I thought you were possibly exaggerating. There really is such an ad. Pretty horrible. I never heard of this news almost 3 years after the fact.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/28/china-racist-d...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/28/china-racist-d...
The skin pigment 'melanin' is what causes a black person's skin to be black, and is also the same as in a non-black person's tanned skin. It's a added pigment that the absence of causes light skin. Removal of melanin can happen (through non-laundry!) causes such as developing vitiligo, or being born with albinism (a genetic condition which exists in all ethnicities not just black people). Removal of melanin literally turns a darker skinned/haired person white (but obviously not changing other features).
The American TV show Everybody Hates Chris, based on comedian Chris Rock's childhood experiences made almost THE EXACT SAME JOKE more than once [1] [2], making fun of the very strict African-American mother trope of threatening a misbehaving child with 'slapping the black out of you'.
The laundry commercial may have some problematic connections with the ideas of 'clean' and 'attractive'.
America has a long history of minority TV shows aimed at mass audiences tackling stereotypes, Everybody Loves Raymond for Italian-Americans, Fresh Off the Boat for Asian-Americans, and a huge number of African-American cast shows including The Jeffersons, The Cosby Show, Fresh Prince of Belair etc. Comedy shows with characters with minority experiences are a good way to improve understanding. It will be unfortunate if lighthearted comedy dies because excessive political correctness.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44mTfEcP76o [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPmqVW_qLmk
Seeing is believing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darlie
My pet theory is that this is because Americans are one of the few groups of people who are willing to accept the fact that they have problems with racism. Every other country mostly just denies the existence of any racism that crops up (or overreacts in the opposite direction) and is therefore not so easy a target.
Africa and India are more diverse than US
1 Guinea 2 Tanzania 3 Democratic Republic of Congo 4 Uganda 5 Liberia 6 Cameroon 7 Togo 8 South Africa 9 Congo 10 Madagascar 11 Gabon 12 Kenya 13 Ghana 14 Malawi 15 Guinea-Bissau 16 Somalia
But that aside, GP has a point that contemporary American culture spends a lot of energy worrying about this. The energy expended is a poor measure of the size of the problem.
But the claim was about "ethnicities", not races. People frequently refer to their ethnicity as Irish, Sicilian, Catalan, etc. Rarely have I heard someone say their ethnicity is white.
==The energy expended is a poor measure of the size of the problem.==
Who gets to be the judge of the size of the problem? If a certain race or ethnicity is spending a lot of energy on this, maybe it is incumbent on everyone else to re-assess the true size of the problem.
Judging the extent of racial prejudice is also hard. But only crazy people think the US is more racist now than 100 years ago. 100 years ago the NYT did not devote many pages to white self-flagellation. Nor does China today. Nor does Liberia, for that matter.
Categorizing it like this could be viewed minimizing today’s prejudice by comparing to prejudice of 100 years ago. I think the goal is to get to zero prejudice, so let’s compare against that.
“Women don’t have it so bad today, 100 years ago they couldn’t even vote.”
My reason for comparing real things, not utopias, is that we can learn things from them. Because they exist, or existed. And what you learn here is that the volume of argument about a bad thing is a poor indication of the prevalence of this bad thing. Quite possibly anti-correlated.
Here's an easier example for you. The Guardian is full of articles of a feminist bent, decrying the wage gap, etc. Literally every day there are half a dozen. The Saudi newspapers are not like this. There are no snarky comments about the princes all being men of the same racial group. This difference in the volume of discourse does not indicate that women have it worse in London than in Riyadh. And observing this simple fact does not indicate approval of the situation in either country.
==This difference in the volume of discourse does not indicate that women have it worse in London than in Riyadh.==
This is a strawman, as nobody has ever claimed they have it worse. However, the wage gap in England effects women in London directly and they have the ability to change it through voting. Do you see how that is different from state-sponsored/controlled media in a country that makes no attempt at equality?
==And observing this simple fact does not indicate approval of the situation in either country.==
But using one country's scenario in an attempt to diminish the plight of people in another is implying that we have to choose one. It's a false choice because we can work on improving Saudi Arabia from the outside while actively voting for improvement in England from within. To clarify, I don't live in England, but this applies to any comparison of what another country is doing (specifically, a non-democratic country).
*almost* every
He said "almost every subsaharan country is 100% black".
Measuring purely the number of technically different ethnicities is a silly way of calculating diversity. You need to look at the delta between the ethnicities if you want to talk about diversity that isn't purely on paper.
I probably should've just said "racially", but oh well.
Here is the _exact_ same ad in Italy, but reversed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dntfod-Cbo
No one bats an eye.
The is a big problem in China regarding racism, mostly because of the simple fact they aren't multicultaral like the West; it's just iganorance really.
> “If we just show laundry like all the other advertisements, ours will not stand out.”
He's right. I haven't paid as much attention to a detergent ad since Tide's Superbowl ad.
Very similar to the Gillette thing, in a way. Makes sense when you think about it.