If a TV advert were to show a person of European descent eating with a knife and fork, would you consider it racist?
No?
Well, obviously, you are wrong. Because that is exactly what has happened to Burger King, who have been forced to withdraw their adverts for their Vietnamese style burgers, because… wait for it… they showed people trying to eat them with chopsticks.
And before you ask, no, they were not Asians. The people in the adverts were mostly Europeans, which would explain why they looked so hamfisted using chopsticks. No self respecting Asian would have any trouble eating ANYTHING with chopsticks.
The trouble is that these days, once the ‘R’ word is used, it is best to withdraw and apologise, even if you have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an advertising campaign that now sits at the bottom of a waste paper basket. Arguing the point is futile. You have lost.
And that is precisely what Burger King has done. quote.
Burger King in New Zealand has removed an advertisement that showed people eating a Vietnamese-themed burger with oversized chopsticks after it was branded racist and offensive.
The ad in question featured people trying to eat the Vietnamese Sweet Chilli burger with a pair of giant chopsticks.
Maria Mo, a Korean New Zealander and student at the University of Waikato, tweeted her shock after viewing the advertisement.
“I couldn’t believe such blatantly ignorant ads are still happening in 2019, it honestly took me a second to work out what the heck I was looking at,” Maria Mo told HuffPost in a message. end quote.
Ah, Huffpost. Everyone’s favourite snowflake rag, where you can be as offended as you want by absolutely nothing at all and they will provide safe spaces crayons and kittens.
Ah, sorry, that might be an Asian man in the picture above. Obviously, he is not offended. The adverts were meant to be a light-hearted way of advertising a new line of burgers. It really is all a storm in a rice bowl.
Oops. Sorry @mariahmo.
The complainant is Korean. Koreans use chopsticks all the time. Yes, they do, and so what? In my two years of living in Asia (Hong Kong), I marvelled at how the locals could eat absolutely anything with chopsticks. How they could get through a bowl of rice with chopsticks was something I never mastered, but they did it, over and over. My admiration was genuine, not sarcastic and definitely not racist. I often wished I had the skill.
Let’s just come out and say it.
There was nothing racist about this ad.
Asians use chopsticks.
Burger King was advertising a new product line with an Asian theme.
That is it. No offence intended. No racism. No nothing… just an advert for burgers with a Vietnamese sauce.
She wasn’t finished though. quote.
However, Mo told Stuff she was concerned the removal of the ad is “just a measure to cover their tracks”.
“Unless there is an official announcement from BK to acknowledge their racism and apologise for the offence it caused, as well as promise to undergo more rigorous diversity training to make sure nothing like this happens again, their pulling the ad is just a measure to cover their tracks and absolutely nothing has changed.”
Stuff. end quote.
The world really has gone mad. Burger King needs to do ‘diversity training’ to ensure that everyone knows that Asians don’t use chopsticks? Oh, wait…
The article describes Maria Mo as a ‘Korean New Zealander’. If she is a New Zealander, she needs to understand that sometimes things are said and done in fun, with no intention to offend or upset anyone. That is just the way we are.
Many Burger King employees are of Asian descent. I wonder what they think of these ads? Actually, no, I don’t. I’m sure that most of them have much more important things to think about, and frankly, so do I.
Is this all we have to worry about nowadays? Really?
Stop the world because I really do want to get off.