Originally a comment by Holms on “White Feminism”

I’m noticing a trend here. Apparently, it’s bad when activists campaigning against [X] social ill to fail to consider the intersection of [X] with [being black in America], i.e. it’s bad for a [feminist] to fail to consider [black feminism in America]. The fact that [X] is being fought in another nation doesn’t seem to change this; it all needs to consider the social climate in America.

I first noticed this years ago when an Australian KFC ad was running. As you may or may not know, Australia is a major cricketing nation, and as Americans probably don’t know, cricket is very international. The teams that have what is called ‘test status’ (basically meaning the best of the national teams) are:

Australia

England

New Zealand

Pakistan

India

Bangladesh

Sri Lanka

West Indies (a bunch of Caribbean nations grouped together to field a single combined team)

South Africa

Zimbabwe

Notice that most of the teams come from nations that are not white? In fact the predominantly white teams are outnumbered by African / south asian. This means more often than not, an international cricket match will have at least one non-white team participating.

So, on to the ad I mentioned:

This ad is entirely reasonable. One of the teams involved is Australia of course, because it ran in Australia; the other team is the West Indies because there was an Australia / West Indies match coming soon; and as mentioned, most matches will involve at least one non-white team anyway. A lone Australian fan is surrounded by Windies fans, that’s a bit awkward, let’s fix that awkwardness by sharing food. The Australian fan is white because Australia is predominantly white, the Windies fans are black equivalently, and the food being shared is fried chicken because the company that made the ad is KFC.

Nothing out of the ordinary there aside from contrived acting, but apparently ads running anywhere in the world need to have American social issues in mind at all times (including racist stereotypes that don’t exist outside of America).

American activists, you may be doing good work on American issues, but please pull your fucking head out of your arse, the world is broader than just your nation.