Golly Bars
Slate has a story about an apparently racist “Nogger Black” bar (black on the outside!) being sold in Sweden by a Unliver subsidiary. Which reminded me of “Golly Bars“, AKA Golliwog Bars. These were a staple of growing up in Dublin that Unilever (through its subsidiary HB in Ireland) sold as a vaguely ice-cream-textured treat with an ugly blackface wrapper. What the fuck is up with Unliver anyway? In later years, HB/Unilever changed the “Golly Bar” and abstracted the blackface into a rather impressionist design to try to obfuscate the Golliwog’s nasty origins, finally changing completely to some lame polar bear or something. I think possibly my first awareness of racism, and of institutionalised racism, came when I was all of 5 or 6. I was sitting there wondering why some of my ice pops had pictures of dracula, or bunnies, or cows but for the life of me I couldn’t understand why this one had a picture of a person with dark skin who didn’t look very happy at all. I remember asking my parents and getting a vague answer that didn’t satisfy me. I decided to stick to the Dracula Pops, because there was a serious ice pop I could get my teeth into! Besides, HB’s version of “ice cream” bore more of a resemblance to flavoured cardboard than anything else. Just don’t get me started on Minstrels chocolates! And oh yeah, Unlever also does a brisk trade in “skin whitening” creams in many Asian countries where the paler you are, the posher you are, apparently.
Regarding my comment of “pure speculation”, characteristically misttyped, I was refering to “Egyptians and Israelites to transform from dark-skinned Ethiopian styled colouration into olive-skinned middle-eastern colouration”. I know of no large cache of in-tack skin samples and computer dna models are in their infancy and unreliable. One person write “dark skinned” would refer to someone latino, indian, or black. Artworks fades and is equally open to speculation. In short, there is no reliable way to know exactly what Egyptians or Israelites looked like. Moses wife, Tziporah, was described as being “Kushis” (which normally refers to Ethiopia, but the Gemara explains that she was actually black, but rather that she was outstanding in her actions. Apparently black is beautiful.