Social Media Response to Sainsbury’s Christmas Ad Proves UK is as Racist as the US
By: Chelsey Flood
Tags: Race, Equality, Social Media, Marketing, Politics

Sainsbury's is trending on Twitter. This is unusual enough for me to investigate, and so I watch a heartwarming Christmas ad that makes me miss my family, want to eat a roast dinner, and imagine my boyfriend doing an embarrassing song and dance about his cooking skills for our future children.

Aw, Twitter is just excited for Christmas, I think naively, before the words racist comments catch my eye.

The family giving me warm Christmassy feelings in Sainsbury’s new ad, titled Gravy Song, is black. There’s a phone call between a dad and his daughter. She’s dreaming of her mum’s roasties and wondering whether she’ll be home in time to eat them. Her dad reminds her that he is something of a wizard at making gravy, so much so that he’s improvised a song to celebrate his skillset. It’s a sweet and loving advert that made me nostalgic for a time I actually find quite stressful irl. Well played Sainsbury’s advertising team.

Gravy Dance has over a million views on YouTube, and the comments are turned off. Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s second Christmas advert, Perfect Portions, featuring a white family has less than 20,000 views on YouTube, and comments are still allowed.

As is often the case with our culture, the scale of our racism problem reveals itself via the Internet. The comments feature is disabled on one ad but not the other. At the time of publishing this article, almost as many people have selected the dislike button as the like button on the black family advert on YouTube, compared to 23 people using the dislike feature on the white family ad. Who are the people taking the time to use these functions to display their hate?

This is how institutionalized racism is allowed to manifest. Covert acts of hate that could easily be denied as racial, and that cut like tiny knives.

And what is it that people object to? Racists on Twitter are upset because the UK is an 80% white country, and this one advert has no white people in it.

These customers are boycotting Sainsbury’s. “Go woke, go broke!” they exclaim. As if to be woke aka enlightened, is a bad thing.

“Advertiser’s should stick to the Heart warming animal ads, or Santas etc. Remember the Penguine ad! Stick with light hearted ads! ALDI did well just by a Carrot & a Parsnip!!” another Twitter-user writes.

For some reason, this person believes that representing a black family having fun is political and incendiary, rather than lighthearted. As though they live in a dystopian world in which celebrating diversity is evil because the government swears racism doesn’t exist.

What does it mean if a person relates more to vegetables than other human families? Is this a sign of some more serious pathology?

These tweets make me angry, and they make me sad. How can a far-too-late attempt by a large organisation to correct decades of a lack of diverse representation be read as its opposite? And why are these people so confident in airing their ignorant, bigoted opinions? Do they not know that they are outing themselves as racist? Or do they not care? And if they don’t care, is this a failing of morality or education?

Because I have heard this kind of overtly ignorant racism from people I am related to, and I know that there it is a matter of education. Occasionally, I see it in students that I teach. Then I’m less sure.

Always, it’s introduced or concluded with, “You know I’m not racist.” Or: “I don’t care about race.”

Another astonishing piece of double speak.

No matter how much I explain why diverse representation matters, I still have to listen to blithely confident people talking about companies ‘getting on the diversity bandwagon’ and ‘virtue signalling’.

“Well done Sainsburys and BLM for creating more division in the country,” another Twitter-user writes. And I hear echoes of something my dad said when I last argued with him about race. That toppling slave trader statues only creates more of a divide. As if the statue isn’t toppled because of the divide.

Sainsbury’s has attempted to pick a side in a bid to show that racism will not be tolerated. But social media refuses to acknowledge history or reality. It is unable to admit that this is a fight that started hundreds of years ago.

Instead, racists blame black activists for creating the division they are fighting against. It is mindbending. And it makes me very tired. Because how do you battle an opponent averse to reason? The mental gymnastics required to keep communications decent can wear a woman out. Even an increasingly privileged white woman.

We have reached a point of denial-induced doublespeak where the words ‘I’m not racist’ actually mean the opposite. I tell people I am racist, to try and differentiate myself from the huge section of white people who refuse to accept any responsibility for the shit show we are experiencing. And how could I not be? I was brought up in small-town Britain in the 80s by people who got their news from The Sun and The Daily Mail.