I'm sure that by now most of you have already seen the extremely racist ad where a Chinese woman is seeing flirting with a "dirty" black man, which she then dumps into a washing machine, and he comes out Chinese? Man, I guess this black man needed the job, but I wonder if he really thought this through before agreeing to take this role?
So yeah, that's the ad we will be discussing. So, how about that? Many people believe that racism is an American thing, but I assure you this is not the case. In fact, this ad simply highlights that the problem exists globally.
This is not the first time an Asian commercial was extremely offensive to our black brothers and sisters. Do you folks recall the ad for "Snow?" This was a Thai based ad which said, "You win by being white." They showed a Thai woman slowly becoming black, yeah; they painted her up in black face and all. After taking the snow pills, she became light skin again.
Please bear in mind, I'm not singling out asians. This is a global phenomena which I have witnessed first hand when traveling as close as the Caribbean Islands, and as far as Australia. That being said, you absolutely cannot deny the racist implications of the aforementioned videos, and I am certain that most of my Asian brothers and sisters will join me in condemning this company and their ill advised commercial.
I cannot understand how these advertising companies do things like this without realizing how offensive the commercial will be to black people the world over. Or is it that they just don't care about offending black people? Has anyone out there been able to get any comments from the laundry company?
We know that oppression occurs all over the world. As I have mentioned before, I have experienced the privilege of having fair skin while here at home, and abroad. I can recall this one time when an older woman approached me and said, "You are very handsome boy, very clean and nice skin color, so good for making the babies. You can maybe date with my daughter? I know you spanish like us, but you no black spanish. I no want black for my daughter. You want meet my baby? She very beautiful and light just like you." The broken English is because this was said to me by a Spanish woman who barely spoke English, in a Spanish country which is made up of predominantly dark-skin people. She also happened to be extremely brown herself, yet she had a problem with her daughter dating "darks." The self-hate was extremely heartbreaking. It reminds me of that one brown lady who said "I no black, I white" while filling out a doctor's form.
The good thing about all this is that today we have the Internet, and social media. This allows us to see and share commercials like those aforementioned disasters. In the past, we would have never even known about this. I believe that awareness is key to addressing these issues, and it is a good thing that we are all becoming more and more aware of what's really happening in this world. That's the only way that we can hopefully one day get rid of racism for good.