Racist BEHR commercial.

Post Reply New Topic

Some say it is racist against Asians because it features a song called "Color is a Beautiful Thing."



I saw this commercial a couple of days ago and they still included the part that refers to Asian languages. Just now, AMC aired it during a John Wayne movie called The Cowboys and that part has been edited out.

No it is not racist. First off language isn't a race. Using a song that is part of a culture isn't racist. This is about the least offensive commercial I have ever seen. Someone is seriously out looking for racism where it isn't. I think it would be better to focus on real problems like police brutality rather than someone using a song in a commercial.

This is kind of like people getting upset at the word niggardly, people are just getting offended based it sounding like it's offensive. The song is clearly celebrating diversity, I Ching isn't jibberish either.

The freezeframe of the pink rowhouse reminds me of an incident long ago that somebody recounted on the San Francisco Chronicle comment boards. Some big company whose name I can't remember, I think it was Kodak (which shows you how long ago this happened) was trolling SF trying to get somebody to paint their rowhouse pink. They finally convinced this very elderly Japanese American lady to do it. Her house went from gray to bright pink, such a bright pink that it lit up the entire block pink-INSIDE the house rooms with windows facing the street, WITH the curtains closed! After the film crew left, the old lady went around and apologized to everybody, then called a painting company to paint over the pink. Whenever you see one of these stupid "be yourself" paint commercials with a pink house, think of this story.

All I see is a boring commercial with bad singing.

So maybe this commercial is, partly, inspired by that event?

That song is the catchiest I've ever heard.

Here's the song in three languages: English, French and German.




Check out a comment a Youtube viewer left:

SirLyonhart 1 month ago
I thought this song was racist, especially the country way it was sung in the commercial, until I looked up "ding dang" 定 当 in chinese. It means Certainly. You learn something new every day.

One of my advertising jobs involved me (and my three coworkers) designing about 150-200 proposed (or "spec") yellow-pages telephone-directory display ads daily for businesses which were considering their ad renewal/upgrade. To keep our attention (it can get really boring), and realizing that our spec-ads would be published in communities around the United States, I suggested that we include illustrations of individuals whose races matched national demographics. Well, that lasted less than a month. As soon as our spec-ads were circulated among business owners in Puyallup, Wash., near Portland, Ore., I was told that Puyallup had a disproportionate number of Christian business owners who didn't appreciate the racial balance of our illustrations. So, we turned the previously "black" and "Hispanic" illustrations to white simply by swapping the illustrations' colors. They also didn't like that a little more than half the illustrations included women. Oh, and they started requesting ichthys fishes be included.

I argued to our supervisor that we couldn't know the demographics of every directory's community, and hoped to represent all businesses, not just those in Puyallup. After all, the illustrations weren't 100-percent "black" and "Hispanic" any more than they were 100-percent white. My logic didn't go far.