CVK
I know that I shouldn’t expect too much from beer commercials but these Bud Light ads, featuring the uh, comic duo of Steve and Zagar, really sink to a new low. Watch them yourself here.

I can’t even count all the stereotypes these ads contain: cannibalism, eating domestic animals, spear-chucking, squatting, etc.

From DiversityInc:

The multimedia advertising spots for Bud Light are supposed to chronicle the misadventures of the “Odd Couple” pairing of Zagar, who closely resembles a Yanomamo tribesman, and Steve, a single, young white man. In the commercials, Zagar walks around half-naked, menacing strangers in restaurants, eating Steve’s pet canary, and shooting people with arrows during a basketball game. The point of the spots is that different as they are, their common ground is drinking Bud Light.

According to DiversityInc, several Native American organizations are calling for Anheuser Busch to pull the ad campaign, saying it’s a 2006 version of the “Steppin Fetchit” stereotype. And it’s not the first time Anheuser Busch has used offensive indigenous imagery:

In 1998, Native American organizations took issue with Anheuser-Busch using “Chief Wahoo” the Cleveland baseball team’s mascot to promote its products. The company then publicly announced the cessation of this practice.

What’s sad is that this isn’t an isolated incident. If anything, the whole Savage vs. Civilized dichotomy is one of the mainstream media’s favorite cliches. It pops up time after time after time.

For example, a recent Land Rover TV commercial juxtaposes a white man driving in an SUV in the snow with an Inuit man on a dogsled. Or the recent print ad from California’s Hopkins Real Estate Group, which juxtaposes a white guy in a suit with a crowd of Tibetan monks. Or the countless fashion editorials that juxtapose the lanky white model dressed in the finest couture with the dirt-smeared natives of whichever “exotic” country they visited for the shoot. Or that famous scene in Indiana Jones when the big brown guy shows off his elaborate sword skills, only to have Indy casually pull out a pistol and shoot him.

The underlying message in all of these representations is the smug celebration of the supposedly inherent superiority of whiteness and “Western” culture. It’s unbelievable to me that this still flies unchecked in 2006. I guess just because Zagar is light-brown and doesn’t have a bone through his nose, it didn’t racist enough to raise a red flag at theAnheuser Busch headquarters.