black is dirty, white is pure according to dove. welcome to 2017!

Another day, another racist soap ad.

On Saturday, soap manufacturer Dove issued an apology for a racially controversial campaign. “An image we recently posted on Facebook missed the mark in representing women of color thoughtfully,” the brand wrote on Twitter. “We deeply regret the offense it caused.”

No, it wasn’t their horrific “before/after” advertisement showing a Black person in front of a cracked “before” skin background and a white person in front of the smooth “after” skin (and a racially ambiguous person between them). Apparently, they had not learned from that faux pas.

This was another short spot showing a Black woman taking off a dark brown shirt to reveal a white woman in a pale shirt underneath.

In their defense, the ad supposedly then showed the white woman removing her shirt to reveal a racially ambiguous woman (all traces of the video have been removed), but this does not erase the anti-Blackness of the first series of images. Soap companies have a long history of associating Black people specifically (not just people of color!) as dirty and impure, contrasting them with the supposed purity and perfection of white people.

Some things just don’t change!