Now we’re moving!
You might not like this style of reasoning; if not, well, we’re going to spend a dozen posts arguing around each other’s points, so we could just cut to the chase, I could call you a closeted bigot, you can call me a SJW white knight, everyone moves along.
But!
My answer would basically hinge on the idea of power dynamics. Men have, traditionally speaking, had it pretty good, while accomplishing a good chunk of the bad things in human history from their almost universal and constant position of more or less absolute power. Sure, we’ve had a handful of queens and marchionesses who’ve been pretty horrifically shitty things, but eh, I don’t think I’m on unfirm ground here in saying that men have typically run the show and been blessed with an overabundance of privilege, especially in the western society where all of this stuff is in the zeitgeist in particular.
When criticizing and correcting, it does tend to help to punch up. Or pull down, if you want to look at it that way. Men have held a lot of power, and a lot of them have used it poorly. . . and–importantly here– not enough of them have used it to stop the ones using it poorly . It’s like the issue with bad cops: it’s not that EVERY cop is bad (why, I’d even allow that up to 10% of cops are mostly good guys!), it’s that all the rest who aren’t actively murdering black dudes tend to cover for the ones who are.
There’s a fuckload of shitty male behavior out there, perpetrated largely from positions of power (societal, financial, and often just purely physical), but sure, all in all, it’s concentrated in a subset of the male population. Maybe even a minority!
But when we hold all the cards, it’s kinda up to us to make the changes occur. Women still don’t get enough of a say to fix our shit all on their own, so it’s up to the rest of us–hopefully the majority of us!–men to fix this shit, because we’re the only ones with the power to rein in our less reputable contemporaries.
It’s a lot less easy and morally defensible, I propose, to call on black men to fix their own shit, when society still doesn’t allow them full control of their own shit (and even then, some prominent figures in the black community have made essentially that same message, but, vitally, it’s coming from within the community–just like Gillette is uniquely positioned as a brand to speak “to” most men). It’s punching down, telling the guy who you held down, stripped of his dignity and his opportunity so badly he felt he had nowhere to turn but where he wound up that he should have known better; the advertising equivalent of “stop hitting yourself,” on some level.
I’d wade in more deeply, but I’ve got a really tasty salad waiting on me. Let me know if that helps, though, sincerely. I’m not trying to jump down your throat, but this ad is genuinely one of the most incredible and stirring things I’ve seen a large corporation do in aaaaaages and I fucking love it.
