UPDATE on Lebanon’s Negro: Maytha does some investigative reporting

…and pisses off a vexed managing director in the process.

In a story last month on this site, I commented on the wildly inappropriate use of name, slogan, and imagery for a steel wool product sold in Lebanon called “Negro Steel Wool.” After my initial repugnant shock surrounding the no-nonesense marketing of a …product, I calmed down for a second and decided to do some investigative bloggerist work, which included online searches and correspondences, to uncover the answer to my queries.

Disturbing Image Series: And the Minstrel Show Lives on in Lebanese Markets

I cannot begin to express all that is wrong with the following image:

But I will try to.

In an attempt to sell “the best of our best” in household cleaning, a product found in a Lebanese grocery market features a caricature of a shirt-less Black man flexing his muscles as his might physique puncturing the “Negro” product’s slogan: “leef al-3bd.” The slogan literally translates to “loofah of the slave.” However “3abd,” a derogatory term equivalent to the West’s “N-word” carries a shameful historical legacy of referring to Black people as “slaves.” But this product and its imagery is proof positive that the history has yet to be exclusively relegated to the past.