



A horrifyingly racist Chinese detergent commercial threatens to drive even deeper wedges between the black and Asian communities, further impeding their righteous mission of uniting as people of color toward their natural common enemy”namely, the white community.

In what is being billed as “The most racist Chinese laundry detergent commercial you’ll see all year,” a black man toting a paintbrush and paint bucket with his face and shirt smeared with fresh paint wanders into a room to discover a sultry Chinese woman motioning for him to come hither. As he leans in for a kiss, she jams a detergent packet in his mouth, shoves him into the washing machine, and sits atop it gleefully while he screams in pain. She then appears spellbound as a gleamingly light-skinned Asian male emerges from the washing machine, cleansed of all his blackness.

CNN called the commercial “staggeringly offensive.” You should watch it. It’s pretty cool.

It is also an obvious inverted parody of a notorious Italian detergent cuckmercial from about a decade ago in which a white woman shoves her scrawny, tighty-whitey-wearing would-be Italian suitor into a washing machine, which magically transforms him into a grinning black male who flexes his muscles alongside the tagline “Coloured is better.”

But since white people are by definition in a position of power, it is impossible for laundry detergent commercials to be racist against them. Instead we must focus on this Chinese commercial and its unfortunate, troubling, problematic, and unacceptable equation of blackness with dirt and filth and ca-ca and huge, obvious, unavoidable skid marks.

“Since white people are by definition in a position of power, it is impossible for laundry detergent commercials to be racist against them.”

The sad and sobering truth is that the Asian community and the black community have a long and nauseating history of being racist toward one another”which, as I’ve noted, impedes their ability to unite and be racist toward white people.

In the 1980s, the suicidally infertile island nation of Japan was rocked by a pair of scandals in which senior officials said hurtful things about American blacks that seemed designed to damage their self-esteem, cause them to score lower on IQ tests, and then get sucked up in the toxic undertow of the school-to-prison pipeline. In one case, a leader of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party said that American blacks intentionally go bankrupt in order to avoid paying their debts.

And Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone wound up apologizing profusely for the following comments he’d made in a televised speech:

The level of Japanese society far surpasses that of the United States. There are many blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in the United States whose average level is extremely low.

Due to difficulties in translating Nakasone’s comments directly into English, he could have either been saying that blacks and browns have “extremely low” intelligence levels or literacy levels, not that it matters too much. And even though blacks and browns do have lower average literacy rates and lower average scores on standardized intelligence tests than whites and yellows, Mr. Nakasone was right to apologize for his hurtful comments because, it cannot be stressed enough, it causes the sort of resentment between Asians and blacks that will eventually serve as an obstacle toward their greater mission of resenting whites together.

Last year, a member of the Pakistani parliament helped further damage Asian/black relations when he uttered the following unforgivable statements after visiting the Congo:

Our army has gone there (Africa) to civilize those black people. I am sure they will accomplish the task….People there are yet to become civilized. They take bath [sic] every 15 days. After applying soaps before bath, they do not even use water in a bid to retain the aroma.

As if that’s not sufficiently horrifying and terrifying, there’s “Darkie Toothpaste,” which dominated the Chinese dental-hygiene market for half a century. Originally packaged with a caricature of a bug-eyed Louis Armstrong-looking servile “coon” character wearing a top hat, Darkie was sold for decades until someone complained, whereupon the manufacturers changed the brand name to “Darlie” and replaced the coon logo with what appears to be a white vaudevillian in blackface, as if that’s supposed to be better. (In Japan, Darkie was briefly marketed as “Mouth Jazz.”) Because of its scope and duration, Darkie Toothpaste represents a historical anti-black macroaggression of the highest order”it would not be unfair to refer to it as the Holocaust of Dental Hygiene Marketing.