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Speaking of Super Bowl Ads

10:27 am By Maegan La Mala · Media

4 Feb 2009

The following was apparently an ad that NBC refused to show during the Super Bowl. It is a commercial featuring an ultra sound of an unborn baby–which all wraps up into an image of Obama. The basic message being: if Obama’s mother had aborted him because it was going to be “hard” to raise him, the U.S. never would have achieved the historic election of a black man.”

Sweet.

Although I seriously doubt that the people who created this video meant the racial politics of it to exist much beyond “First African American president! Hooray!” it is still interesting to me to think about what racial message this clip is really sending.

A single white mother controlling whether or not the entire black community will be able to celebrate a historic moment?

Hmmm. What does that say about single black motherhood that it took a white woman to get us our first black president?

And what does it say about ‘fertility issues’ in general that even when we’re talking about African American children, it’s *white women* whose choices are put under the microscope and interrogated–more specifically, it’s white women whose choices are *valued* (obviously not respected, but very clearly valued)?

1 Response to Speaking of Super Bowl Ads

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Julia

February 5th, 2009 at 1:24 pm

I kind of wonder if this ad isn’t an attempt to reach (preach to) an audience of women of color, with the “safety valve” of a white mother being the actual case study to make it “safer” (eg, less patently offensive to those it intends to “convert”).
Why not focus on health/educational/income programs to make sure that “future geniuses” aren’t bypassed? Control control *sigh*

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