Essay

Black and white

By Matt Wilce

Let me apologize from the start and say that this column might be a bit off color mostly because I was forced to use "racist toothpaste" this morning. It wasn't a shock to find that the regular toothpaste was all gone — used by my partner S-chan — but I wasn't prepared to find I'd be brushing my pearly whites with the contents of a tube featuring a smiling black gentleman in a top hat.

Darlie isn't widely available in Japan, as far as I know, so S-chan must have picked it up on a visit to Taipei. A popular brand in most of Asia, the Taiwanese toothpaste's name is written with the Chinese characters for "black person" and originally bore the racist name Darkie as its name. That was until Colgate-Palmolive bought the manufacturer in 1985. Now, the handsome, smiling gentleman on the packet looks slightly less "Negroid" than his predecessor.

The marketing department at Hawley and Hazel who first created the concept supposedly based the character on Al Jolson and the perception that those of African descent have especially white teeth.

Japan, too, had a long-running and popular ad series for Calpis featuring a similar hat-wearing black-faced character, although the drinks company voluntarily canned the campaign.

As I brushed away, I was reminded of Robertson's Golden Shred marmalade, a breakfast favorite in the U.K. As a child, I had collected the tokens from the backs of the jars and mailed them to the company to add to my collection of Golly badges, which were shaped like a black-faced woolly-headed character in a jacket and bowtie.

By the time I started collecting them, the name had been sanitized to Golly. When my parents were young, he was known as Golliwog. Created by children's author Florence Kate Upton in 1895, the Golliwog was hugely popular and millions of badges were sent out over a campaign that ran from 1910 until 2001. By that time, the last syllable "wog'' became a derogative term for people with dark skin, such as those of African, Indian and Pakistani descent.

I got thinking about other racial stereotypes that we see used in advertising every day, which don't stand out as readily — more gray than black or white. There are any number of ads in the United States that feature caricature portrayals of Asians, British TV ads routinely poke fun at their Continental neighbors, and Japanese commercials — when you can figure out what's going on — have no shame in parading global stereotypes.

Considering the casual racism in my home country and here in Japan, to complain about the Taiwanese toothpaste seems like the pot calling the kettle black. But perhaps we all should pay more attention to the images served up to make us spend.

Shukan ST: June 6, 2008

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