I've had some monumental arguments with my 90 year old father over the years, about the bigotry of his generation of British Colonial types. Given the sort of prevailing attitudes that these adverts portray, I guess he was merely a product of the times, although I still wish he'd had the intellegence/sensitivity/humanity to challenge some of that thinking in his later years!
I would imagine that it is difficult to reconcile the many years of conditioning to think a certain way with a world that is changing in quite uncertain ways. My late Italian grandmother simply refused to have a ‘darkie’ (Pakistani) as a doctor, I guess because she’d been raised to think them uncouth and uneducated (uneducatable?) It always jarred with me, because those sorts of views were very much un-expressible in Australia of the early-1990s (that was to change briefly, albeit racially charged views have to be coated in far more ambiguous clothing). This is progress, not an eradication of unenlightened views, but a gradual whittling away. Perhaps the demand to eradicate instantaneously formerly held truths does more harm than good. I’m not sure of what way would be best, however!
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