In a Facebook ad for Dove body wash, a black woman removes her brown shirt and — voilà! Underneath is a white woman in a light shirt.
The ad, a three-second GIF, featured three women, each removing her shirt to reveal the next.
But the transition from the black woman to the white women — compiled into a static collage by a social media user — evoked a long-running racist trope in soap advertising: a “dirty” black person cleansed into whiteness.
(Among other examples was an ad by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which was in business from 1875 to 1921, that featured a white child asking a black child, “Why doesn’t your mamma wash you with Fairy soap?”)The outcry to the Dove ad, which was posted last week, was swift, with many social media users wondering how it could have made it through multiple layers of review.
On Saturday, Dove — owned by Unilever — apologized, writing on Facebook: “Dove is committed to representing the beauty of diversity. In an image we posted this week, we missed the mark in thoughtfully representing women of color and we deeply regret the offense that it has caused.”
Marissa Solan, a spokeswoman for Dove, said on Sunday that the GIF “was intended to convey that Dove Body Wash is for every woman and be a celebration of diversity, but we got it wrong and, as a result, offended many people.”
She added that Dove had removed the post and was “re-evaluating our internal processes for creating and reviewing content.” She declined to say how many people reviewed the ad or whether any of them were African-American.
Critics were unimpressed by the company’s apology.
“What was the mark?” the Facebook user Ariel Macklin wrote in a comment that was liked more than 1,100 times.
“I mean anyone with eyes can see how offensive this is. Not one person on your staff objected to this? Wow. Will not be buying your products anymore.”Dove’s ad was…
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