Things that make me go WTF!? part whatever

Yesterday, I was walking into town and without any warning, encountered this:

(phone numbers blanked out by me, partly to hide the area-code for where I live, partly because I am not sure I want to make someone else's numbers available without their permission, however cross they made me)

That was taken with my crappy little mobile, so you can't see the full detail. The woman depicted also had the stereotypical full, red lips, for example.

I waited this long to mention it because I wondered if there could be any way in which it would be a mistake to call it disgusting and blatant racism? I know nothing about the business except what appeared on the car door (the web address appears to be defunct - every time I have tried it, the result comes back "domain name doesn't exist"). My suspicion is that the owner's surname happens to be "Black", but I pondered that maybe it was owned and run by women of colour; maybe it was even a collective of women of colour so that all of the workers took an equal share in the profits and the decision-making, and they were all okay with the name and the artwork. If that unlikely scenario were the case, would it still be racist, or would the owners' ethnicity and happiness with the design be acceptable?

Also - I'm not a person of colour myself so maybe the people living in these parts who are have already discussed it and decided it doesn't bother them, so maybe it's not my place to say anything.

However, it comes down to this. I was walking along, minding my own business, and I saw that logo and that business name, and had nothing else to go on to interpret it. The same would be the case for anyone else - let's say, a woman of colour.

Quite apart from the stereotypical image that could come straight out of the 1950s, what's the message that the logo and business name sends?

I suppose in the USA, where the slave trade has a much stronger historical resonance, the impact would be much greater, but that slave trade also led to African men and women being brought to Britain to work for poverty wages (or payment in kind - i.e. bed and board) that is indistinguishable from slave labour in practical terms. In the 20th century, people came from the West Indies to fill the bottom-rung positions. These days, the classic stereotype is the Filipino maid: poverty wages for domestic service nowadays going to women of colour from the Far East. But the message is still the same, and the image and the business name still seem to be loaded heavily with the racism of those former times, and the latent racism that still hangs around in British culture today.

All that message about a woman's place, and a Black woman's place specifically, is carried in that logo and business name, and I would be willing to guess that many women of colour would understand the message (and many White men, on a subliminal level, would get it, too).

I am sure you could go around and pick up a nice collection of vox pops videos of Black folks telling you they don't feel offended by the stuff in this image. But to do that, you would ignore a lot of people who did find it offensive. You would also probably get a lot of people saying they're not angry about it just because they don't want to cause any trouble and, when people are put on the spot, they tend to water down their true reactions (I have seen it happen, and have done it myself).

Racism is most often not this blatant - it still exists, but is more subtle than that.

I think I am filing this under "I cannot believe they could still do that!"