Duncan Hines have done the unconscionable with their new “Amazing Grace” — ooops, I mean, “Amazing Glazes” — instant cupcake frosting advertising campaign. They have brought back the Blackface comedy routine for mainstream profit in the form of a dessert Minstrel show.
The terrible idea of the television commercial is that these white sponge cupcakes can’t “sing” until they’re covered in a Blackface glaze.
Once the glaze is applied, the cupcakes immediately have rhythm, funk, and a hippity-hoppity sense a a huck-and-shuck delight!
Beware, though, if you’re not covered with the Blackface glaze, you sing off key, and you have zero rhythm.
Hmm.
What to do?
Why, add more Blackface glaze, of course!
Once the ooey gooey Blackness covers your vanilla visage, the transformation from suburban kitchen spongecake to ghetto street corner shoeshiner is complete, and Doo-Wop springs from white eyes and pinkish mouths.
The first clue that the commercial is Racist in its core and innermost driving intention is found in the title of the product: “Amazing Glazes” — which is clearly a twist on “Amazing Grace,” the standard, Black, gospel dirge heard in Churches in the urban core every Sunday.
The rest of the Racist clues flow like a waterfall as each cupcake is covered in the metaphorical black-tar-as-chocolate Black experience in America and forced to perform before their ultimate demise in your White Supremacist mouth.
Here’s the official PR blurp explaining the madness:
Created by Josh Binder, a Chicago-based director, “Hip Hop Cupcakes” portrays how Amazing Glazes make any delicious dessert “sing.” Binder’s inspiration for the video was bringing to life the joy of baking. “I wanted to create an entertaining and engaging way to show bakers that this glaze makes everything you top taste better and more exciting.”
While I understand this horrible lack of taste from Duncan Hines isn’t quite as nefarious as Lynching Black Children, or even calling a woman a Black Bitch, it is still off-the-scale for creating incredulity that such a major food brand so could be so badly debrided by their own, purposeful, planned, paid-for, and executed, advertising scheme.
I wonder how Duncan Hines Amazing Glazes would taste on Obama Waffles?
What a weird commercial, David. I watched it with my mouth open I was so shocked to see it. Minstrel show is sure right. What were they thinking?
I think it must be a generational indifference to the delicacies of history, Anne. Young kids today have no real idea how people were treated and how much they suffered in real life in real time. It’s an insensitivity of time and place.
Sweet cupcakes, that is a crazy commercial.
It’s a shocking commercial. The big, overblown, animated lips. The white bug-eyes. It Racial stereotyping at its worst.
UPDATE:
Duncan Hines pulled the offensive Blackface Cupcakes advertising campaign:
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/12/11/Duncan-Hines-pulls-racist-cupcake-ad/UPI-51461292098883/