[Niamh.]

Originally Posted by y.winter

The "changing-shirt-becoming-someone-else" FX is not new on television, it has already been done in sports ads and included black/asian/white/latin people, metamorphosing into each other. It's always the same message of "we're all in this together, any kind of human being", and this was the same idea in the dove ad.
I find the whole drama around it very obnoxious and OTT (and I'm not surprised the screenshots were taken out of context). People need to calm down (and overall find better things to do online), not everything that includes white and black people is deliberately racist - some are, but not every little thing.

I'm sure that it wasn't Doves intention to come across racist, that wouldn't be smart for their company but from what I read of the article it used to be a "thing" to say black people were dirty and white people were clean so they should have been a bit more careful imo:

But the transition from the black woman to the white women — compiled into a static collage by a social media user — evoked a long-running racist trope in soap advertising: a “dirty” black person cleansed into whiteness. (Among other examples was an ad by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which was in business from 1875 to 1921, that featured a white child asking a black child, “Why doesn’t your mamma wash you with Fairy soap?”)