1 post tagged “civil rights”

There is a commercial for either the Yellow Pages or a company called Southern Plumbing here in Wellington. Now, it doesn’t give a phone number (kind of ironic if it is for the Yellow Pages) otherwise I’d have called them the minute I heard this on the radio.
   The ad begins with a southern American woman talking about how she had coons, and she threw the Yellow Pages at them. It goes on with her complaining about coons and how she has to get rid of them, and the last sound in the scene is her priming her shotgun.
   I can’t see the connection to plumbing because for most of the broadcast I am in total shock.
   Yes, she uses the word coon.
   I know you can be ignorant and assume that coon is short for raccoon, which is bound to be what they will say, but why then did the woman need to have a southern US accent? Maybe the Americans reading this can inform me if there more raccoons in the south.
   I just thought of the Ku Klux Klan.
   The Yellow Pages company in New Zealand was recently bought by an American corporation so I don’t buy the argument that with the new management no one knew about the racial connotations.
   It paints the whole image of the Klan, lynchings and murders of black Americans.
   If the Southern Plumbing I linked is the firm that has put this ad out in conjunction with the Yellow Pages, then I would be seriously worried.
   I have written to the firm. I would like to think this ad was done out of sheer ignorance but there are way too many coincidences here. If they realize they have few African-ethnicity clients on their database it sure won’t be down to the small number of people of African descent in New Zealand.

PS.: The term is used in Australia, too, referring to Aboriginals:

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22931249-5001021,00.html

which makes me wonder just how many New Zealanders made the same connection.—JY