I came across the flap over a KFC ad that was intended to air in Australia but was pulled after someone put it on YouTube and Americans got worked up over what they perceived to be racist imageries — rowdy black people loving fried chicken. Here’s the ad:

Mashable has a nice summary of the controversy, including clips from the talk show “The Young Turks”, which took a very strong stance that the ad is racist. After drawing an avalanche of negative reactions from Australians for that opinion, TYT did a follow-up show in which it stuck to its stance. The hosts’ main points were basically:

• We’re not saying Australians are racist, just that the ad is.
• We understand that from the Australian perspective, the ad is not racist; but Australians should understand that from our perspective, it is.
• Despite the different perspectives, the ad is bad because it propagates American stereotypes to other cultures.

I definitely agree with the first two points, but I disagree with TYT that the ad is bad because it’s propagating American stereotypes. Here’s my question: Why should Australia, or any other country, kowtow to American sensitivities? The TYT hosts are correct that from our perspective, the ad is clearly racist, and if it were an ad intended for an American audience, I would be first in line decrying it and wondering out loud how anyone could have thought this was acceptable. But the key phrase  in that statement is “our perspective”, and while the TYT hosts were busy being so concerned about American stereotypes being exported to other cultures, they seemed to have no problem with pushing their own American attitudes — in this case, America’s hypersensitivity to anything remotely pertaining to race, which makes us immediately scan for racial undertones in everything we see — onto other cultures. Instead of West Indies fans, we see black West Indies fans. And instead of cannibals (in another chicken ad that TYT points to in its follow-up show), we see black cannibals.

If the same racial undertones that Americans immediately detect in the ad stand out for Australians as well, then I would agree we have a problem. However, if within their cultural framework the imageries don’t suggest racial stereotypes (that they don’t see it as a commentary on black people), then who the heck are we to demand that they adopt our attitudes toward race? In their follow-up show, the TYT hosts acknowledge the difference in cultural perspectives, yet immediately disregard it and essentially say, “Yes, there’s a difference in the way the two cultures view race, but ours is the right way.” Can there be a clearer display of ethnocentrism? TYT tries to make the argument that KFC is an American company and therefore beholden to American values. That’s a weak argument, however, since in this day and age, the likes of KFC are really international corporations, serving a wide array of markets, each with its own culture and attitudes. For all but the most extreme cases, it would be asinine to demand that all those markets conform to the sensitivities of one culture, and extremely arrogant and ethnocentric to demand that that one culture be ours.

Let’s put ourselves on the flip side of that equation: Imagine how we would react if people in India demanded we pull ads encouraging the consumption of beef from American TV because it’s offensive to Hindu beliefs. Hey, if we demand another country adopt our race-phobia, why shouldn’t another (and one with a much bigger population than the U.S. no less) demand we adopt their food phobias?