An Etsy commercial featured a black grandfather getting upset over a white Santa Claus in a shopping mall. The ad in question featured no dialog from the actors but the body language spoke a thousand words.
The commercial starts with a wide shot of the father, grandfather, and young son. Everyone appears to be in line at a shopping mall during Christmas. The camera cuts to a closeup of the grandfather’s face as he looks at several random items that all feature pictures of Santa Claus. The young son peeks at his grandfather then takes him by the arm to go take a picture with Santa. The camera zooms out and the grandfather doesn’t look very pleased. And that’s putting it lightly.
The next scene is of the same family exchanging presents on Christmas morning. The young boy presents the grandfather with a gift. The elderly man opens it and inside is a Christmas stocking featuring the face of a black Santa. Everyone smiles and the commercial ends with some dialog from a narrator: “give more than a gift.”
Although the actors did not speak in the commercial, the message is crystal clear. The grandfather did not like the images of Santa Claus that he saw on the random items in the mall. Nor did he like the Santa his grandson made him take a picture with. And the reason for that is that all of the images were white. He gained satisfaction once presented with an item that featured a black Santa.
Imagine if this commercial were the other way around. What if a white person in a majority-black mall with black Santas everywhere were to give off negative body language at the depictions of Santa. Then if he was gifted a “standard” white Santa Claus at home, he became happy. The entire world would have to stand up and take notice of the obvious racism from a major company like Etsy.
The reason why the “black Santa” commercial is ok is because of how the world views the black American population. Mainstream media and political types paint them as children that must be coddled as such. Adult men, even grandfathers such as the man depicted in the ad, must exist in a perpetual state of infancy. Typical things like personal accountability for one’s own actions cease to exist in that paradigm. Racism is seen as justified indignation due to past harms as if no other racial group has experienced the same. This “hall pass” to behave inappropriately is racism in itself.
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