Creative agency M&C Saatchi has partnered with out-of-home media owner Clear Channel and youth organisation Rise.365 to challenge racial stereotypes in a thought-provoking campaign.
‘Challenging Narratives’ will depict negative pre-conceived biases that many young black men face daily as mock book covers. Each work is inspired by the personal experiences of young Rise.365 volunteers.
Resulting from in-depth interviews with the young men by M&C Saatchi senior strategist Shaun Okoh, the experiences variously include being told their mixed heritage (black and white) made them more tolerable, being randomly stopped and searched by the police for the first time as a scared 12-year-old or being aggressively arrested at 16 for a crime someone else committed.
“It has been a great experience working with the agency, who took the time to work closely with our young men, creating a safe space for them to express their experiences and challenges and using that to inspire exceptional creativity. We’re also hugely grateful to Clear Channel for their ongoing support in highlighting our work at this level,” Rise.365 founder and director, Joyclen Buffong said.
“We hope that this campaign will have a huge impact, making people think twice about the way they treat particular groups of people, and helping us all to live in a fairer society.”
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As part of the campaign, each of the young men interviewed is then shown a book cover corresponding to a ‘judgement’ that they had personally received.
Clear Channel will run the charity’s campaign across its 3,500+ strong network of digital out-of-home screens across the UK, in a bid to educate the wider public on how prevalent such outdated views still are within British society.
Okoh added: “Bias can be challenging to tackle. It’s human nature to sometimes create narratives in our minds about people we don’t know. However, for young black boys, the narrative created is often a negative one. This campaign needed to get people questioning the stories they make up and what better way to do that than with book covers.
“I think the work does a fantastic job of drawing attention to such an important issue, however, what I personally love most, is the boys’ fun facial expressions juxtaposing the negative stories people made up about them – showing that, despite racial bias knocking them down, young black guys always get up again.”
