For the Indigenous, This New Coca Cola Ad Shows Mexico's White Savior Problem teleSUR English
go to original November 29, 2015

Coca Cola Navidad comunidad Mixe Totontepec 2015: Like most white savior plots, the ad is all about white people having a huge emotional experience that push them to go on Brown-rescue missions. (Coca Cola)

A new Coca-Cola ad released earlier this week aims to send an important message to its white and Mestizo consumers in Mexico this Christmas: break with your comfort zone and bring civilization to Indigenous people.

This, at least, is what their most recent advertisement seems to convey.

“81.6 percent of Mexican Indigenous have felt rejected for speaking another language,” the ad purports to inform while somber Indigenous faces fill the screen.

Fortunately for Mexico’s Indigenous, white Mexican hipsters are here to save them this Christmas with a “special message,” the ad tells us.

What follows next is a painful metaphor of ongoing colonialism in the country: white kids storm the Mixe Indigenous community, as if a crusade, distribute coke bottles and build a giant Coca-Cola Christmas tree for all to idolize.

Like most white savior plots, the ad is all about having a huge emotional experience about Brown victimhood that urges European descendants to take up the moral duty to save the oppressed from their oppression. It is founded on a white egocentric myth that there is something that Brown people must need that only White people can give them.

Read the rest at teleSUR English

Related: Groups Ask Mexico to Pull Coca-Cola Ad on Indigenous (Associated Press)

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