Why Can't Advertisements Be Racially Sensitive?

On October 7th, Dove released a new video advertisement for their soap. In the ad a black woman removes her brown shirt and transforms into a white woman in a peach shirt, who then becomes a South Asian woman wearing tan. Shortly after it was released, critics accused the ad of treating dark skin as dirty and undesirable, an old cosmetics-advertising practice that is still used to sell skin-lightening products today. In response, Dove withdrew the clip one day later and apologized in a post on Facebook. The company said it "missed the mark"—the same phrase Pepsi used in April to respond to critics of a commercial in which the light-skinned model Kendall Jenner mends police-civilian tensions during a protest by handing a cop a soda.

As a black person, I was personally offended when the video of the Dove Ad popped up on my news feed on Facebook. It is absolutely incredulous to me that no one thought that this video could be considered racially insensitive before it was released. And to receive, in my opinion, a half-ass'ed apology saying that they "missed the mark" just adds salt to the wounds. I suppose it's hard for a non person of color to understand what kind of subliminal messages video advertisements like that can send to young black children across America. It's already bad enough that we're taught to associate black with everything that is menacing, evil and threatening, but to have this black woman use soap, so much to the point that she is now a "clean white woman" just hits the nail in the coffin. You're essentially telling young black kids that being black is dirty, which is one of the reasons why we have such a huge colorist problem in the black community now. I hope that in the future, after all the backlash that both Dove and Pepsi recently received after releasing their commercials that other companies take a hard look at what they're producing before they release it to the world.

#David