Today at From the Narrow Desert, Wm Jas introduced us to the world's most racist toothpaste.
Ah, the joys of living in a foreign country!
William's post about Darlie toothpaste immediately made me think of one of Hungary's "most racist products" -- a line of cough drops called . . .
Ah, the joys of living in a foreign country!
William's post about Darlie toothpaste immediately made me think of one of Hungary's "most racist products" -- a line of cough drops called . . .
Some claim that Negro cough drops do not allude to people of African descent, but to the Latin word nigreos, which means "black".
This kind of makes sense because the original Negro cough drop is black. Hence, Negro is supposed to be a reference to a color, not a person. As in color-color, not skin color.
Actually, the Negro cough drop is named after its inventor, the Italian confectioner, Pietro Negro, who was not a negro, but an Italian -- you know, one of them olive-skinned motherXXXXXX's.
Of course, the word negro was still perfectly acceptable a few decades ago. For example, when I was kid, I remember seeing public service announcements on television for an organization that called itself The United Negro College Fund.
This kind of makes sense because the original Negro cough drop is black. Hence, Negro is supposed to be a reference to a color, not a person. As in color-color, not skin color.
Actually, the Negro cough drop is named after its inventor, the Italian confectioner, Pietro Negro, who was not a negro, but an Italian -- you know, one of them olive-skinned motherXXXXXX's.
Of course, the word negro was still perfectly acceptable a few decades ago. For example, when I was kid, I remember seeing public service announcements on television for an organization that called itself The United Negro College Fund.
The United Negro College Fund still exists, but the organization has pulled a Kentucky Fried Chicken kind of acronym-ization on its name and now refers to itself simply as the UNCF.
Yo! Did I just put KFC and the UNCF in the same sentence? I must have unconscious bias issues, for real. Better sign me up for some unconscious bias training.
Getting back to Negro cough drops, the product is marketed as "the throat's chimney sweep", which helps explain the image of the chimney sweep on the upper left of the package.
As everyone knows, chimney sweeps are also quite black -- not black as in black people, but black from soot, you know, from the dirty chimneys. The black on Hungarian chimney sweeps -- who are mostly white, except for the Roma ones, but we won't go there in this post -- is not intended to be offensive, it just sort of happens, you know, because of the job, which is definitely not racist.
Anyway, the innocent origin of the product's name is lost on most foreigners. Case in point, the American rapper Curtis James Jackson III -- more popularly known as 50 Cent -- who in 2012 found the cough drops offensive enough to photograph and post on some social media site or other.
Fiddy also mistook the chimney sweep on the package for a stylized image of a hanged black man.
Yikes.
So much for taking Fiddy to the candy shop . . .
Yo! Did I just put KFC and the UNCF in the same sentence? I must have unconscious bias issues, for real. Better sign me up for some unconscious bias training.
Getting back to Negro cough drops, the product is marketed as "the throat's chimney sweep", which helps explain the image of the chimney sweep on the upper left of the package.
As everyone knows, chimney sweeps are also quite black -- not black as in black people, but black from soot, you know, from the dirty chimneys. The black on Hungarian chimney sweeps -- who are mostly white, except for the Roma ones, but we won't go there in this post -- is not intended to be offensive, it just sort of happens, you know, because of the job, which is definitely not racist.
Anyway, the innocent origin of the product's name is lost on most foreigners. Case in point, the American rapper Curtis James Jackson III -- more popularly known as 50 Cent -- who in 2012 found the cough drops offensive enough to photograph and post on some social media site or other.
Fiddy also mistook the chimney sweep on the package for a stylized image of a hanged black man.
Yikes.
So much for taking Fiddy to the candy shop . . .
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