Instrumentally Racist  

(I work for an Internet marketing company. I provide a variety of Internet marketing products to a variety of clients, but I do not speak to the customers directly. That aspect of the job is handled by an account manager. This is a conversation between myself and one of my account managers. It is important to note — for this story — that both the account manager and his supervisor are African American. The customer in question owns a music store.)

Assistant Manager: “So, [Client] asked me to remove all images of African American people from his site and the marketing products and replace them with images of ‘beautiful Caucasian women with blonde hair.’”

Me: “I’m sorry, what?!”

Assistant Manager: “Yeah, it was an awkward phone call. He feels that black people don’t represent his customer base or his business.”

Me: “Does he… Does he think that black people don’t play instruments?”

Assistant Manager: “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Me: “I’ll just remove all images of people in general and we can tell him that we didn’t have enough stock images featuring ‘Aryan’ women playing instruments.”

Assistant Manager: *dies laughing*

(The account manager took the request to his supervisor — again, also a black person — who told us to just make the changes to avoid an escalation. I wonder if the client knows that a large portion of the people he works with at this company are not white?)