May 30, 2016

Racists hate chocolate, new study emerges

editor:	Gurmeet Singh

One of the insults I faced often when growing up was ‘coconut’: Translation – brown on the outside, white on the inside. There were interesting variations on this theme: Bounty (a coconut chocolate), Oreo (yet again a black/ white chocolate biscuit) – a fun little subgenre of prejudice cultivated by black and brown people who didn’t like the idea that another black or brown person might like to read, or listen to anything other than B21 or 50 Cent.

Ironic then that the German right-wing should hone in on the chocolate/ imagery sector of the ‘racist’ venn-diagram; Not to suggest that that the black guys weren’t black enough, but frankly, they weren’t white enough. Alexander Gauland, deputy leader and co-founder of the AfD in Germany followed up the right-wing outrage in the country over Kinder’s latest marketing plan (using childhood pictures of players from Germany’s national football team) – by tweeting that World Cup and Champions League winner, Jerome Boateng, is liked as a footballer, but most Germans wouldn’t want him as a neighbour. Boateng, of dual German and Ghanain heritage, grew up in Berlin, before eventually moving to South Germany to play for Bayern Munich. He is one of the most successful German footballers in history.

But his childhood image on a box of Kinder chocolate prompted angry social media responses from Pegida followers, who apparently were not aware the images were of the national team. They seem to have believed the black face (Boateng) and the brown face (Ilkay Gündogan) were part of an attempt from Italian chocolate manufacturer Ferrero, to push multiculturalism down their throats. “Where will it end?” bemoaned one patriotic European against the Islamisation of the West, apparently more concerned with how their chocolate was packaged than the finer points of the alleged Islam/ Europe conflict (pending, it seems). "Is this a warning for future terrorists?" asked another – a question I still haven’t quite worked out. A warning? For terrorists? Chocolate? Terrorists?

Joking aside, it’s hard to understand how simple messages of inclusiveness, whether part of large marketing campaigns, or minor political movements can provoke such astounding anger in such a large number of people. For these people, it doesn't matter how white someone is on the inside, because like a Kinder chocolate, have you noticed, you know, it's still very brown on the outside. Pegida and AfD members have a hair-trigger response to diversity-based imagery and messages: A brown/ black face, and that’s it, it’s over, the Western project, the Enlightenment, the house of Atreus has fallen and we’ve built a massive super Mosque in its place. Game over, man, game over.

Look at China. It took weeks to get an apology out of detergent firm Qiaobi: A woman literally pushes a black man into a washing machine to ‘clean’ him of his blackness. He emerges paler, happier, cooler. She is positively ecstatic. Such an offensive, astonishingly backward message belongs in a different age, but sadly, there is too long a historical precedent that black and brown skin is simply white skin gone ‘wrong’, white skin that’s dirty, black on the outside, white on the inside. Christ - there's a too-long history that black and brown skin is like chocolate - I mean, what even is that about?

These contrasting images illustrate that advertising messages function according to market demands, and not higher-principles of inclusivity. No one expects advertisers and marketers to respect human dignity: Indeed, a familiar argument about advertising is that it is fundamentally based on delivering images of human inadequacy and its solution through consumption. More importantly, it demonstrates just how the different groups function: Anti-racists have cried foul over the Chinese advert with justification – the ad is racist. Right wingers moan and groan over an apparent attempt to push multiculturalism – an image triggering a series of paranoid fantasies in their too-addled brains.

Ferrero are not standard bearers for a concerted dialogue to an increased multiculturalism, but they recognize that there is a positive cultural and economic shift towards diversity in Germany. However, it’s pretty unbelievable that AfD and Pegida followers don’t recognize that – apparently, there is a massive social cover-up going on, subtly changing the values and chocolate of yesteryear to make it more, well, brown. Gauland doesn’t want Boateng as a neighbour, nor would any German, he thinks – why even bother saying this? To justify the outrage over the Kinder marketing plan. Why not instead attack neoliberalism, its flexibility, its ability to twist and turn and cater to popular shifts in markets? Because Alexander Gauland wants his chocolate and he wants to eat it too – he wants free trade, cheap labour, cheap goods, but he does not want migration. He wants to be entertained by black footballers, but he doesn't want to live near them. He wants to take take take, and expect nothing to change around him. You probably can have globalised neoliberalism without racism. You cannot have globalised liberalism without migration. Pegida, AfD, all the rest, should stop behaving like Kinder and act like Erwachsene: Chocolate is not your enemy – black and brown people are not your enemy - Islam is not your enemy. You are your own enemy.

Image: Alexander Gauland from Wikipedia