A Thai commercial portrays racial stereotyping while trying to advertise their black herbal toothpaste. The commercial begins with a young Asian girl standing outside looking up at the sky and crying. Then, a tall colored man walks up to her, looking down upon the little girl wondering why she is crying. You can see a huge height difference among the two. The little girl, still crying, points her index finger up to the sky where a yellow helium balloon is caught in a street lamp. The camera then follows the pole from the base all the way up to the top of the lamp, making it appear extremely tall and high up in the sky. The camera then focuses back onto the colored man as he looks down at the crying girl. The colored man is shown, climbing up the pole to retrieve the little girl’s balloon. He slides back down, takes a step forward and hands it to her, when all of a sudden; the little girl’s mother appears. Her mother sees the colored man as a threat and instantly grabs her daughter before she could take her yellow balloon back from him. The mother is shown yelling in Thai at the colored man and running away from him. Meanwhile he shown, still standing in the same position as when he was handing the little girl her balloon with a confused and somber look on his face. The now sad man walks back to his house with the balloon and adds it to a collection of colored helium balloons he already has compiled. He sits on his bed and looks up at the camera. As he looks into the camera, you can see the sadness through his eyes, you can see he is hurt and you feel sorry for this guy. He then lies down on his bed in fetal position and turns over. Then the colored man and his bed suddenly turn into black toothpaste on a toothbrush. There is no dialogue from the beginning of the commercial to the end, only soothing background music is played. At the end of this commercial, the narrator says “Appearance can be deceiving”. The intent of this racial stereotype was not meant to be offensive in anyway, rather they were trying to prove a point.
Michael Omi states in his article “In Living Color: Race and American Culture” that race itself is a slippery concept…In our society, one of the first things we notice about people when we encounter them is their race. We utilize race to provide clues about who a person is and how we should relate her/him…”. The mother in this commercial proves Omi’s statement true in this case. Once she saw her daughter near a big masculine black man, she assumed that he had bad intentions and was posed as a threat.
Aaron Devor defines masculinity in his article “Gender Role Behaviors and Attitudes” as, “Styles of dress which emphasize the size of the upper body musculature, allow freedom of movement and encourage an illusion of physical power and a look of easy physicality all suggest masculinity.” In this case, the colored man in this commercial was wearing a muscle shirt, showing off his bare muscular arms. This also added onto why the mother assumed he was going to harm her child.
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