Monday, October 15, 2012

Pink Politics

I happened to watch a CFL game on the weekend and noticed that the players and coaches were wearing a lot of pink on their uniforms. I didn't catch the beginning of the game so I wasn't sure why they were adding pink to their attire. It probably was announced at the beginning of the broadcast, but I never heard any reference to it during the parts of the game that I watched. My guess was that it was in support of breast cancer research. To find out I just now googled it and found out that indeed, it was to show support for this research. Here's the article if you're interested in reading the whole thing. The first sentence of the article states: "The CFL will again look pretty in pink". Okay, so pink is considered to be pretty. I get it. But, further in the article it talks about it being league policy that all dress this way, and that Reebok will donate a portion of the sales of pink paraphernalia to cancer research.
Just as I suspected. This is a corporate-sponsored attempt at raising money for Reebok, and to justify it, some money will be directed towards cancer research.
I'm sure some of the players have had some direct experience in losing a loved one to breast cancer, but simply donning the correct colour to raise awareness and promote sales for Reebok is taking it too far, in my humble opinion.
The players also don ads for other corporate sponsors such as Rona, etc. So, now Reebok, under the guise of doing good, gets to out-advertise the others? I wonder how much they paid the CFL to do this? I'd like to know. Would it not have been better to pay this amount directly to breast cancer research and if they wanted, tell the CFL audience that they did so and how much they gave?
I might be able to stomach this kind of corporate-grab-for-good if every once in a while a player or coach were interviewed during the game to ask them what wearing pink means to them. The player might speak about how his mother survived cancer, and so on. You get the picture.
Simply dressing in a certain colour just doesn't do it for me. It cheapens it. It makes it common. It loses its significance.
As has been said many times, the personal is political. Once corporations claim the "personal", it's still political, but it's no longer personal. 
There are many causes out there looking for funding. Is this the only way people will give? Or, are we making it so commonplace that the public will no longer be influenced by just another two-minute ad dressed in pink?