Chinese laundry detergent commercial is flagrantly racist

Luther Vandross was outed as gay after his death.

An ad for a Chinese product called Qiaobi laundry detergent is jaw-droppingly racist.

The ad shows a young woman doing laundry when a black man in paint-splattered clothing arrives. The woman waves him over and then puts the detergent in his mouth before shoving him into the washing machine. When the machine is finished, a young Chinese man comes out of the washer wearing clean clothes.

The blog Shanghaiist reports, “Thanks to traditional beauty standards valuing white skin, many Chinese people have a well-established phobia of dark skin which unfortunately also breeds racist attitudes towards people of African descent, who are viewed by some as “dirty” simply because of their skin tone.”

What only a few folks online have mentioned, is that the Chinese ad is a rip-off of an old Italian commercial that has a white man turning into a muscled black man. The tagline for the ad? “Coloured is better.”

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