The Margarine Family Receives Guests: Whiteness in Advertising in the Last Five Decades (1968-2017)

Abstract

Several qualitative works point to the limited way in which black people, women and, above all, black women, have been represented in Brazilian advertising. However, only a few studies seek to assess the treatment given to white characters in mainstream advertising compared to that given to blacks and women in a quantitative approach. To help fill that gap, this article examines the representation of white and black models in Brazilian advertising over five decades. From a temporally stratified sample of advertisements published in the Veja magazine, the Brazilian news weekly with the greatest circulation, we coded the images of the advertisements, focusing on the human characters portrayed. The results point to the maintenance of racial inequalities in advertising throughout the period and to specific mechanisms of representation that naturalize the systematic predominance of whites in advertising.

Keywords:
advertising; race; gender; intersectionality