ED WEST UNHERD PROFESSIONAL
This is the language of the professional class, the liberal elite-in short, a new dialect of power. The broader public may have been repulsed by the unfamiliar, academic language, but it was not directed at the public. Our 2021 incoming class is the third-largest in a decade.” 4 Apparently the rebrand was working for its target audience. As one Forbes headline put it, “The Internet Comes Together to Mock the CIA’s New ‘Woke’ Ad.” 3 The pushback was so intense that the CIA felt the need to respond, with a spokesman telling Fox News that “2020 was a standout recruitment year for the CIA despite the pandemic. The advertisement was almost universally panned. I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are. Because of them, I stand here today a proud first-generation Latina and officer at the CIA. My parents left everything they knew to expose me to opportunities they never had. I am tired of feeling like I am supposed to apologize for the space that I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my brilliance. I used to suffer from imposter syndrome, but at 36, I refuse to internalize misguided, patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be. My employment is not and was not a fluke or a slip through the cracks. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise. I am a woman of color, I am a mom, I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. The most notorious of these ads included a Latina woman who begins her monologue, “When I was seventeen, I quoted Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me.’” The video continues,
ED WEST UNHERD SERIES
It was not until May, however, when a series of recruitment ads titled “Humans of the CIA” appeared, that the political undertones of the CIA’s rebranding would be made explicit and all hell would break loose. The agency’s twin adoption of liberal talking points and Bay-Area-inspired professional-class aesthetics suggested that the two might be linked, and-as we shall see-they are.
The models used on its website were conventionally attractive and ethnically ambiguous twenty-somethings, the faces you might see on a college brochure. In January 2021, shortly after Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, the Central Intelligence Agency announced a “digital facelift.” The agency’s goal was to attract millennial and Gen Z applicants who might be skeptical of the organization’s mission and to “increase racial, cultural, disability, sexual orientation, and gender diversity so that its workforce is ‘reflective of America.’” 1 The rebrand involved a new minimalist logo, reminiscent of the type of design typically used to promote electronic music (as some online were quick to point out).
0 kommentar(er)
