The Chatterdesk has received an urgent missive from Marc Fisher, metropolitan columnist for the Washington Post and occasional Slate contributor, who was posted in Germany in the early 1990s. (Click here to purchase his book, After the Wall.) I reprint it here in full:
I think I can top your excellent examples of racially antagonistic ice cream novelty names. In Germany, the top-selling ice cream novelty is a chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream pop, which is advertised with placards that stand on the sidewalk outside each shop showing an almost entirely naked African boy with an imbecilic grin, a huge bone jammed through his nose and every vicious stereotype of black facial characteristics ever used by the Nazis or any other hate group. The Negerkuss, a German ice cream treat similar to our Klondike bar, translates generously as “black man’s kiss” and literally as “nigger’s kiss.” Astonishingly, when I would ask Germans about these marketing methods, they would accuse me of being wildly oversensitive.
The Chatterdesk will keep abreast of new developments on this fast-breaking story.
