An online racist protest against black faces on chocolate bars backfired after it was revealed the children on the wrappers were German international footballers.
Germany’s favourite chocolate bar is called “Kinder” which is German for children. Traditionally the child on the wrapper has been a white male, in a fashion not dissimilar to the UK’s Milky Bar Kid.
Recently however, a wider variety of ethnic groups started to appear and this threw members of the German anti-immigrant protest group Pegida into a frenzy. According to the BBC, a Pegida page in the German region of Badem-Wurttemberg carried a comment from the group admin:
“They’ll stop at nothing. Can you really buy these? Or is it a joke?”
The joke however was on them. The photos on the bars that so irked the racists were boyhood photos of German international footballers Ilkay Guendogan (Borussia Dortmund) and Jerome Boateng (Bayern Munich) who both play for the national team .
Exasperated Germany fans went online to explain that the point of the campaign was to show support for the German side about to play in the EUROS.
One person, quoted on the BBC page wrote: “Close the borders and have no exports, no migration! Then you’ll get unemployment and local league football.”
Kinder made a statement explicitly opposing racism
Kinder is made by Ferrero an Italian company which makes it an even more bizarre choice as a national icon for German racial purists. It soon responded to the protests by voicing its view:
“We would like to explicitly distance ourselves from every kind of xenophobia and discrimination. We do not accept or tolerate these in our Facebook communities either.”
The episode has laid bare to Pegida’s protestations that they are anti-immigration rather than racist. The name stands for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes), and had been an umbrella group attracting support from conservatives who also claim not to be racists.
That facade may now have ended because of a protest over a chocolate wrapper.
That part at least is funny.
