Mandeep and Sharvarish Seem Like South Indian Versions of Stefan Fetchit
Maybe it's just me, but the more I watch a series of spots for SNY-TV, the more I wonder if I'm watching stereotypes gone amok.
They feature two South Asians named Mandeep and Sharvarish, presumably Indians, who own a New York sports memorabilia shop. Some of the ads are nominally funny. Others are merely bewildering.
But what's troubling are the centerpieces of the ads are little more than caricactures that fulfill the worst prejudices of anyone whose only contact with Indians is from the back of a cab or watching "Slumdog Millionaire on DVD.
Judge for yourself:
Of course, you could argue, maybe I should lighten up. But if SNY tried pulling off these ads with a couple of blacks who sounded like they just came off the plantation, or Hasidic Jews one step removed from the shtetl, you might feel differently. And so would SNY.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Are These SNY-TV Ads Racist?
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2 comments:
I just googled SNY ads to see if anyone else was talking about this. I'm puzzled and I agree with your assessment. There are still cultural groups in our society that are subject to open caricature and ridicule. Apparently Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sikhs are among them. As long as people are amused, right? Hrmph.
Not being South Asian, I'm not best qualified to answer. But being African-American and someone who's sensitive to ethnic stereotyping, I must say I love these ads for a few reasons.
1) If anything, the ads seem to ridicule the white and African-American customers for their fanatical love of New York teams and their boorish and destructive behavior in the store more than anything about the South Asian proprietors, who seem to fit a more positive image of immigrant business oweners -- entrepreneurial, hard-working and eager to satisfy customers' needs.
2) Servish and Manthib actually remind me of a couple of friendly South Asian newsstand owners in Washington Heights from whom I used to buy newspapers every morning on my commute and whom I became friendly with.
3) The musical accompaniment of the opening bars of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" on the sitar, in the ads, is clever.
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