Keep it up and your eyes are going to get stuck like that…
To follow up on my post yesterday about “jingoism”, the Spanish basketball team is under fire here for an ad they did pre-Games in which they are making slit-eyed gestures. The advert for a courier company, which is an official sponsor of the Spanish Basketball Federation, occupied a full page in the sports daily Marca, the country’s best-selling newspaper.
The advert features two large photographs, one of the men’s basketball team, and one of the women’s team. Both squads pose in full Olympic kit on a basketball court decorated with a picture of a Chinese dragon. Every single player appears pulling back the skin on either side of their eyes. The advert carries the symbol of the sport’s governing body.No one involved in the advert appears to have considered it inappropriate nor contemplated the manner in which it could be interpreted in China and elsewhere.
A fairly heated debate over whether the ad is racist has been going on in various places online. I think the answer is fairly obvious…
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