Levi "Going Forth"?

After reading an article about race representation in advertisements ("Advertising and People of Color" by Clint C. Wilson II and Felix Gutierrez) I remembered the new ad campaign by Levi Jeans. Minorities have a history of either stereotypes perpetrated through commercials (Latin Americans in Taco Bell commercials), or being ignored altogether (using Native American names for products but leaving actual Native Americans underrepresented).

I keep seeing these "Go Forth" commercials in the time before a movie starts in the theater and their racial diversity is actually pretty striking. I'm so used to stereotypes and racial exclusivity that I usually just block out ads, but this commercial (using a Walt Whitman poem as the voice-over) caught my attention:



The first image after the "America" sign on the screen is a young black girl, so you could assume the advertisers are using her as the image directly associated with the U.S. The ad continues with a mixture of black and white Americans with actually a broad range of [arguably stereotypical] representations of urban black youths and a successful white executive to an apparently middle-class interracial group of hipster friends.

I think this is an interesting step forward for an advertisement, since it gave a relatively broad range of black and white representations. It doesn't ignore the obvious reality of urban life, but it doesn't confine the races to certain economic classes either. One issue could be the lack of inclusion of other minorities of the American population, since there aren't any obviously Hispanic or Native American actors, but there is at least some progress with one American ethnicity [Other versions of this commercial actually do include a woman that appears to be Hispanic]. Anyway, I really think that opening image is especially important, because it doesn't have a middle-class white person as the first thought after "America." It isn't exactly a radical change in race relations to have a racially inclusive advertisement, but I think the more diverse representation is actually pretty inspiring (which was probably the intent of advertisers appealing to the younger generation).