Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), in a surprising dead-heat race with Democrat Deborah Ross for his Senate seat, is doing the Trump thing and reaching out to the black community. And he’s doing it with about as much finesse as his party's standard-bearer, too.
A new ad highlighting Sen. Richard Burr's (R-NC) work in helping disadvantaged children in his state appears to feature black children from a school in Africa, not North Carolina.
The ad titled "Kirby" features an interview with African American Pastor Kirby Jones who says that Burr "has done a great deal to help the children and their families get on a path and trajectory that leads to academic success and life success. He is genuinely interested in our community, in our children."
Throughout the ad are images of black children in the classroom, two of which are "from Getty's iStock catalog that are tagged as 'non US' locations." They have tags like "non US location," "South African culture," "Africa," African ethnicity," and "African American ethnicity." There was method, sort of, behind the use of not-American children to highlight the success of disadvantaged American children, with the ad's creator telling TPM that "it was not able to shoot B-roll of students in Pastor Kirby's program" because they were "sensitive about ensuring that Kirby's group's tax exempt status was not put in jeopardy by being a part of a political ad." He added that it was OK because they got the images from Getty—a U.S. company. "I don't think that [using not-American children] is the point. The point is that we go to an American entity."
It might be the point for North Carolina's black voters, however. Because, you know, not all black people—not all black children—are interchangeable. And yes, it is 2016.
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