Dove Goes Black Face
Dove in a effort to show diversity or something, released an ad showing a black woman that uses Dove removing her shirt and revealing a happy smiling white woman. Most people who saw it immediately were able to draw the correlation between Dove soap and a pretty racist statement.
Soap companies have a history of using racist imagery to sell products and while they used smiling women instead of bafoonish cartoons, the imagery struck a cord with people of color especially with the racially charged political atmosphere.
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The Dove brand sheepishly admitted Saturday that it had “missed the mark” with a not-so-vaguely racist advertisement that made it the latest target of consumer rage.
But angry and befuddled Dove lovers spent the weekend wondering what mark Dove was trying to hit in the first place.
The ire-inducing advertisement was released Saturday afternoon. The first frame shows a dark-skinned woman in what appears to be a bathroom, a bottle of Dove body wash in the lower right-hand corner of the frame.
In subsequent frames, the woman reaches down and lifts up her shirt (and apparently the rest of her skin/costume) to reveal a smiling white woman.
Offended social media users erupted, and the company quickly apologized. But Dove’s two-sentence Twitter note and a slightly longer message on Facebook left it unclear what exactly the ad was trying to convey.
An image we recently posted on Facebook missed the mark in representing women of color thoughtfully. We deeply regret the offense it caused.
— Dove (@Dove) October 7, 2017
The vacuum of information was filled on social media by people peppering the company with comments and rhetorical questions, none of them good.
Was Dove saying that inside every black woman is a smiling, redheaded white woman? Was Dove invoking the centuries-old stereotype that black is dirty and white is pure? Or that black skin can or should be cleansed away? And perhaps the biggest question of all: Did Dove really believe that the ad would make more people of color want to buy its products?
“What exactly were yall going for?” a self-described Dove consumer said on the company’s Facebook page. “What was the mark . . . I mean anyone with eyes can see how offensive this is. Not one person on your staff objected to this? Wow. Will not be buying your products anymore.”
By Monday morning, the hashtag #BoycottDove was spreading on Twitter.
“The short video was intended to convey that Dove body wash is for every woman and be a celebration of diversity, but we got it wrong,” the brand said Monday in a statement to Reuters.
Steve
Steve is an affordable multifamily housing professional that is also the co-founder of Whiskey Congress. Steve has written for national publications such as The National Marijuana News and other outlets as a guest blogger on topics covering sports, politics, and cannabis. Steve loves whiskey, cigars, and uses powerlifting as an outlet to deal with the fact that no one listens to his brilliant ideas.
