Francis Berger
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From Toothpaste to Cough Drops; Racism Be Everywhere, Yo!

9/7/2022

12 Comments

 
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 . . .  
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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.
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 . . .  
12 Comments
dave sora
9/7/2022 22:25:37

Biden still uses the word today. Its only offensive if someone to the right of Joseph Stalin uses it.

Reply
Coronald McDonald
9/8/2022 00:04:49

Is it a coincidence that this motto "the throat's chimney sweep" in English is an anagram of

"These whet race-hypnotism."
"Racist when they stem hope."
"Whiteys' preachment ethos."
"Why paste ethnic theorems?"
"Oh my, that's ethnic weepers."



I think not!

It even anticipates the Taiwanese dentifrice
"Racist showmen hype teeth"

Naughty, naughty Magyars!

Reply
Francis Berger
9/8/2022 12:10:41

@ CM - Those anagrams are very good. You have a gift! Naughty Magyars indeed!

Reply
Dr. Mabuse
9/8/2022 04:01:10

The race grouches better stay away from Middle Eastern grocery stores; I once came home with a package of Negro brand steel wool scrubbing pads. The graphics are more unambiguous, though the smiling black muscleman on the package looks a bit like a genie to me: https://sbbelacan.wordpress.com/2019/01/09/12-logo-rasis-yang-digunakan-dalam-produk-terkenal/

Reply
Francis Berger
9/8/2022 12:15:17

@ Dr. Mabuse - That's a good link. It even features the toothpaste Wm wrote about in his post.

This stuff is all so silly. Always has been. I don't think any Norwegian person has ever found the Minnesota Vikings football logo offensive, yet somehow Uncle Ben or a cough drop named after a man named "Negro" is beyond the pale.

Reply
lea
9/8/2022 07:00:35

Gotta cleanse these nefarious expressions of interpretable odd translation.

Reply
Michelle
9/9/2022 04:09:46

WOW. You are in rare form today!!

Reply
Francis Berger
9/9/2022 19:31:27

@ Michelle - Even I have to indulge in a little nonsense now and then . . .

Reply
lea
9/9/2022 06:20:26

We used to have over 700 languages on our planet not too long ago, imagine all the opportunities for wokeys to get upset.
I do love me some fully 'negro chocolate'.

Reply
Francis Berger
9/9/2022 19:32:04

@ lea- Good point. I hadn't thought of that.

Reply
Anthony Probst
9/9/2022 07:42:28

Another version of the slogan, employed to discourage overeating:

A waist is a terrible thing to mind.

Reply
Francis Berger
9/9/2022 19:34:25

@ Anthony - A few years ago someone told me about a thing called "Fat Studies". I though the person was kidding. No such luck.

https://pcaaca.org/area/fat-studies

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