Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Posts Tagged ‘Chicken’

Just when you started to believe the excuses for the Australian KFC “crowd pleaser” commercial (e.g., that “not one person [polled] in Australia had any idea of the American stereotype of black people and chicken”), I uncovered another Australian gem–from back in the day (1992):

Now, admittedly, I’ve never eaten at Chicken Treat, but it’s probably a safe bet that, at $2.75, their “Chick’n Ham’n Cheese Burger” is no better than, say, Wendy’s Bacon Swiss Crispy. (Though Wendy’s wins on style points, for placing their adjective at the end.) In other words, Chicken Treat isn’t putting out an exceptionally delicious sandwich that’s universally known as the best. It’s just a regular-ass, fast-food, factory-farm chicken sandwich. So the fact that the black guy can’t contain himself around it—hungrily licking his chops while visually fixating on it at the beginning—says more about the guy than the sandwich.

Wendy's Bacon Swiss Crispy

Then there’s contrast between the two characters, which couldn’t be more stark. On the one hand is the cool, collected White guy with his deep voice (and exceptionally bushy, expressive eyebrows). He’s a wearing a conservative button-down shirt, buttoned to the very top, and a deliciously Fantastic Sams hairdo, circa 1988. On the other hand is the out-of-control, screaming black dude carrying on about the sandwich in his shrill voice. He’s got on the loudest—and frankly, nicest—floral shirt I’ve seen in years, as well as a flattened-bill baseball cap rested on the rear three-quarter on his head. I swear, the only thing missing is the original tags hanging off of his hat and a spinning basketball on his finger. Oh, wait, he’s probably busy licking those fingers.

So, Australians, I call bullshit.

There’s a fine line between using race semi-constructively to understand the world, and bona-fide racism. I know this because Ethnic Avenue dead-ends right before that line—Racist Parkway. On the other hand, the Australians seem to have no problem taking a bloomin’ kangaroo leap over that line, as evidenced by a recent KFC commercial creating quite a stir around the Internets.

I have to admit there’s something remotely amusing and, at first glance, harmless about pacifying a group of rowdy black people with an enormous bucket of chicken—the so-called “KFC crowd pleaser” (though we all know they wanted to call it the “black-people silencer”). But the more I watch the commercial, the more I realize the racism is in the details: the Aussie rubbing his face in exasperation; the black people (reportedly from the West Indies) dancing around happily and inconsiderately; the loaded “awkward situation” euphemism.

An interesting variation on this theme comes courtesy of our foot-shuffling, pen-flicking Korean friends.

We all know there are different types of racism. There’s rednecks-dragging-you-from-a-pick-up-truck racism. There’s abruptly-lock-your-automatic-car-doors racism. There’s your-membership-application-has-mysteriously-been-rejected racism. And there’s everything below that. So as these things go, resurrecting an old, tired stereotype is relatively low on the racist (and, frankly, originality) scale. After all, black people do seem to have a special relationship with chicken because, as Dave Chappelle famously put it, “it’s fuckin’ delicious.”

The temptation, of course, is to compare these commercials and declare one of them the more racist of the two. The Korean version certainly has some nice touches that favor it to win that contest: an attempted Korean barbecue abduction, cannibalistic savages hungrily devouring fried chicken, a theatrical protagonist performing Eastern magic. But the Australian one benefits from the automatically more condescending accent, and an overall douchier ass-wipe delivering the lines. So it’s definitely a toss-up.

What do you think?