Poshdeluxe

Check this out:

Abercrombie & Fitch Bias Case is Settled
(If you don’t have time to read the article, excerpts are included below, followed by the poshdeluxe soapbox).

Abercrombie & Fitch, one of the nation’s trendiest retailers,
settled race and sex discrimination lawsuits yesterday, agreeing to
alter its well-known collegiate, all-American - and largely white -
image by adding more blacks, Hispanics and Asians to its marketing
materials.

After
a federal judge in San Francisco approved the class-action settlement
yesterday, the two sides announced an agreement that calls for
Abercrombie & Fitch to pay $40 million to several thousand minority
and female plaintiffs. Abercrombie also agreed to hire 25 diversity
recruiters and a vice president for diversity and to pursue benchmarks
so that its hiring and promotion of minorities and women reflect its
applicant pool.

In an unusual step, the settlement calls for
Abercrombie to increase diversity not just in hiring and promotions,
but also in its advertisements and catalogs, which have long featured
models who were overwhelmingly white and who seemed to have stepped off
the football field or out of fraternities or sororities. Plaintiffs’
lawyers said they insisted that the company agree to add more diversity
to its marketing materials so as not to discourage minorities from
applying for jobs…

“Their profile, their image is going to evolve,” said Robin S.
Murchison, a retail analyst with Jefferies & Company. “It will
still be the cool kids. You can walk onto any Ivy League campus and
there’s a lot more going on than Waspy-looking guys and girls. I think
they’ll tap into that. I actually think it will work to their
advantage.”

POSHDELUXE SOAPBOX
While I agree with companies being sued for discrimination (which was
incredibly obvious and disgusting in this case), I find the “marketing”
component of the settlement a little ridiculous.� Are we saying
that all companies need to cater to every race? Moreover, I feel
there’s something VERY wrong about the fact that it’s so much easier to
lay down PC standards on corporations than to force them to comply to
stronger laws on labor conditions (sweatshops, etc.). So now we’ll see
Asian people in A&F commercials… what about the Asian people
working in their sweatshops across the ocean? Does this settlement do
anything for them? Not a chance. And, as the article points out,
A&F will ultimately benefit from this settlement, because now
they’ll be able to lure more minority consumers into spending $150 for
a navy sweater. Wow, what a breakthrough.

This article, rather, this decision, just really pisses me off. It
reveals so much of what is wrong with America’s attempts to address
racism. If we are trying to value people equally, regardless of their
skin color, then why aren’t we doing more for people outside of our
borders, people whose lives we affect with our massive consumerism, our
pollution, our trade policies… our complete disregard for human life.
Instead, we make ourselves feel better by sprinkling diversity onto our
commercials, our shows, our movies. While I’m all about inclusiveness
and a stronger minority presence in the media (not to mention in the
government), I just can’t convince myself that seeing a Latina sorority
girl on an A&F commercial is going to improve the life of a Mexican
girl who’ll never finish high school because she sews $150 sweaters at
the maquiladora for 14 hours a day.

“I love this settlement,” Mr. Gonzalez [the lead plaintiff] said. “It’s a landmark thing for
an American icon. They were portraying this image that all-American is
all white. That’s not the case.”

Yeah, what a landmark.