JACK CASHILL: Hey, AT&T, Flagrant Racism and Sexism Are ‘Not OK.’

One of the several downsides in watching too much football this past weekend was watching too many TV commercials. And although I had grown used to the “stupid white man” trope, now a staple of comic advertising, I was unprepared for AT&T’s impressively racist and sexist “Just OK is not OK” campaign.

The larger message of the campaign is that “when it comes to wireless networks, just OK is not OK.” According to some dubious test, AT&T is allegedly “America’s best network.” To launch this concept, AT&T and its marketing geniuses at the Omnicom Group designed a series of scenarios in which an incompetent white professional or service worker offers his services to a wary customer of color. . . .

On its company website, AT&T claims, “Whatever a person’s race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, physical ability or other characteristic, we respect and value them.”

This claim is actually funnier than the ads.

My experience with AT&T’s service is that it’s not even just okay. Their network isn’t as good as Verizon’s, when we had their Internet it was unreliable, and while we’ve never had U-verse, the people I know who do say it’s worse than Comcast, which is failing to clear a pretty low bar.