The Billiken's Bluff

The good folks at Verizon, who brought us such creative advertising campaigns as the Verizon worker asking, Can you hear me now? , are at it again. Their new campaign features the Elliots a multicultural family who just installed Verizon DSL in their suburban home. The father is teaching his sons how to use the email account. Sounds like a fairly boring premise for a television campaign. But hold your horses.

I'm reminded of a joke:

A father and son are involved in a terrible car accident. The father dies immediately. The son is rushed to the hospital where he is brought into the emergency room. The surgeon comes in and says, "I can't operate on this boy because he is my son."

How can this be? The father died in the car accident, right? And of course the punchline is that the surgeon is the boy's Mother. The punchline is aimed directly at the listener who is presumably too prejudiced or conditioned (even my conditioned has been conditioned) to think of the possibility that a woman could be the surgeon.

The narrow-mindedness that this joke illustrates is very similar to the reaction I had when I saw this commercial. There is this middle class white father, Mr. Elliot, who is trying to show his two sons how to include a picture in the body of the email. The two sons respond, come on Dad we already knoooooow how to do that. It's suburban, normal, mundane, except for the fact that Mr. Elliot's two sons look black or at Puerto Rican, but certainly not white. I kept waiting for the punchline. I kept waiting for Mrs. Elliot, the black mother to come into the living room. At least then the commercial would have felt vaguely familiar. White father + Black mother = Mixed children. That is the equations that would have satisfied my expectations. But Verizon completely got rid of the safety net on this one. Mrs. Elliot does not make an appearance.

This is not a normal suburban family at least by television standards. This commercial seemed out of place to me. Not so much because I haven't been exposed to multiracial families (I'm half Irish, half Syrian) but because you never seen this on television. If you do it's always framed a certain way. Both the black and white parent are present, to help explain the situation to the viewer, i.e., how these multiracial children came to be. Verizon's commercial offers no explanation, or apology for the family grouping that it presents. It just offers quality high speed internet service.

I realize that I often make bold, unfounded conspiracy claims. I also realize that as a student with liberal tendancy I often take the ANTI-everything stance (particularly when it comes to this government, or large corporations). When I started writing this post I was even planning on attacking Verizon for trying to appear diverse. But I'm starting to realize that this type of thinking isn't always productive. Verizon doesn't do anything wrong by presenting a family that is unusual by television commercial standards. In fact they are probably doing something right. If there were more presentations of families like the Elliots on television then maybe more people wouldn't be fooled by the "Mother/Surgeon" joke.