On Sunday morning I started seeing screenshots from a Dove ad in which a Black woman changed into a white woman. There is a bottle of body wash in the corner so the assumption is that if you use their body wash, you’ll wash the black away. I rolled my eyes and was irritated but this isn’t my first rodeo with racism in marketing so I moved on. I then came upon the apology from the company, “An image we recently posted on Facebook missed the mark in representing women of color thoughtfully. We deeply regret the offense it caused.” This is a pretty typical formula: offend, backlash, apologize, business as usual.
There’s never a shortage of people who “just aren’t that offended” and who “just don’t see the big deal”. I began to receive direct messages and comments from people on social media asking if I had seen the actual video of the ad, suggesting that I wouldn’t be offended if I had seen the whole ad. I learned long ago to do my research before saying anything, especially when it comes to matters of race. The foundation of my stance must be firm because there will always be someone trying to crack it. The video started with a Black woman taking off her shirt and miraculously turning into a white woman who then turns into a Middle Eastern woman. I was even more upset when I saw the whole ad. Now, I was willing to just let it roll off my shoulders until I saw the Middle Eastern woman. To me, her placement was just as deliberate as the placement of the Black woman. This is gas lighting at its finest.
Gaslight (verb): manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.
This happens so often when it comes to racism. I was upset when I saw the video because the placement of the Middle Eastern woman was so clearly deliberate. I don’t care if she might be a tiny bit darker than the white woman (literally centering whiteness), she still benefits from white privilege and is still lighter than the Black woman. You think I’m being too sensitive? What about the self-tanning lotion with the label that reads, “Normal to Dark Skin”? “Normal” isn’t on the scale when it comes to skin color. They could have said, “Light to Dark Skin” but they didn’t. They chose to actually PRINT “normal” on their bottles. Ok, fine. I’m reaching, right? What about the ad in which they placed three women in front of a wall with two pictures; one of the pictures was seemingly cracked skin and the other was smooth skin. The Black woman is in front of the wall with the cracked skin with “before” written above her while there is a racially ambiguous woman in the middle and a white woman in front of the smoothed out skin with “after” above. I agree that it’s subtle but I always tell people that you don’t have to be burning crosses on people’s lawns in order to be racist.
Anyone wanna talk about when LaBron James was posed on the cover of Vogue Magazine with Giselle Bundchen resembling King Kong with his Jane? The First World War army recruitment poster, which calls for Americans to destroy this “mad brute”, features a King Kong-esque gorilla. Giselle is in the same arm as the woman in the gorilla’s arms. Their gowns are practically the same color and I would guess that they’re a similar material as well. LeBron is dribbling the ball with the same hand that the gorilla is holding his weapon, a club or bat. LeBron’s mouth is open the way that the gorilla’s is and the worst part, to me, they got it down all the way to LeBron’s shoes resembling the gorilla’s feet. All the way down to his feet. The first Black man to be on the cover of Vogue Magazine was essentially portrayed as a gorilla. Let that sink in.
Let’s just take this one step further and touch upon the importance of how Black people are portrayed in the media. Do little Black girls see this Dove commercial and start to believe that their blackness isn’t desirable? That their blackness is dirty and something that should or CAN be washed away? That they are the unwanted “before”? One step further: if we portray Black men as savage beasts who are attacking white women, how does that portrayal influence the killing of innocent Black people at the hands of paid public servants? It’s all connected. It doesn’t begin and end with soap and fashion magazines.
How long are we going to allow these subtleties to continue before we say, “something isn’t right here”? It’s not your imagination. Boycott or don’t. I don’t really care. It’s all connected. Stand for something or fall for anything and after today’s discussions, it looks like a lot of you need a safety net.