How did this even happen?
A new ad from Chinese detergent brand Qiaobi has to be the most racist ads of 2016. In the video above, a young woman is seen seducing a black man, who's painting in her home, only to trap him in a washing machine with Qiaobi's detergent pods.
But what happens next is even worse. The black man comes out of the laundry machine as a fair-skinned Asian man wearing a clean white T-shirt.
The ad, which is now being shared on social media sites, has been labelled everything from "raw racism," to "scary as f**k" to the "most racist commercial to ever air on TV."
The slogan at the end of the commercial, What’s on Weibo notes, says, "Change begins with Qiaobi."
But Asia's obsession with fair and white skin — and this obsession is spread over many countries — is nothing new. As Global Post points out, skin whitening, skin whitening products and skin lightening treatments are all part of a larger profit-making industry. And it's not just Asia — people in North America are just as concerned about having darker pigmented skin.
And as CNN points out, this Asian ad was inspired by an older Italian ad with the same concept — it even has the same music. In this ad, a skinny, hairy white man is put into a laundry machine only to come out as a buff hairless black man. The slogan for this commercial ends with, "colour is better."
Qiaobi has not made a public statement on their advert.
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