Ok, I'm going to live up to my forum moniker here. The second I saw this ad, it made me think of the late Edward Said's work on colonialism. Said was a professor of comparative literature and he wrote about the ways that popular culture were produced by the structures of domination but also reinforced them. If you read his Culture and Imperialism, you will never look at 18th century literature in the same way. As a quick example, he talks about how the Caribbean colonies figure into works of literature like Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. They're a source of wealth for the rich British family and a convenient plot device in ways that naturalize European domination over non-European parts of the world.
This ad strikes me as being largely the same thing. It reflects themes of domination within society - black people are "uncivilized." It also reinforces that same theme by proposing that the black man in the ad "recivilize" himself. It may not even be a conscious thing. Perhaps the person who created the ad did not set out to create a racist ad. Likewise, I doubt that Jane Austen wrote her novels for the purpose of serving the project of British Empire. The ad is a reflection of these larger structures of domination and reinforces them at the same time, making it more (rather than less) natural to think of black people as needing to be civilized or tamed.
Sorry, LittleBrotherWise.
