KFC or Koon FC?

KFC tv ads currently running on UK screens in 2021 feature mostly Melanated people or so-called Black young men and women riding on their bikes or gyrating on the screen. Their faces are morphed into animated chickens with accompanying ‘cluck-cluck’ animal noises. Not so offensive? Well let’s look at some of the history of Black people and chicken and then you decide.

Photo credit: https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrowlinks/essays/chicken.htm

licensed under CC-BY-SA

Photo credit: http:www.arviesmith.com/archive/collection-pages/black_collectibles/coon_chicken_inn.html

Licensed under CC-BY-SA

Photo credit: https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrowlinks/essays/chicken.htm

Licensed under CC-BY-SA

Image from Understanding Jim Crow by (2015) by David Pilgrim

Licensed under CC-BY-SA

Photo credit: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jan/07/kfc-chicken-race-australia-america
Current UK adverts for KFC In 2021. Photo credit: https://www.moreaboutadvertising.com/2019/04/kfc-asks-what-the-cluck-in-new-look-mother-campaign/

Licensed under CC-BY-SA

Notice how the creators of the KFC advert campaign have used the colour red throughout these images. This works on several levels to disrupt yet relocate our focus onto the ‘swinging’ ‘pendulous’ and ‘red fleshy parts’ of skin on the animated chicken. This serves to symbolize the dominance and suggestion of lips, mouth and the tongue of a caricatured Black person-(see the above images).

The work of Tom Burrell as a Marketing communications pioneer and Advertising Hall of Fame inductee, provides an excellent analysis and campaign of how to ‘stop the brainwash’ in his award winning book: Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority (2010).

Finally, in the seminal book written by Wilson Bryan Key: Subliminal Seduction (1974) in it he shows the visual evidence of how the media and their advertising campaigns, are saturated with sex and racial tropes which operate on the unconscious streams of our mind.

So remember the words of Listervelt Middleton when somebody tells you to “get over it”, “Stop being PC” or “You’ve got a chip on your shoulder”:

Minute by minute, hour by hour, when you lose your history, you lose your power. So sharpen your eyes and tune your ear so you’ll know what you see and understand what you hear.

The media like to capitalize on the fact that many of our children and youth are being miseducated in the current schooling system. If they really knew who they were they would not take part in their own recolonization. Just as Listervelt Middleton above is reminding us that we must go back and learn our glorious history from the beginning or continue to be exploited like KFC clucking chickens.