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Super Bowl ad promotes Pepsi, promotes racist stereotypes

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Summary of story from The Grio, 7.2.11.

Super Bowl adverts seem to delight in courting controversy, and it is not unusual for the ad break to attract more analysis than the game.

The internet has already been buzzing with criticism of the discount website Groupon’s contribution, which makes a cheap joke out of Tibet’s troubled history (see Guardian).

The Grio highlights another advert that has received less attention which promotes not just Pepsi Max, but also a few rather nasty racist and sexist stereotypes.

The ad features a black woman who physically abuses her male partner for breaking his diet, in doing so demonising women as harpies and black women as particularly aggressive. The latter is the familiar old ‘angry black woman’ stereotype.

The advert ends with the couple taking a walk in a park, during which the man ogles a white woman dressed in running gear. The white woman’s cheerful and summery image is a stark contrast to the black woman, who is scowling in coat and trousers on a hot day.

Grio points out that this perpetuates yet more harmful myths: ‘the white woman is more delicate, i.e. more feminine, than the black woman’ and ‘all black men really want white women anyway’.

I would add that it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to say that this advert is racist all-round.

The black man is portrayed as a lascivious predator of innocent white women. Both black characters are painted as criminals in the advert’s conclusion, when they run away after the white woman appears to have been knocked out by a flying coke can.

As Grio notes, the negative portrayal of black women in this advert is particularly obnoxious considering their poor visibility in American football, where their sole representative is the sportcaster Pam Oliver.

  1. I’m sorry, but isn’t this just a summary of what EVERY black sitcom on TBS is about? I mean, c’mon. There’s observant and concerned, and then there’s having a stick up one’s ass about everything.

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