Daily Times

Britain has long traded on its multicultural tradition. Nowhere was this more on display than in that extravaganza of patented eccentricity that was the London Games. And not in a necessarily bad way.

Today, the multicultural model is up for sale, to be used as hard currency on the open market. And not everyone is happy about it. Not when multinational companies get in on the act of cashing in, quite literally.

Dove is but the latest to fall foul of the cultural diversity it has taken upon itself to package and wrap up and sell to its female customers. First came positive body image for ‘real women’. Now comes this. And here is where the company almost came undone. It has had to publicly apologise for its television advertisement for body wash, which boasted two edits: one short and one long.  The latter features a black woman removing her top to reveal a white woman who does the same to reveal an Asian woman. The shorter version stops with the black woman washing herself white. The ensuing backlash saw Dove apologise for “missing the mark in thoughtfully representing women of colour”.

Ogunyemi explains how proud she felt at being the first woman to appear on screen for the ad. Indeed, had it been the other way round, women of colour would have been a mere afterthought of causal tokenism. Yet the response to the video throws up an important distinction: namely cultural diversity versus cultural liberty

Yet not everyone is happy.

Lola Ogunyemi is the black woman in the ad. And she has spoken out. Particularly against the company’s failure to defend placing her first under the spotlight. And she has a point. Penning a piece for The Guardian this week, she explains her cultural heritage: a Nigerian woman born in London and raised in Atlanta. Thus, she says, she has grown up aware of prevailing western societal notions of beauty linked to skin tone. “Having the opportunity to represent my dark-skinned sisters in a global beauty brand felt like the perfect way for me to remind the world that we are here, we are beautiful, and more importantly, we are valued.”

Ogunyemi goes on to explain how proud she felt at being the first woman to appear on screen for the ad. Indeed, had it been the other way round; meaning had it been the white woman who appeared first, she would have hogged the spotlight, with women of colour being an afterthought of causal tokenism.

Yet the response to the video throws up an important distinction. Namely, cultural diversity versus cultural liberty. The former is often seen by those who want to showcase their perceived liberal credentials as simply a means of ticking off boxes. Meaning that cultural diversity becomes divorced from the latter. While cultural freedom itself cannot be curtailed by the prioritising of particular gazes. For that would be wilful myopia by another name. Not cricket, in other words.

Given that the US is at the heart of the global capitalist system – it is understandable that it also tends to dominate the race narrative, considering the rapid globalisation of identity politics itself. This has produced movements that have been at once important and inspiring: the Black Panther Party of yesteryear and today’s Black Lives Matter. But it has also kept the focus almost exclusively on the US, with little thought to voices from Global South and the systems of hierarchy and privilege peculiar to these regions. Which is tends to bring us full-circle, this time to notions of cultural imperialism.

All of which makes Ogunyemi’s voice all the more refreshing. She is proudly exercising her fundamental right to cultural freedom; to demand that she been seen first and foremost through her own eyes, without turning the latter blind to dialogues of constructive criticism.

So, yes it is a shame that Dove chose not to defend its decision to feature her first in its commercial. For it simply underscores the fact that the company would put profit above cultural self-determination. Meaning that the call “love the skin you’re in” comes at a price. And we all know who gets to keep the change.

The writer is the Deputy Managing Editor, Daily Times. She can be reached at mirandahusain@me.com and tweets @humeiwei

Published in Daily Times, October 14^th 2017.