Apartment Therapy Media describes itself as “the ultimate online destination for all things home” with a a reach of over 3 million unique visitors per month. It was also recently hailed as the #1 Design Blog by The Times of London. Having seen Jesse Lu’s recent call-out of AT on Everyday Object and considering its regrettable campaign of championing Knitta, Please [ed: !?!?] in 2006, 2008 and 2009, I wanted to take a comprehensive look at how this important site has treated race and class, [and point out] a history of problematic posts.
Via abbyjean: one grand home, a nuanced post on a fraught topic.
I think what often makes instances of insensitivity so difficult to discuss is that those giving offense are insensitive in the most literal sense—unable to perceive what might trouble others about their comments. And often the offending significance isn’t in the words themselves so much as in how we understand them in combination. Words are rarely ‘just the facts,’ especially when describing people. One could point to an offending statement and say, “I didn’t say anything that isn’t true.” But the devil is in what’s unsaid.
In the example that struck me most, one word throws off the meaning of the entire post:
I recently bought a couch from a lovely Indian couple off of Craigslist. The couch is perfect except for the fact that the couch smells like curry. What would be the most cost effective thing for me to do to get rid of the smell?
Never mind the grating “off of.” The first sentence on its own is problematic mostly because it’s in a public forum. Mentioning that the couple was Indian implies that the writer and reader both are not Indian. That carries a further assumption: that the reader needs to have it emphasized that the Indian couple were “lovely”; that otherwise “Indian” might be understood as an aspersion. Were the sentence spoken or written in private, from one non-Indian to another, I don’t think these implications would hold. The adjectives would be neutralized; the speaker/writer’s words would be read less as calibrations to attitudes assumed of his/her audience than as description. But in its public context the sentence implies a shared set of associations precisely by responding to what it doesn’t state.
The second two sentences without the first would be unremarkable. Curry is a distinctive odor; if your dwelling doesn’t otherwise smell of it, it’s reasonable to want to keep it that way. But the mention of “Indian” in the first sentence makes the entire post into a restatement of a generalization (“Indians smell like curry”)—again—precisely because the post doesn’t feel the need to state the generalization. A further generalization is implied: that it’s not usual (read: normal) to smell like curry. I can just hear my older relatives saying, “Well, it’s not.” Which for my family is true. But the words’ significance, their larger “aboutness,” as we sometimes say in the lit biz, depends on who’s speaking/writing, and who’s reading/listening. On a web site with three million page views/month they have a different significance and reach than when said between, say, two relatives.
I don’t mean that we should rejoice (in this case) in second-hand cooking smells. In fact in the evening I often write in my kitchen rather than in my study because of the garlic and booming conversation from downstairs. But by reproducing its reader’s question verbatim and with no commentary except “we love curry,” AT not only affirms clichés about its subjects but makes assumptions about its readers. Which is particularly disappointing; design is supposedly about attention to every detail, and about such attention making life more rewarding. That shouldn’t exclude anyone.
Reblogged from think on this.
Everything I chanced upon on the Internet today was funny (well, not 
