Stride: the ridiculously racist gum company
by Carmen Van Kerckhove
Gee - Asian shopkeepers who speak with funny accents sure are hilarious! Our target demographic of racist males aged 13-29 will love these ads!
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i remember the first thing i thought when i saw this ads a few weeks ago was, “exactly how many stereotypical images of men of asian descent does it take to sell a product?”
we have these commercials, the apu controversy, those lipton (i think) bottled tea ads… i feel like there are more that i am leaving out, but you get the idea…
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Vitamin water did that Badminton one.
Then there was that hot pockets thing.
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I remember watching this ad a few weeks ago too. I was sipping on an iced drink and nearly choked. I wondered if maybe all the ad execs were sitting around and were like “Sure, we can talk about how great the flavor is, but that’s too cliche. Hey, I know how we can sell this! Let’s be racist!” Because creating a commercial that actually sells a product without offending anyone is just sooo hard, right?
And I thought we were moving forward.
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the racist hot pocket ad
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Yes, because selling a product in a racist commercial will make it so much better FOR product! Wow. I nearly fell of my chair seeing this one, yup–we definitely are moving backwards.
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i was just talking about this ad with my wife! This add and another one were so blatantly racist towards Asians. As a black man I understand who advertisers play up stereotypes, and I am not usually surprised. But this commerical and another one with an old Asian guy jumping around in silk pajamas were just over the top.
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the sad thing is that any voice of dissention to shit like this will always get the ‘oh lighten up!’ response.
i’ve discussed this with a filmmaker friend of mine who wanted to really play up stereotypes in ‘humorous’ ways, and ended up being called ‘too uptight’. it seems like the majority of the people behind these kinds of commercials really seem to think that this kind of racism is merely ‘healthy comic rivalry’ between cultures. that was a term coined by someone else i used to know and argued about this with.
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Good ol’ Asians had it coming to’em. /*sarcasm
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Hi, a long time blurker coming out of the woodwork, here. I just have to say that this blog and the Addicted to Race podcast mean so much to me, as I live in a pretty segregated suburb of Dayton, Ohio (only 10% of my high school consisted of students of color, less than 1% of them black), and really appreciate that the racial awareness I’ve gained already will serve me well in college and the real world. So thank you for keeping up such a wonderful blog and podcast, and, if you don’t mind, I’d like to start posting here a lot more (for the record, I am of Scottish, Irish and English descent, and I burn easily in the dang sun).
Thought that this was a good place to mention what I saw last week at a National Amusements Harry Potter showing. There was some ad for movie gift certificates that featured a series of people reacting to bad gifts. Everyone was giving fairly universal expressions of disgust, disappointment, etc. That is, except for the Asian man. Instead of a non-specific opened package, he was shown against a YELLOW background in a comically-overlarge sweater, looking sheepish and humiliated and tiny and impotent. He was the only gift-receiver to be intimidated by his gift, rather than intimidating the gift giver.
Absolutely no one in the theatre laughed during the commercial until the Asian Guy appeared. I heard some really inappropriate hearty chuckles coming from adult and child alike.
I seriously don’t know how this got through all the levels of production at National Amusements. Maybe it was meant to be totally innocuous, but there were so many racist stereotypes packed into that few seconds of screentime…did they just accept the gag as fair play, like the screaming shopkeeper/landlord, wise mountain-top guru, or uber-nerd stereotypes?
I brought this up with my family after the movie ended (along with the actress playing Cho’s wooden, submissive, exoticized, almost Geisha-like performance in the HP movie itself) and was told to Lighten Up and Don’t Start an Argument Why Are You Always So Negative Jeezus.
So, am I overreacting? Am I just a stupid white liberal girl who doesn’t know anything outside of her spoiled upbringing? Or am I starting to “get it”? -
Neil, you are sadly right. I wrote Stride about this over a month ago and the response I got may as well have been, “Well, our focus group liked it, so … whatever.” The standard “I’m sorry you’re offended by our totally not offensive ad” b.s. Which, to be fair, is better than the response I got from Hot Pockets, which was … nothing.
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Well I’m a black woman, but, I’m still offended. Why does white America need to “other”-ize non-whites and use their “idiosyncracies” (from their clouded perspective of course) for entertainment? Enough with sticking up for the Asians; in Asia they make the same offensive/racist ads, butwith black people!!! Maybe in Africa they make racist ads but make fun of white people. I grew up in Africa and personally never came across racist ads, but I’ll say it’s possible.
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Thank God I’m not the only one annoyed by the portrayal of Asians in those commercials.
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So you’re saying if I walk into an urban store that it’s rare for an elderly Asian who still retains their accent to be working there? Get the hell out of here. Stereotypes exist ONLY because they are how things USUALLY are.
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To Doug,
I bet white people would get pretty pissed if nearly all depictions of whites consisted of toothless rednecks and various other negative white stereotypes that have some truth to them.
Sorry, just because Asians who speak broken english exist doesn’t excuse the fact that Western media actively promotes them, demands Asian actors who speak fluent English to fake accents, and rarely shows a positive image that most Asian Americans can relate to.
Hope this clarifies the issue for you.
Cough*douche*cough
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To Doug,
It’s all about a balanced portrayal. For many White Americans there is the comfort of knowing that they are seen as individuals, knowing that for every Britney Spears, they is a Barbara Walters or a Hillary Clinton being depicted. For non-whites, there is a large proportion of stereotypes that don’t always reflect the reality of daily life. Non-whites don’t necessarily have the comfort of knowing they are seen as individuals. They instead have to work twice as hard to dispel any negative stereotypes in order to be seen as an individual. That’s why the ad is so disheartening.
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To Doug and other race-consciousness beginners who need to have this explained:
Saying that you believe racial stereotypes are usually true (on an anti-racist website no less) suggests that you’re either terribly inobservant or extremely inexperienced. Asians constitute some 60% of the world’s population, almost 4 billion people. When you’re talking about that many human beings, there’s simply no way that any stereotype will be “usually true”.
Here’s how racist stereotyping works: you absorb images like those in these ads (or blackface cartoons or anti-Latino propaganda or schoolyard snickers or whatever) before you’ve had a lot of life/learning exposure to a rich diversity of the people of color in question; which plants in your head a dehumanizing lens through which you view those Other people; after which you seek confirmation of that stereotype (in cultural media, in isolated anecdotes) and disregard data which debunks the stereotype; thus making it easier for you to hold racist views or make racist statements or commit racist acts or be party to racist hate crimes or simply turn a blind eye to societal racism. For centuries, dehumanizing stereotypes have been used to create mental space wherein white folks feel comfortable and justified in brutalizing, terrorizing, colonizing, kidnapping, enslaving, lynching, incarcerating, and otherwise oppressing people of color.
Class dismissed.
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not to mention a mental space wherein people of color also feel comfortable discriminating against other people of color…
a lot of these stereotypes of people of color that are perpetuated via popular forms of media help create a framework for thinking about race no matter what group to which you belong.
in the studies i have read on race-related hatred between different POC groups, the number one place where the stereotypes come from is TV… there’s no way you can say images don’t matter… (especially in cases where the racist has never come in contact with a person of whatever race/ethnicity is being portrayed)
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i’ve been seeing that ad all the time when I watch tv- every time, I’m shocked it hasn’t been pulled off the network. the first time my family saw it, we were truly appalled. i hadn’t thought that kind of thing was remotely acceptable anymore, especailly (or even) on network television. sad and pathetic.
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I was wondering how long this would take and I am suprised that the ads are still on the air. It’s like it the hip thing to do, all the racist sterotypes.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Another racist Stride gum commercial | Mediahacker on 15 Apr 2009 at 8:02 pm
[…] called out two JWT-produced Stride ads in 2007 for playing crudely on Asian stereotypes. Maybe in another two […]