The Airbrushed Asian

When Scottish tourism officials first unveiled the promotional poster for next year's Homecoming Scotland campaign (whose purpose is to get people of Scottish descent to visit the homeland), people looked at it and remarked, "You know, not everyone in Scotland is white."

So a second version of the poster was sneaked out, with one small change: an Asian guy had been photoshopped in. (He's on the left side of the bottom image).

But most people seem to think the change is even worse than the original, calling it "tokenism" and blasting the government tourism agency for having to "think about it after the event."




The most famous case of cut-and-paste diversity was the cover of UW Madison's 2001-2002 undergraduate application.

Advertising Photos

Posted on Mon Dec 22, 2008


Comments

What's that picture the Asian guy is holding?
Posted by Big Gary  on  Mon Dec 22, 2008  at  09:11 AM
And couldn't they have at least found a photo where the Asian man was looking in the same direction as everybody else?
Posted by Big Gary  on  Mon Dec 22, 2008  at  09:13 AM
Is he even Asian? The image is so tiny he could be Middle Eastern or Mediterranean for all I can tell. He's just duskier. In fact the original guy looks more Asian to me than the replacement.
Posted by Charybdis  on  Mon Dec 22, 2008  at  11:20 AM
Be that as it may, they definitely should have Asians in the picture. Most of the kilt shops in Edinburgh's tourist area seem to be staffed by Sikhs. (Don't ask me why.)
Posted by Mr Henderson  on  Mon Dec 22, 2008  at  06:24 PM
"What's that picture the Asian guy is holding?"
-- Big Gary


It looks to be a book, another copy of which is sort of shown in the original image in the area the Asian guy is added to. It's hard to be sure, but it looks like a picture of Robert Burns on the cover. So I'd guess he's supposed to be reading a book of Burns' poems, which makes sense in the context.

"Is he even Asian? The image is so tiny he could be Middle Eastern or Mediterranean for all I can tell."
-- Charybdis


Umm. . .is it bad etiquette to kick somebody who can ban you from the website?
Posted by Accipiter  on  Mon Dec 22, 2008  at  08:38 PM
I kind of thought he was holding a book with a picture of the original guy, so the original guy wouldn't feel bad that he was editted out. But I guess not.
Posted by Sakano  on  Tue Dec 23, 2008  at  04:36 PM
Okay, duh - but only partly.

I assumed 'Asian' to refer to southeast Asia. Typically such a designation (when used to describe race) isn't intended to include people in north or west Asia. While saying 'My girlfriend is Asian' when she's a Turk is technically correct, that's not what what most people think of first. Asian, rightly or wrongly, has pretty much replaced 'oriental' as a racial description. Otherwise the term would encompass far too diverse an ethnic range to be meaningful, which is arguably a good thing.
Posted by Charybdis  on  Wed Dec 24, 2008  at  10:15 AM
And couldn't they have at least found a photo where the Asian man was looking in the same direction as everybody else?
Posted by Big Gary in Edinburg, Texas on Mon Dec 22, 2008 at 08:13 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

No meaning to pick Mr. Big, but the guy standing next to the "Asian" appears to be looking down, and the guy on the other side of the picture (in the checkered shirt) appears to be looking off into la-la land himself...
Posted by Christopher  on  Thu Dec 25, 2008  at  06:56 AM
In UK parlance, "Asian" means Indian or Pakistani.

I think this is somewhat forgivable, considering there will be relatively few Ex-Pat Scots of Asian descent. As a racial group they haven't really been here long enough to get sick of it!
Posted by BS Historian  on  Fri Jan 09, 2009  at  03:56 PM
Sikhs selling Kilts seems perfectly reasonable to me . . . After all, many of the British Sepoy ( Native troop) regiments in India were comprised of Sikhs and not a few of those regiments were attached to Highlanders, so the kilt would have been part of their uniform. And isn't the kilt somewhat similar to the traditional wrap of some Indian male clothing?

( Braces self for deluge of comments about how British people never ran armies in India . . . 😊
Posted by D F Stuckey  on  Sun Jan 18, 2009  at  12:22 PM
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