Without any dialogue, a nearly two-minute film shows what it is like for an African American male to experience racial bias throughout his day. Everyday moments, like eating at a diner or shopping at a store, become fraught with micro-aggression as white people he encounters give him various degrees of suspicious or hostile glances. The intimate and unnerving portrayal begins in the morning when he opens his eyes and follows him throughout his day. When his son greets a white classmate in the backseat of a car, her mother rolls up the window. At the pool with his son, other hesitant swimmers glare. At a high-end store, salesclerks and a security guard eye him as he makes his way through the store. At a diner, a white couple chooses a distant seat. The spot ends with the man entering a courtroom, as a judge.

Procter & Gamble had previously demonstrated its commitment to combatting racial bias with “The Talk,” an Emmy-award winning film that addressed the emotional moment when a Black mother has to warn her child about the dangers of racism. The ad, challenged for not including black men, led to the creation of “The Look.” “The Look” is about a common occurrence in the life of an American Black man, the suspicious looks one gets when going through everyday life. The film was made at a time when the nation was reeling from the shooting deaths of unarmed black men by police and a year before mass protests over the death of George Floyd. The film crystalized what an average day is like for a Black man in America today. First released online and later broadcast on TV, the film aired on Oprah Winfrey’s two-night town hall special addressing race in America.

It was important for the director to capture both sides of the uncomfortable experience. For that reason, we chose to hire a white director, who could bring his unique perspective to the storyline. We paired the director with a Black cinematographer to make sure both points of view were represented. It was critical for the director to capture the uneasiness that occurs both in the Black protagonist and the white people he encounters throughout this day. The challenge was conveying all the various degrees of emotions in all the characters in the spot without a single word of dialogue. Capturing the subtle nuances of emotion in the faces and body language of the actors was key to showing both the cause and the effect of the micro-aggressions.