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Wal-Mart takes another misstep down the slippery slope of race

By SUE CARLTON
Published January 11, 2006

So did you hear this latest bit of bad PR for Wal-Mart?

This time around, the mega-store chain came under fire for its Web site. As reported last week, the listing for a Planet of the Apes DVD set linked shoppers to movies about famous black Americans Martin Luther King Jr., Tina Turner, boxer Jack Johnson and actor Dorothy Dandridge.

It was one of those if-you-liked-this-you-might-like-that kind of links. But the implication for some was a very different sort of connection, which, if intentional, would have been an obviously racist attempt at humor. But more on that later.

Wal-Mart apologized and quickly shut down its automated movie recommendation system, saying the connection between the biopics and the sci-fi movie-turned-TV-series was unintentional. The Associated Press reported that Wal-Mart said there was no racist motivation and that the connection occurred when the set of black-themed movies was put together before last year's Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and grouped with an overly broad category of DVD boxed sets.

It probably didn't help that this came in the wake of another story about Wal-Mart and race.

A human resources manager, who is black, went into a Brandon Wal-Mart supercenter in November intending to buy thousands of dollars in gift cards for employees. Though his white assistant usually purchased the cards without incident, the black manager was kept waiting for hours and ultimately threatened with arrest after Wal-Mart said it couldn't verify his employer's check. That ugly experience got national attention and raised legitimate questions about racial profiling, which Wal-Mart says is not tolerated. The store manager was fired and another employee disciplined.

Add that to criticism about Wal-Mart's health insurance for low-income employees and other troubles, as reported last week by Times writer Mark Albright; the biggest sexual discrimination case in U.S. history; a recent raid to round up undocumented workers hired by contractors to clean stores; and more. Does Planet of the Apes sound like just the latest?

But here's a point about the movie, one of my favorites as a kid. In the classic Charlton Heston version, astronauts have crash-landed on a planet where intelligent talking apes rule while humans are enslaved. (We find out later it's actually Earth in the future.)

The movie has themes like struggles of power and class, ostracism and, yes, a strong element of race. Look up "Planet of the Apes" and "racism" on Amazon.com and you find a book titled Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics and Popular Culture, by Eric Greene. The book's first line: "In the Apes series, racial conflict is removed from the audience's present, projected into both the near and distant future, and reinscribed as species conflict."

So did some forward-thinking Wal-Mart employee connect the struggle of black Americans with the undercurrent in the movie? Or was some knuckle-dragging troglodyte attempting an offensive prank?

Maybe neither. Maybe it was as Wal-Mart contends: an unintentional but potentially offensive mistake.

The world gives us plenty of reasons to get outraged and demand change from behemoth corporations. But automatically assuming the worst can weaken the argument next time around, when a real and deliberate slap happens.

All of which is easy enough for me to say.

A friend who is black points out that it's a constant struggle to figure out which businesses he can trust with his money, where he is welcome and where it's entwined in the DNA of the place that he is not, however subtle or obvious.

Track records, he says, mean everything.

Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 11, 2006, 00:46:02]