White is the New...White?

In our class discussion of Anne McClintock’s “Soft Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising”, I was most intrigued by the fact that commercials for cleaning products almost always feature white people and white clothing. The YouTube clip below shows a Tide commercial from the 1950s. A mother and son are on the beach, and there just happens to be a sturdy clothesline, proudly displaying an array of clothes that are “clean and bright like the sun on the sand…the kind of clean that you like best next to those you love”. The mother in this commercial sports a perfectly pressed white dress, “her skin and clothes epitomizing the exhibition value of…domestic leisure” (McClintock 514), while the son is wearing white swim trunks and gets wrapped up in a big white fluffy towel by his mother. These are what McClintock refers to as “the white raiments of imperial godliness” (517). There are no traces of anything dark in this commercial, not people, not clothes, not the environment. Everything is bright and sunny and wonderful, and most obviously, white. This is certainly not unusual for the time period, as the ‘50s were a time when blacks and whites were still segregated, but the bombardment of white in this commercial reflects a world without color, which is certainly not reality.

In an ad from the past few years, not much has changed. Of the several hands that are featured turning the washing machine dial, only one appears to be the hand of a black person, and when an actual person is shown, it is again, a white woman. Also, the shirts that are shown being cleaned are, of course, white. It is also interesting to point out that the background music used in this commercial is hip-hop and is likely performed by a black artist, yet the voiceover is the voice of a white woman. Could it be that advertisers were trying to, in a sense, cancel out the fact that the woman in the ad is white by adding what they believe to be music that is representative of African American culture, in a sense trying to be more evenhanded?

Also, both ads feature woman doing the laundry with not a man in sight. The women in both commercials look like they are never so happy as when they are doing laundry. They appear to be positively thrilled. The present-day commercial possibly features some men’s hands, just like it features one black hand turning the dial, at the beginning of the commercial, but the person actually doing the laundry is a woman in both instances. Even though this second ad was made approximately 60 years after the first ad, and we would like to see ourselves as a progressive society, white is still the equivalent of clean and cleaning is the job of the woman. Personally, I cannot wait until they stop trying to make my whites whiter, and figure out how to keep my blacks from fading.