#TwoBits: Everybody wants to be offended these days

Tre-zoo-may!

I couldn’t even pronounce the name until last week, since TRESemmé became the most famous – or notorious – shampoo in the country.

I’ve had a big red bottle of it in my shower for years (obviously bought by Rose), which is how I know it’s quite a good shampoo.

But apparently not for dry or damaged hair, if you happen to be black.

Or for fine or normal hair, if you happen to be white.

We have corruption everywhere we look, from dairy farms in the Free State to the looting of banks, from fraudsters selling PPE equipment at exorbitant prices, to ministers buying Aston Martins with ‘loans’ from ‘friends’, we have – who knows? – 10 million jobless and counting, we have businesses collapsing left and right, but what is the big issue of the week: an advertisement for shampoo.

I do not believe for a moment that a single person involved in the preparation of that advertisement, from the lowest copywriter to the highest account executive, had the slightest intention of causing offence, let alone being racist.

Anybody who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past 40 years knows that intentional racism will get you into severe trouble, from Alaska to Antarctica and all points in between.

So this advert slipped past whatever checks and balances there are, between ad agency and client, and nobody picked up that the picture of a black woman with ‘dry and damaged’ hair was being juxtaposed with a white woman with ‘fine, normal’ hair.

Nobody gave it a second thought and, I am given to understand, there were black and white members of the creative team.

These are the labels commonly found on shampoo bottles. You get shampoo for ‘normal’ hair and shampoo for ‘dry and damaged hair’. 

Well, we all know what happened next.

Social media went into a frenzy, the EFF picked up on it and in a fury forced Clicks to close many of its 400 stores across the country.

For the sin of selling TRESemmé products.

In hindsight, yes, the advert was not clever.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

If the pictures had been switched around, so the black woman had ‘normal’ hair, nobody would have said a thing.

We have now learned that dry and damaged hair is not a condition that black women have to put up with, and even if it is, guaranteed it never will be in the future.

No matter how offensive one finds that situation in isolation, the extent of offence was entirely manufactured.

Everybody wants to be offended these days.

Grow up.

One thing I know for sure is that Julius & Co are brats, so let’s not go there, but I am disappointed with the reaction of government.

We heard on the news that the cabinet, no less, pronounced the advert was racist and now wants a commission of inquiry into why the advertising industry hasn’t ‘transformed’ enough.

Dear God, we’ve got Days of Zondo, now we’ll have Days of Omo.

I think advertising people are very sensitive generally – do you remember when Omo used to wash ‘whiter than white’?

They’ve dropped that line and these days it only ‘removes those pesky tough stains much faster’.

But let’s spend another R200 million to rap them over the knuckles.

Why didn’t our President, or whoever is running the show these days, say that they would handle the manner directly with Clicks or Unilever and tell Julius to get back into his box?

In that whole cabinet room, there’s a shiver looking for a spine to run up.

* * *

We’re all tired of hearing about pandemics, I know.

But here’s a little poem by the late Spike Milligan with a different take on epidemics:

Smiling is infectious, you catch it like the flu,
When someone smiled at me today, I started smiling too.

I passed around the corner and someone saw my grin.
When he smiled I realized I’d passed it on to him.

I thought about that smile, then I realized its worth.
A single smile, just like mine could travel round the earth.

So, if you feel a smile begin, don’t leave it undetected.
Let’s start an epidemic quick, and get the world infected!