This is PEAK white feminism!
This is panels on diversity and intersectional feminism with no women of color invited to speak pic.twitter.com/Kp8frL5IEy
— Tora Shae (@BlackMajiik) April 4, 2017
Pepsi will pay dearly in reparations.
Via WaPo:
There’s plenty to unpack in Pepsi’s carbonated hot mess of an ad that was released Tuesday, pulled Wednesday and probably will be hated and ridiculed for years to come. For those who have not seen it, it can be viewed here because the Internet never forgets a good marketing fail.
One could go for ages about the ad’s multiple failures: its attempt to literally commercialize struggle, pain and resistance; the idea that racial harmony can be pop-and-locked into existence; that police forces armed and ready to crack down on protests would like protesters more if they just gave the police soda — too bad Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t think of that! — and so on. But Pepsi’s commercial was much more than just a marketing fail. It represents a pervasive and persistent white liberal fantasy of U.S. protest politics that trivializes the long and oftentimes dangerous work of resistance and protest, and at the same time marginalizes people of color who often are the drivers of such protests, at great costs to their lives and livelihoods. What irks me, as a black woman, the most about Pepsi’s attempt to make Protest the New Black is that it completely excludes black women from any meaningful part of the protest action.
Black women were a core part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. It was black women who organized the original Million Woman March in Philadelphia in 1997. #BlackLivesMatter, which has changed U.S. discourse on race and policing, was started by three black women, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors. It was black women who started the #SayHerName campaign to highlight the plight of black women that have been killed and abused by law enforcement. Ninety-four percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton in no small part because we saw the civil rights disaster that would come with the Trump administration.
Yet Pepsi cast Kendall Jenner of Kardashian fame as the white center of the ad. (The Kardashians have a history of exploiting black culture and racial bias for profit.) People of color were relegated to side characters: The only black woman Pepsi saw fit to feature was the poor dark-skinned sister who was forced to hold Jenner’s blond wig as she sashayed out to join the protest.