Africa Is a Country

White People Eat Fried Chicken

White People Eat Fried Chicken

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH_WxJVxHcw&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

Allison Swank
Just as Nelson Mandela went underground as the Black Pimpernel in 1961 to evade the white apartheid government, in this TV ad for  a popular South African fast food chain, this white Afrikaner family goes underground in 1994 to escape Mandela’s black government–what?

And white people eat fried chicken at a food joint whose slogan is “soul food”?

This intermingling of race roles is a clear attempt to normalize black stereotypes of soul and chicken in white culture–which is represented here as uptight and fearful. To sell chicken to white people, Chicken Licken tries to bridge the divide between what is stereotypically white and black, while managing to reinforce both clichés. Over it.

Further Reading

Goodbye, Piassa

The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.