1

0.1

0.0

0.1
0.0

Number Percent
distribution

INDIAN

Source: Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, Population, Vol. 4, 358–59.

13,692Laundry owners, ofﬁcials,
and managers

100.0
100.0

Number Percent
distribution

Number Percent
distribution

178,628
120,715NATIVE WHITE

TOTAL

Janitors and sextons
Laundry operatives

OCCUPATION

Table 1 Race and Occupation in 1920

6,943
2,810

6

181

982

221
11,577

1.7
1.2

0.0

0.4

7.2

0.1
9.6

Number Percent
distribution

CHINESE

2,931
808

77

206

120

625
1,072

0.7
0.4

0.3

0.5

0.9

0.4
0.9

Number Percent
distribution

JAPANESE

215
239

4

45

1

63
11

0.1
0.1

0.0

0.1

0.0

0.0
0.0

Number Percent
distribution

ALL OTHERS

81

82

YASUKO I. TAKEZAWA

cent were foreign-born whites, respectively. For women, 35 percent ofdomestic and personal service workers were blacks, and 46 percent and15 percent were native whites and foreign-born whites, respectively(Table 2).
Thus, although there are certain occupations highly over-represented
both in number and percentage by minority groups such as the laundry
and porter categories, other occupations strongly associated with minorities were in fact more highly represented by whites both in number andpercentage.
IV STEREOTYPES AND SOCIAL DISCOURSEIn the following analyses of advertisements, I employ some of Judith
Williamson’s key concepts as presented in her book, Decoding
Advertisements. These include concepts such as the Signiﬁer (the material object), the Signiﬁed (its meaning), and the Referent System, which
she deﬁnes as a mythology external to the sign itself but meaning theactual thing in the world.
With particular regard to the Referent System, Williamson states, “theSigniﬁer is itself the denoting sign: the sign in its totality points to something else. That something else I term a Referent System” (emphasis inoriginal).12 She underscores the importance of making the distinction
between the “knowledge” which we must have “as a prerequisite tounderstand the ad’s connotation process,” and the “system of signiﬁcation of this knowledge,” which as a system cannot have speciﬁc “existence” in one place and consists of a series of formal relations (emphasis
in original).13 Her explanation is crucially important in terms of understanding that signiﬁers in advertisements are neither isolated from eachother nor coincidental, but are linked to the whole system of social ideologies.
I have selected a limited number of advertisements as examples to discuss in depth the decoded signiﬁers and the signiﬁeds contained within
the advertisements, which in turn demonstrate racial boundaries explicitly or implicitly observed either in individual cases or when combined
together.14
Figure A is an advertisement for automobile tires that appeared in
1925. Readers are confronted with the surprised face and wide eyes ofthe black boy who has apparently just dropped a watermelon, considereda favorite food of blacks. A closer examination of the advertisement

3,561,943

1,772,200

909,939

Transportation andcommunication

Domestic
occupations

FEMALE
Agriculture
100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

Percent
distribution

1,514,041

367,228

813,780

2,610,354

8,212,540

7,151,291

Number

47.6

40.4

45.9

73.3

67.2

74.8

Percent
distribution

NATIVE WHITE

475,439

26,413

465,465

476,095

2,951,751

647,249

Number

15.0

2.9

26.3

13.4

24.1

6.8

Percent
distribution

FOREIGN-BORN
WHITE

Source: Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, Vol. 5, 74.

3,180,251

12,224,345

Manufacturing andmechanicalindustries

Domestic andpersonal service

9,562,059

NumberTOTAL

Gainful Workers 10 Years-old and Over in 1930

MALE
Agriculture

Occupation

Table 2

1,152,560

495,284

423,645

395,437

923,586

1,492,555

Number

36.2

54.4

23.9

11.1

7.6

15.6

Percent
distribution

NEGRO

38,21121,01469,31080,057

136,468

270,964

Number

1.2

2.3

3.9

2.2

1.1

2.8

Percent
distribution

OTHER RACES

83

84

Figure A Collier’s 1925

RACIAL BOUNDARIES AND STEREOTYPES

85

reveals several important signiﬁers: the dead tree, the owl, and the position of the sun and sunbeam, signifying death and fear, night and fear,
and the sunset, respectively. The ideal position of the sun in northern
Europe is over the head, and therefore this picture is in opposition to thenorms contained within Eurocentric society. The patched clothes signify slavery or poverty. The extensive use of a dark color tone enhances
the boy’s red lips, which match the color of the watermelon fruit. This
combination is not coincidental. These backgrounds—the patchedclothes, the assumed act of dropping a watermelon, and the surprised
expression on the boy’s face—when combined together make a referent
system: the boy stole a watermelon at sunset and dropped it when he got
caught. “Time to Re-tire”, the phrase written on the signboard, implies
that the boy was withdrawing from the watermelon ﬁeld, while at thesame time it is a play on words or a pun referring to the tire product. In
contrast, a different advertisement using whites for the product appearedin the same magazine that same year. In this second advertisement, thesignboard is a much lighter color and the phrase“time to retire” is used
to refer to the white old man smiling at a white young boy.
The “Cream of Wheat” advertisement (Figure B) promotes one of themost popular products whose advertising features human characters.15
The main character in its series is a smiling black cook named Rastus, atypical black male name during the slavery era.16 Dressed in a cook’s
white smock, Rastus sports a toothy grin while cooking or serving foodand is frequently standing behind white ﬁgures. In most advertisingexamples in the Rastus series, he is a voiceless ﬁgure: captions underneath often specify phrases of conversations conducted by other ﬁguresin the advertisement while Rastus observes from the background with awarm smile. Rastus is apparently an obedient, non-challenging ﬁgure forwhites. As a referent system, his voiceless ﬁgure and smiling face withgleaming teeth convey docility and obedience. According to Horseman,the prevalent image of blacks in popular theater and literature in the lateeighteenth century was that of the docile, childlike, lazy, contented slave,
dependent on the protection and care of a white master.17 However,
Rastus not only signiﬁes the stereotype associated with this image, butalso conveys a sense of the wealth of the whites, which can be considered a universal goal that can trigger consumer purchases.
“Cream of Wheat” advertising strategy also uses Uncle Sam, anotherpopular face perhaps appearing not as often as Rastus. Figure C illustrates the central ﬁgure Uncle Sam dining while seated in an armchair.

86

Figure B Literary Digest 1910

87

Figure C Literary Digest 1917

88

YASUKO I. TAKEZAWA

Uncle Sam, a signiﬁer of American patriotism, makes a referent systemof “class” and conveys the meaning that what he eats can be considereda staple in American diets. A further contrasting feature of these two pictures is the contrast between the teeth and the red gums of Rastus andthe absence of such features in smiling Uncle Sam.
Figure D is an advertisement for formal wear that appeared in 1909.
The message in the ad reads: “CRITICAL dressers will ﬁnd nothing to
criticize in the evening and dinner clothes we make . . . they are right.”
One particularly interesting feature in this advertisement is the divergence in the line of sight between the two parties. Both white men, who
are positioned in the foreground and cast in central roles in the picture,
are looking at two black-faced persons, while in contrast the two blackfaced men are looking in different directions. This scene has the effectof making the reader identify with the more closely situated white menin the foreground, leading the reader to assume their gaze at the shabby,
unpressed clothes worn by the black-faced men posing in the background. The physical boundary which divides the inside and the outside
symbolizes racial lines. The dichotomy of a plain yet spotless black suitas the ideal versus a shabby, unironed suit as a point of “criticism” isrepresented by the contrasting polarity of the white and the black-faced
men. Note also that the white men are depicted as being taller than theblack-faced men. A similar contrast between white men and black men
has been used in another advertisement created by the same company.
An advertisement for chewing gum appearing around 1928 contains
a less explicit but ideologically comparable representation of blacks.
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, soon after the developmentof advertising employing visual images, the use of black ﬁgures in advertisements for detergent and soaps became popular.18 Such use of blacks
in advertising directly implied that black skin was dirty and something
to be cleaned and whitened. After the early decades of the twentieth century, however, the teeth of blacks as one of the signiﬁers of their blackskin became increasingly featured in advertisements for products associated with teeth such as toothpaste and chewing gum. Although it does
not carry overt implications compared to earlier advertisements, theblackness of the skin of blacks as a referent system remained unchanged.
A particular point of interest in this advertisement is the caption underneath the watermelon that reads, “the tempting taste [that’s] simply irresistible.” It reinforces the stereotype of blacks as people whose immense
desires are uncontrollable and whose lack of rationality or reason makes
them steal watemelons from ﬁelds.

89

Figure D Collier’s 1909

90

YASUKO I. TAKEZAWA

Until the civil rights movement, blacks played stereotypical occupational roles in advertising: for men, roles such as cook, servant, porter,and janitor, and for women, roles such as cook and housemaid. An ad
for Coca-Cola in 1927 illustrates the waiter role assigned to a black boy,clearly differentiated from roles played by the whites, although, as mentioned earlier, blacks made up only 20 percent of the number of waitersin 1920. It is noteworthy that he is a boy, hence shorter in the picture, incontrast to the adult man he happily serves. The black person in theadvertisement is not allowed to be depicted in a role such as drinking
Coca- Cola or any role linked to “sociability” or “taste.”An advertisement for crystal lenses portrays a white man and men of
racial minorities as signiﬁers of differences in civilization and knowledge. The advertising caption reads:
Crystals of marvelous clearness are found in rocks, caves and along river
beds. The Brazilian Indian, Iceland Eskimo or African native who picks themup has no idea of their true nature. . . . Every one of the millions of Wellsworth
Lenses now being worn is made of glass which was examined by delicate
instruments to ﬁnd out if its optical density was exactly right.19

The different positions of the white man and the native men are also
noteworthy: the former standing while the latter are sitting, trying to ﬁgure out the usage of the crystals. The contrast is also overt in clothingworn by the white man compared with those of the half-naked natives.
In this advertisement as well, we ﬁnd the phrase “exactly right,” indicating that the norm employed in this advertisement is attached to a white
man and not racial minorities. The location of the white man in the advertisement—the center, underneath the light, in a high position, and wearing a lab coat—contrasts with that of the men of color who are found in
the periphery, in the shade, in lower positions, and naked. The yellow
background color tone effectively contrasts the black and the white in
the advertisement.
In an advertisement for bubble bath soap appearing in 1911, Japanesewomen serve as signiﬁers of the smoothness of skin. The lantern positioned in the center shines neither on the Japanese child nor the doll buton the bubbles, and its round shape coincides with the round bubbles
which the advertisement claims are “like pearls.” The use of Japanesewomen as signiﬁers of smooth and soft skin is also evident in anotheradvertisement for the same product which contains the message, “Thenthe JAP ROSE bubbles soften your skin as well.” Association of theRACIAL BOUNDARIES AND STEREOTYPES

91

Japanese with the color of yellow is observed in an advertising phrase
for the same product, “Look for the JAP ROSE Girl on the yellow package.” The yellow color of the package seems to aim at differentiating
itself from Ivory Soap, which advertises whiteness and pureness, apparent attributes of the image of the color white. Figure E, another advertisement for the same product, symbolically illustrates the boundary
between the two races: it is a white woman and her daughter who areusing the bubble bath, whereas two Japanese women are placed outside
the central bath setting. Note the physical distance between the two racesin the picture. The image of Japanese women as having smooth skin wasstrongly associated with skin products such as skin cream and soaps, andtheir exotic kimono-clad images appeared in some travel-related advertisements for tours and steamships.
An advertisement for “Masterpieces of Oriental Mystery” uses
images of “Oriental” men as “monsters”, “mysterious” and lustful forwhite women. The man in the advertisement is about to catch a beautiful white woman who, scared and powerless, is screaming for help. The
message within the advertisement is:
She is yours, Master! Sick at heart the trembling girl shuddered at the words
that delivered her to this terrible fate of the East. How could she escape fromthis Oriental monster into whose hands she had been given—this strange man
whose face none had seen?20

In fact, negative depictions of minority men are almost universal,
especially in terms of their relation to majority women.21
One of the stereotypes imposed on Native American men is that of
attacking whites, often with an ax as Figure F illustrates. In this advertisement the white man is having a nightmare of being attacked by an“Indian” who shouts, “Ugh! Scalp no good! Won’t pass FINGERNAIL
TEST!” The detailed message reads, “ If my scalp wasn’t good enoughfor an Indian, it wasn’t good enough for me!” “Even Indians don’t likeme. . . .” His barber suggested that he use a hair cream product, with theresult that “for the ﬁrst time his girlfriend called him ‘Handsome.’”As we have observed in these examples, stereotypical depictions ofracial minorities in advertising rely on the reader’s premised knowledge.
However, they are not merely reﬂections of social ideologies reading
minorities and racial differences, but in fact they play active roles ininventing and enhancing racial differences. For example, the repetitive
use of black ﬁgures in service occupations, such as waiters and house-

92

Figure E Sunset 1921

93

Figure F Life 1939

94

YASUKO I. TAKEZAWA

maids, appeared far more frequently than their relative population
ﬁgures, serves as a sharp contrast to whites, and in turn, adds “class” towhites who use the product. Although the fundamental images of minorities have changed little over the long span of history, racial boundaries
are constantly being drawn and redrawn by enhanced visual images inadvertising.22
V

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF ADVERTISEMENTS

In the previous section, I conducted a decoding analysis of advertisements. This section supports part of that discussion and statistically analyzes widely practiced patterns of representation of minorities inadvertising. My survey included taking substantial selections from fourlarge-circulation magazines with mainly middle-class readerships published between 1920 and 1931. The magazines were two generalcirculation lifestyle magazines (The Saturday Evening Post and
Collier’s), one intellectual magazine (The Literary Digest), and one general-circulation women’s magazine (Good Housekeeping).23
Because of the extremely large volume of advertisements in thesemagazines found even in one issue, for this paper I selected the years
1920, 1921, 1925, 1926, 1930, and 1931 as sample years. The total number of advertisements suitable for this analysis was 557, after excluding
advertisements illustrating minorities only as trademarks.24 As additional criteria, I selected advertisements comprising at least a quarter of apage and containing at least one visible minority member.
Throughout my analysis of these advertisements, I paid particularattention to the following aspects: (1) the roles played by minority characters; (2) the relationship between the white main characters and theblack main characters; (3) the types of products promoted by minority
characters; (4) appearances of race and gender; (5) age categories; and(6) facial expression (for example, no expression, smiling, showing teeth,or other facial expressions). I must point out that this is only a preliminary attempt at statistical analysis, the sole purpose of which is to support my qualitative argument presented earlier in this paper.
The ﬁrst notable contrast that I observed was the difference in raceand gender roles among different groups.25 Table 3 shows the percentages of advertisements containing at least one minority member appearing in an advertisement with or without white persons. Close to half (51.4
percent) of the advertisements showing a black man as the main minor-RACIAL BOUNDARIES AND STEREOTYPES

95

Table 3 Minority Roles in Advertisements (%)
Ads containing

Black
man

Black
woman

Domestic
servant

14.5

54.8

Servile roles

51.4

Part oflandscape

2.8

Brandrecognition
ﬁgureType of role

NativeNativeAmerican American
man
woman

Chinese Chinese Japanese Japanesemanwoman man
woman

0

5.0

0

19.0

0

0

26.0

12.5

33.3

11.1

7.1

9.8

0

34.0

75.0

55.6

50.0

4.5

4.8

11.8

5.0

6.0

0

0

0

Traditional
stereotypicalimages(including
props andbehaviors)

2.8

0

19.6

55.0

4.0

0

11.1

11.2

Being
dangerous,
barbarian,uncivilized

3.9

4.8

54.9

30.0

16.0

0

0

5.6

Entertainment

13.4

2.4

2.0

0

4.0

0

0

11.1

Other

6.7

7.1

2.0

5.0

10.0

12.5

0

11.1

100.0
n=17926

100.0
n=42

100.0
n=52

100.0
n=21

100.0
n=50

100.0
n=8

100.0
n=9

100.0
n=18

Total (%)

000

ity character depict him in a servant role such as waiter, porter, or evenas slave. When combining this with the percentage of blacks portrayed
as domestic servants (14.5 percent), we see that in 65.9 percent of theseadvertisements, blacks are depicted in servant roles. This trend can also
be clearly seen in how black women are depicted: an overwhelming percentage (73.8 percent) of advertisements show black women in servant
roles. However, in contrast to the popular role portrayal of black men,the percentage of advertisements illustrating female house servant roles(54.8 percent) is higher than the percentage illustrating black women inmenial roles (19.0 percent).
Another popular role imposed on black men in advertisements is thatof entertainer, for example, singer or dancer (13.4 percent). I found only
one case of an advertisement that depicted a black woman in an entertainer role.

96

YASUKO I. TAKEZAWA

I also found that the representation of Native Americans in advertising differs signiﬁcantly from that of blacks. Over half (53.8 percent) of
the surveyed advertisements containing at least one Native Americanman portray him (or them) as threatening, dangerous, or uncivilized.
Native Americans were also frequently posed with stereotypical objects
such as arrows, a horse, or an ox (19.2 percent). Stereotypical representations were also common with Native American women: 55.0 percent
of advertisements containing at least one Native American woman
shows her with some stereotypical object, usually food such as corn.
Over a quarter (30.0 percent) of the advertisements portrayed her as
being uncivilized or barbarian.
Comparing advertisements containing Chinese and Japanese withthose of other groups, I found a notable difference in their appearance indistance or landscape pictures: 75.0 percent for Chinese women, 50.0
percent for Japanese women; 34.0 percent for Chinese men, and 55.6
percent for Japanese men. I also noted that among advertisements depicting Chinese or Japanese there are a high percentage of pictures illustrating them in servant roles (26.0 percent for Chinese and 16.0 percent
for Japanese).
Second, in shifting our attention to the relationship between whites
and minorities in advertisements (Table 4), we can see similar results interms of minority roles. Notable differences in either the presence of or
little presence of whites were observed in advertisements featuring
blacks and those featuring other minorities. Appearances of either maleor female blacks in advertisements also portraying whites most often
illustrated the black in a servant role and the white in a master or customer role. In sharp contrast, the relationship between whites and Native
Americans is typically a contrast between civilized and uncivilized
behavior. Chinese and Japanese in advertisements, however, accompany whites far less frequently.
Third, advertisements show certain concentrations in terms of advertised products depending on the racial background of the main character in the particular advertisement (Table 5). Blacks have a highassociation with food products (32.2 percent of all food advertisements
include at least one black with 65.9 percent of that ﬁgure being black
women), and black men frequently appear in advertisements for musicand entertainment (16.9 percent). Role portrayals of black men in travel and automobile advertisements also correlates to their roles as porters
and other menial positions.

RACIAL BOUNDARIES AND STEREOTYPES

97

Table 4 White-minority Relationships (%)
Ads containing Blackman
Type ofrelationship

Black
woman

NativeAmericanman

NativeAmericanwoman

Chinese Chinese
man
woman

Japanese Japanese
man
woman

Minority
individual(s)

28.2

33.3

47.1

47.6

63.5

77.8

66.7

50.7

Master vs.
domestic
servant

14.9

40.5

0

0

1.9

0

0

8.0

Customer vs.
servileworkers

37.6

19.0

3.9

0

13.5

0

22.2

15.7

Sophisticated,civilized vs.
dangerous,
uncivilized

2.2

4.8

41.2

42.9

5.8

0

0

12.6

Mixed (almost
with no racial
distance)

10.5

0

3.9

0

5.8

11.1

0

4.8

Mixed (withsome racial
distance)

6.6

2.4

3.9

9.5

9.6

11.1

11.1

8.1

Total (%)

100.0
n=181

100.0
n=42

100.0
n=51

100.0
n=21

100.0
n=52

100.0
n=9

100.0
n=9

100.0
n=19

Native Americans are also quite frequently found in travel advertisements (35.3 percent for men and 33.3 percent for women) and automobile advertisements (11.8 percent for men). Likewise, more than half of
the advertisements containing at least one Native American woman
advertise food products (52.4 percent). These ﬁndings indicate themajority view of Native Americans as “objects” and also reﬂect the
majority image of “uncivilized” Native American men and “natural”
Native American women. As described above, Chinese and Japanese are
frequently associated with images of travel. An interesting point is thatmany advertisements for entertainment and music as well as furnitureand painting also show Japanese and Chinese in central roles.
Table 6 shows the frequency of appearance for each racial group categorized by gender. I found a total of 269 advertisements containing atleast one white man and a minority ﬁgure, and a total of 198 advertisements with at least one white woman and a minority ﬁgure. However, I

YASUKO I. TAKEZAWA

98

Table 5 Type of Products (%)
Ads containing

Black
man

Black
woman

NativeAmericanman

NativeAmericanwoman

Food products
and kitchen
appliances27

32.2

65.9

7.8

52.4

5.7

0

0

0

Furniture anddecorating

2.2

2.3

0

0

7.5

0

0

11.1

Type ofproducts

Chinese Chinese
man
woman

Japanese Japanese
man
woman

Travel

9.3

9.1

35.3

33.3

32.1

44.4

55.6

38.9

Entertainment

16.9

4.5

2.0

0

17.0

11.1

0

11.1

Industrial
technology

3.8

2.3

9.8

4.8

7.5

0

0

0

Automotive
industry

11.5

2.3

11.8

4.8

13.2

33.3

22.2

16.7

Other

24.1

13.6

33.3

4.7

17.0

11.2

22.2

22.2

Total (%)

100.0
n=183

100.0
n=44

100.0
n=51

100.0
n=21

100.0
n=53

100.0
n=9

100.0
n=9

100.0
n=18

Table 6 Appearances by Race and Gender
Number of ads containing

Man

Woman

Native Americans
ChineseJapanese
Whites and minorities
Blacks

52
54
10
269
184

21
10
19
198
44

observed a striking imbalance in gender observed in cases of all otherraces, yet in different ways. For blacks and Chinese, the appearance ofmale ﬁgures is four to ﬁve times as frequent when compared to female
ﬁgures (184 vs. 44 for blacks, 54 vs. 10 for Chinese).28 The frequency
rate of the appearance of Japanese men is about half that of Japanesewomen (10 vs. 19). For native Americans, the ﬁgures are 21 for males
as opposed to 52 for females.
The statistical contrast between Chinese and Japanese in this respectis explained by the images associated with each group’s gender in advertising, as I discussed in my earlier article.29 Japanese women have an
image of being exotic, having smooth skin, and wearing kimono, andRACIAL BOUNDARIES AND STEREOTYPES

99

images of Chinese men often cast them in roles such as cook, laundryman, or “Dr. Fu”. Japanese men appear very frequently in caricaturesassociated with war or invasion, at least until and during World War II,
but were seldom used for advertisements.
Another interesting result of the statistical analysis related to genderis the higher percentage of adult black women compared to white or
black men (Table 7). Although in the cases of white men, white women,
and black men, the percentages of adult appearances in advertisements
including a member of each relevant category are 87.7, 88.4, and 85.3
percent respectively, 95.5 percent of the advertisements including atleast one black woman also contain at least one adult. Only 2.3 percent(1 case) of advertisements containing at least one black woman include
at least one child, a sharp contrast to 21.7 percent among their white
women counterparts in the same type of advertisements. Appearances of
the aged are far more frequent among men than women for both blacks(10.3 percent vs. 0) and whites (8.2 percent vs. 1.5). An overall analysisof these ﬁgures shows that black women appear almost always as adultwomen, illustrating a narrow concentration in terms of age representation.
A cross tabulation of the data analysis reveals an interesting correlation between race and gender. I observed a high correlation between
depictions containing at least one black man and at least one white
woman in advertisements. Although a further analysis of role categorization is necessary, in large part, this high correlation is seen in many
advertisements which portray a black man as a private servant or in a
servile role for a white woman mistress or customer. The effect is adding
a class feature related to the image of the advertised product, while atthe same time, attracting readers’ attention because of latent sexual
taboos concerning relationships between white women and black men.
With regard to facial expression, I observed a striking difference
between blacks and whites. Table 8 shows four categories which indicate race and gender among blacks and whites. These are advertisementsthat contain at least one white man with a minority member, at least one
white woman with a minority member, at least one black man, and at
least one black woman. Among the 184 advertisements including at least
one black man, 43 advertisements (23.4 percent) show the black man ormen smiling showing many teeth. Similarly, 17 advertisements (38.6
percent) include at least one black woman wearing a “toothy” expression. In sharp contrast, only one case (0.5 percent) including at least one

247(91.8)

33(12.3)

217(80.7)

A (%)

3 (1.5)

175(88.4)43(21.7)

A (%)

46(17.1)

5 (1.9)7 (2.6)

Smile w/ few
teeth

Smile w/
many teeth

Other
expression

A: applicable
NA: not applicable

94(34.9)187(69.5)

Smile without teeth

No expression262(97.4)

264(98.1)

223(82.9)

175(65.1)

82(30.5)

NA (%)

white manA (%)

4 (2.0)1 (0.5)54(27.3)

73(36.9)111(56.1)

NA (%)

195(98.5)23(11.6)

155(78.3)

194(98.0)

197(99.5)

144(72.7)

125(63.1)

87(43.9)

NA (%)

white woman

Table 8 Facial Expressions by Race and Gender

A: applicable
NA: not applicable

22 (8.2)

236(87.7)

Adult(s)Aged

52(19.3)

Child(ren)NA (%)

198

269

A (%)

white woman

white man

Table 7 Appearances by Race and Gender

A (%)

A (%)

8 (4.3)43(23.4)24(13.0)33(17.9)83(45.1)

NA (%)

165(89.7)27(14.7)

173(94.0)

176(95.7)

141(76.6)160(87.0)

151(82.1)

101(54.9)

NA (%)

black man19(10.3)

157(85.3)

11 (6.0)

184

black manNA (%)(4.5)
44(100.0)243 (97.7)

2 (4.5)17(38.6)

1 (2.3)5(11.4)18(40.9)A (%)

42(95.5)27(61.4)

43(97.7)

39(88.6)

26(59.1)

NA (%)

black woman

0 (0.0)42(95.5)

1 (2.3)A (%)

44

black woman

100

RACIAL BOUNDARIES AND STEREOTYPES

101

white woman and ﬁve advertisements (1.9 percent) including at least
white man depict people wearing facial expressions showing many teeth.
As far as “no expression” is concerned, 184 advertisements from a
total of 269 (69.5 percent) containing at least one white man show atleast one white man with no facial expression and 111 out of 198 advertisements (56.1 percent) that contain at least one white woman show thatcharacter wearing no facial expression. The corresponding ﬁgures
among black men is 83 advertisements (45.1 percent) and among black
women 18 (40.9 percent). These statistics support the earlier discussionthat in advertising, blacks are stereotypically portrayed as docile, obedient, happy-go-lucky, and eager to please.
The above results provide an interesting portrayal of racial boundaries
as reﬂected in advertising in different arenas. In the time period selected
for my analysis, minorities were placed in socially inferior positions, thus
reinforcing notions of class. Furthermore, they were associated with traditional home-making: good “home-cookin’” by “mammies” contrasted with products that represent technological developments, civilization,or sophistication (as compared with uncivilized minorities).
Advertisements also stimulate the desire to travel by presenting exotic
images featuring minorities. The differences in roles played by various
minority groups are reﬂected in an uneven distribution of types of products featuring these minority groups.
My statistical analysis also proved that facial expressions of blacks
compared to those of whites were stereotypically portrayed. One particularly interesting ﬁnding was the extremely low frequences of appearances of “grinning” white women in advertising.
Although this is only a preliminary attempt, it is clear that race andgender interplay with the images of minorities consumed in American
society to construct and reinforce racial boundaries.
VI MINORITY RESISTANCE TO STEREOTYPES IN ADVERTISING
Minorities that were stereotypically portrayed did not have enoughinﬂuence to change their images as portrayed in advertising until afterWorld War II. However, they did not remain silent and passive subjectsof stereotypical depiction by the dominant society. Blacks, who suffered
the severest form of racism, later made great contributions to the recognition of civil rights issues in the United States. Archived documents
held by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People102

YASUKO I. TAKEZAWA(NAACP) show numerous protests made by institutions or individual
black readers against the companies that used stereotypical images of
blacks in magazine advertising.
One case involves a windshield-wiper advertisement that appeared inTime magazine in 1949. It contained a caricature of a black person withplain dark skin, popping eyes, large, thick lips, and wearing a tatteredstraw hat. The ﬁgure is holding a slice of watermelon while saying, “Itis raining tonight in GEORGIA?” The board of directors of the San
Diego NAACP sent a letter to Time protesting the advertisement:
It seems incredible that a magazine which usually does a fairly good job ofreporting on inter-racial affairs and which is willing to acknowledge Dr.
Ralph Bunche as “a new colossus” should be guilty of printing an advertisement which is offensive to so many people.
The Board of Directors of the San Diego Branch of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People takes this means of expressing theirindignation and resentment.30

In response to this letter, the advertising editor of Time apologized:
We are very sorry to hear that this advertisement was offensive to some ofour readers, and we appreciate very much your taking the time to bring us
your opinion, for it is only in this way that we can learn of our readers’ reactions to the advertising pages of TIME. . . .31

In another example, a black doctor in Los Angeles addressed a letter
to President Harry S. Truman regarding the black ﬁgures of “AuntJemima” and “Uncle Mose,” both of which the Quaker Oats Company
used in their products:
I seriously believe that this type of advertising, this type of distribution ofmaterial, which ridicules the poor and misguided, but faithful, and endorses
undigniﬁed fawning servility, is bad world relations. . . .
It is my belief that we have never had a Chief Executive more sincere in his
belief in human rights than you, Mr. President. Nevertheless, I believe thatyour noble crusade is being harassed and impeded by such programs and thisadvertising campaign of the Quaker Oats Company. And the result is that the
Negro people have their faith in democracy shaken; and other nations of theworld use our hypocrisy as a worse weapon against us than the atomic bomb
could ever be. . .32

In reviewing the correspondence between blacks or the NAACP and
manufacturing companies or advertising agencies, in most cases, I foundthat the latter apologized and expressed their intent to discontinue theRACIAL BOUNDARIES AND STEREOTYPES

103

use of such advertisements. However, there was one situation wherein amanufacturing company executive retorted: “You are overreactive.” Itseems that such repeated efforts led to changes in the images of minority members only after the civil rights movement.
Conversely, especially in the South, whites displayed resistance to thepositive use of blacks in advertising. According to Kern-Foxworth,advertising agencies as well as TV programmers feared a white backlash. For example, during the 1950s, whites living in the South boycotted
Phillip Morris because it sponsored a Chicago beauty contest that waswon by a black woman.33
It is not possible to estimate the extent to which the voices of blacks
against manufacturing companies and advertising agencies inﬂuenced
the discontinuation of negative images of blacks in advertising. Clearly,
further progress had to wait until the civil rights movement before drastic changes in the images of minorities were effected.
VII

CONCLUSION

Issues involving racial stereotypes are complex by nature and requiredifferent modes of analysis. Racial boundaries exist not only on the
superﬁcial level of racial categories divided by skin color, but they often
take more covert forms deeply rooted in the human psychology of cognitive differentiation, which is eventually linked to social hierachy or
Orientalism. By decoding advertisements and analyzing statistics, wehave observed a number of dimensions in which minorities are conﬁned
by their role representations in advertising, either in terms of gender andage or by such attributes as facial expression, language, and clothes.
These boundaries are rigid in one sense and yet are ﬂexible in another. We have to bear in mind that whites are the main target readershiparound the time period examined in this paper, while for minorities
advertising served as a means of “Americanization” or becoming “whitelike”.
For example, advertisements for men’s suits send a message to white
men —not necessarily to black men— that wearing the “right” clothes
will prevent them from being criticized by more sophisticated dressers.
Likewise, those unable to appreciate the merit of using crystal lenses arepresumably, in fact, not Brazilian or African natives but whites. It is nota piccaninny who ﬁnds temptation irresistible, but a white. The point
here is that the images attached to minorities seem to be mere projec-

104

YASUKO I. TAKEZAWA

tions of complex selves of whites, to which they could be transformed
to “better” selves exhibiting higher social class, civilized lifestyles,
sophistication, and good-looks by purchasing these products. Precisely
because of the possibility of changing themselves and fundamentally
because of different selves existing within their selves, they need icons
representing different positions and statuses in order to differentiate theself they aspire to from the self they want to deny.
Although I discussed only a limited number of stereotypical aspects
in advertising in this paper, in the future I hope to explore other issues
such as light and shade, relations between the roles they play in advertising and the intersection of race and gender.
Racial boundaries, although derived from the Western traditions ofcolor ideology, as well as Western colonization and modernization, are
not merely aftereffects. They continue to affect contemporary society,and are reproduced and reinforced by the consumption of racial images
and stereotypes in capitalist societies.

NOTES
1

Stuart Hall, “The White of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and Media,” in Gail Dines
and Jean M. Humez, eds., Gender, Race and Class in Media (Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage,
1995 [1981]), 20.
2
For the concept of race, see Yasuko Takezawa, “‘Jinshu’: From a Biological
Concept to an Exclusive Worldview,” Japanese Journal of Ethnology 63, no. 4 (1999).
3
Yasuko Takezawa, “Ethnic Stereotypes in the U.S.A.—the Dynamics of Ethnic
Group Images Seen in Advertising and Jokes,” Japanese Journal of Ethnology 52, no.
4 (1988): 363–90.
4
Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (London: Marion Boyars, 1978).
5
Sut Jhally, “Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture,” in Gender,
Race and Class in Media (1995 [1990]), 79.
6
Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of theConsumer Culture (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1976), 62.
7
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1985), 7. For example, in 1900, the Saturday Evening Post, the leading weekly with the largest circulation of any periodical, contained a total of 162,319
lines of advertising, and that number skyrocketed to 4,108,509 lines by 1925. Presbrey,
The History and Development of Advertising (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran &Co., 1929), 443. The Saturday Evening Post annual revenues from 1897 to 1928 were
the following.

RACIAL BOUNDARIES AND STEREOTYPES

105

Table 9 Circulation and Revenue of The Saturday Evening Post
Year

Average Circulation

1897
1902
1907
1912
1917
1922
1927
1928

2,231
314,671
726,6811,920,550
1,883,070
2,187,024
2,816,391
2,843,904

Advertising
Revenue$

6,933
360,125
1,266,931
7,114,581
16,076,562
28,278,755
53,144,987
48,661,580

Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising, 483.
Ewen, Captains of Consciousness, 89–90.
Jhally, “Image-Based Culture,” 78.
10
Ellen Seiter notes the remarkable endurance of images that seem to remainunchanged for a century. For example, white children with blonde hair are depicted as
go-getters, a stereotypical representation which is not available for black children. Ellen
Seiter, “Racist ‘Stereotyping’ in Television Advertisements,” in Gender, Race and Classin Media, 100. See also William M O’Barr, Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness inthe World of Advertising (Boulder: Westview, 1994); and Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, Aunt
Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today, andTomorrow (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994).
11
Seiter, “Racist ‘Stereotyping’ in Television Advertisements,” 78–79.
Marchand also presents a similar argument, saying that the ad creators of that era proudly proclaimed themselves missionaries of modernity, feeling the need to teach the values and norms of modernity to their readers. Marchand, Advertising the American
Dream, xxi.
12
Williamson, Decoding Advertisements, 99.
13
Ibid., 101.
14
Advertising using racial minorities has a long history, since the time of slavery when
African Americans were the object of “ for sale” or “wanted” posters in the case of runaways. In this form of advertising, they were depicted inhumanely and other minorities
as well were portrayed in a discriminatory or inhumane manner in advertising from thelate nineteenth century.
15
Cream of Wheat’s smiling chef ﬁrst appeared in magazines in 1896.
16
In the following discussion of stereotypes, I use “blacks” rather than “African
Americans,” a terms emphasizing cultural heritage, because the nature of racial stereotypes and racial discourse is highly associated with Eurocentric color in this context.
17
Reginald Horsman, “Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial
Anglo-Saxonism,” in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical White Studies(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997).
18
Takezawa, “Ethnic Stereotypes in the U.S.A.,” 374.
19
An ad for Wellsworth glasses. Literary Digest, 1922.
20
An ad for Masterpieces of Oriental Mysteria, in Frank Rowsome, Jr., They Laughed
When I Sat Down (New York: Mcgraw-Hill, 1959), 156.
21
For discussion on racism and sexuality, see Ali Rattansi, “Racism and ‘Postmodernity,’” in Ali Rattansi and Sallie Westwood, eds., Racism, Modertniy, Identity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1994).
8
9

106

YASUKO I. TAKEZAWA

22
Ideally, in addition to the foregoing analysis, the way in which readers (mis)interpret advertisements as text should be taken into consideration. However, since the time
period dealt with in this study is not contemporary and I have not to date found any systematic study that analyzes reader interpretations, I maintain that it is legitimate tochoose this period featuring explicit messages contained in advertisers’ “teachings.”
23
The Saturday Evening Post succeeded two magazines, one of which was ﬁrst published in 1728 in Philadelphia. In 1821 it changed its name to The Saturday Evening
Post. Collier’s was established in 1888 ﬁrst with the name of Once-a-Week and thenchanged to its current name in 1902. Its circulation circa 1910 was over 600,000.
Established in 1895, Good Housekeeping was ﬁrst published in Holyoke, Massachusetts,and later in Springﬁeld, Massachusetts. Its circulation in the late 1920s was over 1.75
million. John E. Drewry, A Selected Bibliography and Reprints of Articles Dealing with
Various Periodicals (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1938).
24
Due to the enormous number of volumes, certain months were selected for samples.
25
I categorized minority roles, relationships between whites and minorities, and products featuring minorities based on my preliminary examination of these aspects.
26
There were several missing values in the data for the analyses of minority roles,
white-minority relationships, and products that resulted in different total numbers ofadvertisements for each group. The percentages presented here are valid percentages.
Since the absolute number of advertisements containing Chinese women, Japanese men,
and Japanese women are so low, the precentages for those groups have less validity.
27
I excluded refrigerators from this category and included them in the category ofindustrial technology since they symbolize the latter than the former.
28
In this analysis, categories detailing each race and classiﬁed by gender are based on
the criterion that at least one member of the analytical group is included. For example,“advertisements including a black man” may or may not include a black woman or amember of other races.
29
Takezawa, “Ethnic Stereotypes in the U.S.A.,” 369–70.
30
A letter by Gordon H. Stafford, Member of the Board, addressed to Time magazine
dated March 7, 1949, Reel 11 of 15, NAACP, General Ofﬁce Papers, 1940–1955, Series
B File (University of Washington), microﬁlm.
31
A letter by Helen Shearer, Advertising Editor of Time, addressed to Madison S.
Jones of the NAACP in New York dated March 25, 1949, Reel 11 of 15, NAACP,
General Ofﬁce Papers, 1940–1955, Series B File (University of Washington), microﬁlm.
32
A letter by Mahlon C. Cooley, M.D. from Los Angeles addressed to President Harry
S. Truman, dated October 6, 1949, Reel 11of 15, NAACP, General Ofﬁce Papers,
1940–1955, Series B File (University of Washington), microﬁlm.
33
Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus, 38.

This study was supported by a Research Project Grant-in-aid for Scientiﬁc Research by
the Ministry of Education (no. 08610313) and a University Research Grant by the
University of Tsukuba.