Madhur Singh, Time, June 21, 2010
{snip}
“Indian marketers have a field day in putting ‘blacks’ where they’ve always ‘belonged,’ at least in the average Indian mind-sets,” wrote S.K.Y. Banji, a Ugandan who has lived in India for more than four years and runs the Reign Times. {snip}
One of the commercials in question, for Coca-Cola’s Sprite—which a Coca-Cola spokesperson says was received “very positively” by a test audience in India—shows two young Indian men captured by savages in an African jungle. While one of them tries to win over the captors by doing a silly jig, the other simply offers them Sprite. “There is nothing offensive in this ad,” says Martha Wariithi, a Kenyan by birth who is the director of knowledge and insights for Coca-Cola’s India and South West Asia unit. {snip}
The Indian lemon drink LMN, produced by the Parle Agro corporation, has a blatantly racist subtext in its TV spot that shows two Africans digging in the sand for water. When they spot a tap nearby, they wrench it off and start using it as a shovel. {snip}
Another spot, for BP’s Castrol engine oil, shows two young Indian men being magically transported from place to place: a beach, a lion-infested jungle—and a cauldron being carried by smiling African cannibals. {snip}
{snip}
“It’s amazing how two global companies, in an age of YouTube and Twitter, can think they can get away with such blatantly racist advertising,” says Hari Krishnan, vice president at the Delhi office of ad agency JWT. {snip} Indeed, many Indians do not see the advertisements as racist or offensive. Despite their experience with prejudice abroad even today, most Indians seem prone to accept easy generalizations about other peoples and cultures.
“These ads could never be aired in the U.S.,” says Diepiriye Kuku, a Delhi-based Nigerian-American conflict-resolution consultant who blogs on his exposure to prejudice in India, a country he says is decades behind the U.S. in addressing racial issues.
Kuku wrote an article titled “India Is Racist and Happy About It” in a leading Indian newsmagazine last year. {snip} “But,” he points out, “Indians don’t only stereotype foreigners. They stereotype other Indians too.” Indeed, racism against northeastern Indians—whose features often have more in common with those of people in countries farther east and who are the subject of various myths about their sexuality—is widely documented. And the fact that skin-lightening creams are one of the fastest-growing product lines in India’s cosmetics sector reflects an obsession with fair skin.
{snip}
Original article
(Posted on June 25, 2010)
Comments
First off, some of the names of the people in this article really lend themselves to stereotyping.
Second, I think this article is written from the white liberal perspective of walking on racial eggshells as normal. Why can’t these same libs apply their own logic to India, and not be so bigoted about its own racial mores? IOW, maybe the perspective is wrong — We shouldn’t be asking why India doesn’t tow the PC line, India should be asking why we’re so uptight all the time about race.
Of course, that there is no such thing as a Pradesh Poverty Law Center is telling.
Here is the advert:
http://tinyurl.com/2wek2hl
Also here is an Indian advert where Pakistanis disparage the dark skinned Sri Lankan cricket team.
http://tinyurl.com/33jswk3
the song played “Hum kalay Hai” is an old Hindi song that disparaged South Indian Dravidians. The video is here:
http://tinyurl.com/3yto5om
The Dravid is seen pestering the North Indian woman and contains lots of stereotypes of South Indians mocking their dress and skin color.
Given India’s long-standing and rigid caste system, none of this should be surprising. To them, Africans are likely even lower than their own “untouchables.”
The funny thing is, India is a place of widespread miscegenation. Many Indians (even in the north) have Afro-Aboriginal blood in their veins.
#1 QD wrote:
We shouldn’t be asking why India doesn’t tow the PC line, India should be asking why we’re so uptight all the time about race.
Due to a half-century of PC indoctrination, we Western whites are not. We must either keep such thoughts to ourselves, or (outside of AmRen) express our concerns in the softest, vaguest, most innocuous terms possible.
Also, based on the (very funny) examples of “racist” TV commercials cited in the article, India’s advertising industry appears superior to ours too. The one about Africans using a faucet to dig for water is hilarious.
There’s something called just telling a joke. Commercials that are funny earn a kind of appreciation from the audience.
It’s interesting… the commercial that purports to show two Indians in a cauldron being carried by smiling African cannibals… if we didn’t live in bizarro-backward world… wouldn’t this be seen as insensitive to the Indians up for dinner. Weren’t Indians in Africa killed by cannibals? An occurrence that more or less still goes on today? Weren’t Indians kicked out of African countries? But I suppose I’m being bigoted and ‘insensitive’ again, towards Africans.
It seems the world still has a kind of caste-system. Quite different from the one that we must Learn about being evil.
Many Asians I know are so racist that it is unbelievable. They say things about blacks that would get any white person ARRESTED. But they can get away with it, and they know it.
I frequently hear latinos insulting blacks in my work place. I think the multi-cultural fantasy is ahem a bit broken.
This has made me remember an amusing ad for washing machines aired on Australian TV back in the 90s.
7 — Jay wrote at 5:54 PM on June 26:
“Many Asians I know are so racist that it is unbelievable. They say things about blacks that would get any white person ARRESTED.”
When my late father was being treated for cancer (his doctor was a young ABC (American-born Chinese)), on one occasion he was admitted to the hospital in severe pain. He was promptly put into a common room with four other patients (one of whom was black). When his doctor arrived and saw my father’s predicament, he was appalled that my father had not been put into at least a semi-private room. According to my father, this is EXACTLY what the doctor told him:
Doctor: (looking around room) “Oh no! I’m getting you out of here right now! Three other patients…(looking over at black patient, then leaning towards my father) AND THAT?!?”
My dad told me the severe pain he was in was the only reason he didn’t immediately bust out laughing.
“But they can get away with it, and they know it.”
Only to a degree, AND THEY KNOW IT. Did you know, for example, that many if not most times Southern and Northeast Asians are not included in affirmative action programs in school admissions and hiring? Why?
Because if they did include them, there’d be no room for the mass of low-IQ blacks out there.
The following article was written 15 years ago, but it could have easily been written yesterday. It’s long, so I’ll post the pertinent parts.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/5_2_a2.html
“One final problem that is leading would-be or actual immigrants to rethink the U.S. is racial tension. Koreans who do business in the inner city have been the target of racial extortion—thinly veiled threats to “give back to the community” or face boycotts and even violence. “Koreans are the most successful business group in the black community, which is why they target us, ” says Kee Young Lee, a vice president of the “Korean News.”
“But nothing has had as profound an impact on Koreans’ ideas about America as the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Six hundred Korean-American businesses in South Central Los Angeles and 200 in Koreatown were damaged or destroyed; Koreans sustained 45 percent of all riot damage. In New York an armed gang vandalized a Korean dry cleaner in the South Bronx in sympathy with the Los Angeles rioters, and vandals shattered the windows of a Korean grocer in Bedford-Stuyvesant as they taunted him with a racist rap song.”
“No other group of small-business owners is subject to such pressure to redistribute its resources, and no other has responded with such a variety of initiatives. Yet these efforts provide no more certain a guarantee against racial animosity than did similar efforts in Los Angeles before the riots.”
And then there’s the Mexican version of blacks in the comic character Memin Pinguin. If you haven’t seen it before, check it out by googling.
“They say things about blacks that would get any white person ARRESTED. But they can get away with it, and they know it.
I once had a Mexican friend (but a naturalized US citizen) who detested blacks and made absolutely no secret of it. He let them know in ways that no American white would dream of. (He told me he didn’t consider them human.) In public, it was sometimes embarassing! He would insult West Indians, telling them bluntly that they had no business being here.
He also became extremely annoyed at the increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants. He would give them glares on the street and shove them in elevators. Talk about prejudice! I found this odd, because he was also very sensitive about any anti-Mexican sentiments. But he didn’t see any discrepancy.
“Many Asians are so racist that it is unbelievable.”
My (Japanese) wife is so right-wing that she makes me look like a commie, and I was once completely banned from posting to AmRen. She barely tolerates Koreans and Chinese, but has ideas about Africans with which only Reinhard Heydrich would agree.
Atlanta newspaper descends to lowest form of worst bigotry, possibibly in appeal at earning more Indiand-Asian readership.
Failed to use the required “promising young and hopeful African American rapper” in news article about “aspiring rapper” gunned down.
No witnesses are willing to come forth, and no “renowned, esteemed, iconic” civil rights leaders willing to take a break from shaking down whitey to come to the community and demand the killers turn themselves in to the local authorities.
http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/aspiring-rapper-killed-at-558508.html
10 — browser wrote at 11:49 AM on June 27:
“He also became extremely annoyed at the increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants. He would give them glares on the street and shove them in elevators. Talk about prejudice! I found this odd, because he was also very sensitive about any anti-Mexican sentiments. But he didn’t see any discrepancy.”
Not odd at all, actually. It’s called “group competition”. It’s a hallmark of primate behavior. Only Whites are not allowed to engage in it.
http://tinyurl.com/27e9uwe
“In many primate species, encounters between neighboring social groups are frequently aggressive, but the functions of these interactions remain poorly understood…Identifying the functions of intergroup aggression will help to clarify the effects of between-group competition for the evolution of primate social behavior, including modern humans.”
He saw no ‘discrepancy’ because there was none.
If the shoe fits…!
Why do black stereotypes persist in India (and everywhere)?
Because as H L Mencken observed nearly a century ago, “All stereotypes are basically true.”
Black African racial stereotypes persist in India because black Africans behave and perform in ways that reinforce those stereotypes, and because India has not been infected with the censorship, hypocrisy, and lying in public of political correctness.
This is how everyone used to think until political correctness killed the ability to laugh at your neighbor and at yourself. This country has lost it’s ability to laugh at all. Emotionally the U.S. has become an unhealthy place to live. We may one day leave and that day is getting closer as life here becomes worse and worse.
When liberals write articles of this nature, (giving examples of hilarious commercials made in racist India), little do they know that they are providing hours of laughter for Bubba and Sue Ellen May in Red State America. If this article were never written, how many of us would have watched the videos a poster above provided? I am still laughing!
My wife and inlaws are east indian (they are very arian white) and what they think of blacks and latinos is scandalous. At least most of us whites, even conservative ones, are at least willing to give non-whites a place at the table, no matter how small, but many Asians I know - well, let’s just say it’s good that Asia is not next to the sahara.
This is one thing that all asians will agree on.There is an enclave of blacks on the east coast of India-from a portugeese slave ship -These people ars definitly on the lowest rung of the Indian cast system. East Timor are mixed malay/african,and they are not accepted by indonesians on an equal basis,but there are other reasons also -such as religion,and Colonial heritage..Japan will not even let decendants of their korean slaves equal rights -even today..
“But nothing has had as profound an impact on Koreans’ ideas about America as the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Six hundred Korean-American businesses in South Central Los Angeles and 200 in Koreatown were damaged or destroyed; Koreans sustained 45 percent of all riot damage.”
The 1992 Los Angeles riots degenerated into a pogrom against Korean business owners. Black criminal lawbreakers marched on mass to the sack of Korea town. Without police or National Guard protection, the Koreans defended themselves from the rooftops with personal firearms. The right to own firearms is the cornerstone of our Constitutional protections.
And the fact that skin-lightening creams are one of the fastest-growing product lines in India’s cosmetics sector reflects an obsession with fair skin.
Let’s be honest, despite false claims that only white Americans are racist, Indians are some of the most color conscious people on the planet. Light skin is given a premium and for an Indian to be called “black” is considered a very great insult. I’ve known some Indian families that were obsessed with their skin color and favored their lighter skinned grandchildren against all others—even though some darker ones were better educated.
