The racism in the Dunkin Donut Egypt ad is the rule, not the exception
Dunkin Donuts Egypt decided to post this racist ad on their Instagram account over the weekend before promptly deleting the image after realizing their racist humor wasn’t going over very well. The caption in the ad reads from right to left: “Dark: Half beauty,” above an image of a chocolate glazed doughnut (a play on an old Egyptian proverb) next to a sugar frosted doughnut whose caption reads: “White: The whole beauty.” The accompanying text posted with the image read: “Because we are against racism, we’ll eat both. Which of them will you choose?”
The third world isn’t a place; it’s a state of mind. This isn’t the first time that a Dunkin Donuts franchisee has caused problems for the company’s global brand by engaging in racist advertising; in 2013, Dunkin Donuts was forced to apologize for blackface used in a television advertising campaign by its Thai franchisee.
Are we being too preachy and unfair to whichever drone came up with this ad? Yes and no. Aside from their role as perpetual gaffe-machines, perhaps it is unfair to expect the majority of marketers to transcend the programming that was manually entered into their brains by their parents and society at large. Racist tropes and beliefs are mainstream in Egyptian society, to the point where speaking up against them would widely be perceived as laughable. And we’re not alone: The CEO of the Thai Dunkin Donuts franchise at the time never understood what was wrong with his advertisement: “I don’t get it. What’s the big fuss?”
Potential impact on Egyptian franchises: Following the Gold’s Gym debacle and now Dunkin Donuts “post-racist” racist advertisement, it should come as no surprise if global brands start tightening the leash on what their Egyptian agents and franchisees are allowed to create for their localized marketing, if they demonstrate time and again that they simply cannot be relied on to run their own ad campaigns. Dunkin Donuts Egypt is run by Saudi’s Alamar Foods Company, the master franchise operator for Domino’s in MENA and Pakistan. Private equity firm The Carlyle Group acquired a 42% stake in Alamar in 2011.
Egypt, we have issues: One only need to stroll through City Stars, Egypt’s largest mall, to see blackface iconography openly on display for sale, or drive through the streets of Maadi to see billboards display blond Caucasians in their advertisements, to understand that most Egyptians’ views on race and ideal beauty are clearly biased against dark skin. Egypt has a long history of blackface in the performing arts, most notably actor Ali al-Kassar, film star of the 1930s—1950s, whose bumbling Nubian blackface caricatures (Arabic, 4:09) were both upheld as a paragon of backwards folksy nationalism, while at the same time his characters’ nationalism was also questioned — aside from the constant jokes made at the expense of black skin color. Many would object to our characterization that the performance was malicious, but that is the nature of the insidiousness of racism — it has always and everywhere in the world been closely tied to humor and passed off as harmless. But for the butt of such jokes, its impact is anything but fleeting or benign.
The truth is we can only really start to move forward as a nation when the majority of the population realizes that Egyptians come in all shapes, sizes and colors, and that development is not limited to aspiring to a Dubai-esque skyline, but more importantly, to purge the poison in which our countrymen’s minds marinate.