Back in the 1970s, white Americans were successfully racially shamed into cutting down on their littering by the famous “Crying Indian” public service announcement on TV.
Anyway, from the Associated Press:
Rights to ‘Crying Indian’ ad to go to Native American group
By TERRY TANG
Since its debut in 1971, an anti-pollution ad showing a man in Native American attire shed a single tear at the sight of smokestacks and litter taking over a once unblemished landscape has become an indelible piece of TV pop culture.
…But now a Native American advocacy group that was given the rights to the long-parodied public service announcement is retiring it, saying it has always been inappropriate.
The so-called “Crying Indian” with his buckskins and long braids made the late actor Iron Eyes Cody a recognizable face in households nationwide. But to many Native Americans, the public service announcement has been a painful reminder of the enduring stereotypes they face.
The nonprofit that originally commissioned the advertisement, Keep America Beautiful, had long been considering how to retire the ad and announced this week that it’s doing so by transferring ownership of the rights to the National Congress of American Indians.
… NCAI plans to end the use of the ad and watch for any unauthorized use.
“NCAI is proud to assume the role of monitoring the use of this advertisement and ensure it is only used for historical context; this advertisement was inappropriate then and remains inappropriate today,” said NCAI Executive Director Larry Wright, Jr. “NCAI looks forward to putting this advertisement to bed for good.”
When it premiered in the 1970s, the ad was a sensation. It led to Iron Eyes Cody filming three follow-up PSAs. He spent more than 25 years making public appearances and visits to schools on behalf of the anti-litter campaign, according to an Associated Press obituary. …
Dr. Jennifer J. Folsom, a journalism and media communication professor at Colorado State University and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, remembers watching the public service announcement as a child.
“At that point, every single person who showed up with braids and buckskins, on TV or anywhere in the movies, I glommed on to that because it was such a rare thing to see,” said Folsom, whose areas of study include Native American pop culture. “I did see how people littered, and I did see how the creeks and the rivers were getting polluted.”
But as she grew up, Folsom noticed how media devoted little coverage to Native American environmental activists.
“There’s no agency for that sad so-called Indian guy sitting in a canoe, crying,” Folsom said. “I think it has done damage to public perception and support for actual Native people doing things to protect the land and protect the environment.”
Like me!
I’ve often argued that we should have Spanish-language TV commercials to shame Latino immigrants into not littering as much in our country as they do in their own countries.
But, whenever Tucker Carlson mentions how much Latin American immigrants litter, the press goes insane at the concept that Latino newcomers litter more than whites because, they appear to reason, if that were true… then we would have to genocide them all. There’d be no other possible course of action, such as, say, running PSAs on Spanish language TV with a Crying Gringo telling them, “You’re in America now. Act like a gringo and stop littering.”
But progressives find my theory that littering is socially constructed and therefore can be socially deconstructed just too crazy to imagine. Liberals instead assume that, obviously, Latinos are just born with the Littering Gene, so the only possible solution to them littering would be to Kill Them All. But that would be bad, so therefore it can’t be true that Latinos litter more. Follow the Science, which says that bad things can never be true.
