Who’s more racist, feminists or China?

A Chinese detergent ad caused little to no reaction in China until it was leaked out to the West. The ad shows an african man dumped in to a washing machine by an Asian woman and transformed into a fair-skinned Asian man.

“We express regret that the ad should have caused a controversy,” a statement issued late Saturday read. “But we will not shun responsibility for controversial content. We express our apology for the harm caused to the African people because of the spread of the ad and the over-amplification by the media,” the company said. “We sincerely hope the public and the media will not over-read it.” More: http://www.dw.com/en/chinese-detergent-maker-sorry-over-controversy-blames-foreign-media/a-19291365

Fascinating, isn’t it? Who knew China was a bastion of racism and needed the West to clue them in? Don’t get me wrong, the ad is clearly racist and the somewhat-global-what’s-left-of-the-free-ish-market is putting that on full display.

But what’s fascinating about this ad is lost in our culture of knee-jerk reactions. Behavior studies tell us that only about 30% of the readers of this post will get this far down in the text. They’ll never know that the ad is a satirical remake of an equally racist Italian ad. That ad features just the opposite, a white man color treated to come out black.

I don’t know about you, but I know next to nothing about the subtleties of Chinese culture. Is the ad racist? That’s easy, “yes, it’s literally racist.” But the literal nature of the racism might be a clue to something else. Humor, satire…a good/bad joke.

A few things to note:

Isn’t it interesting that a quasi-socialist society created and had almost no internal reaction to the ad? Big government, in this case, made them clueless to larger market pressures.

Many Asian women are obsessed with fair skin (a generalization, but they are).

There’s a tricky line between crime and hate.

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