"Why, because I'm black?"

As has become customary in this YouTube era, companies no longer wait for the Super Bowl to actually air their Super Bowl ads, which is why any outrage from PornHub’s executives would be about as real as a Faye Reagan orgasm. At the very least, many companies have started leaking “teaser ads” – which is wholly absurd – like Mercedes’ Kate Upton car wash ad or Volkswagen’s Star Wars dogs, but most companies have just said, “F*ck it, here’s the whole commercial” because they love when bros like me write about them.

Speaking of Volkswagen, the German car company’s Super Bowl 47 ad hit the cat tubes earlier this week and it already has more than 3 million views on YouTube. Of course, it’s not because the commercial is any good – it’s okay, I guess – it’s because people think that white people doing Jamaican voices is racist.

Gee, I wonder if Volkswagen’s ad team saw all of this attention coming when they filmed this commercial.

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You know how ‘South Park’s’ Eric Cartman is a 10-year old who hates Jewish people, slurs everyone and once chopped up a kid’s parents and fed them to him in a bowl of chili? And it’s funny because he’s a fictional character on an animated comedy and ridiculously exaggerated for effect?

Yeah, that becomes way less funny when it happens in real life.

An 11-year-old [Pee-Wee hockey] defenceman was targeted during a team outing for being Jewish, said his mother who is also the team’s manager.

“We all went to an Oil Kings’ game on Friday and on the bus, the goalie of our team called my son a “f**king Jew,” she said, adding this player later told her son that Nazis killed Jews.

A second player from the same team, an 11-year-old biracial forward, told his parents this week that the same goalie targeted him at the beginning of the month.

The goalie told him “Your mom should go back to Africa where she belongs.” (via the St. Albert Gazette)

So, uh …

“(The league) was notified yesterday afternoon of the incident in question and based on a review of the information we received, the decision was made to suspend the player pending further investigation and a meeting with the parent,” he said, adding two league executives will attend the meeting.

He would not comment on whether there have been prior complaints filed against the player, and said no further comments will be provided.

We at With Leather get up on a righteous soapbox from time to time, and we’re just as quick to field “YOU’RE THE PC POLICE KIDS CAN SAY WHATEVER THEY WANT NYEAHH,” so I’ll save you all that and give you the most objective, astute analysis I can muster: that kid who got derisively called a Jew should’ve kicked this little 11-year old asshole’s ass. Just wrecked him where he stood. Additionally, anybody using “go back to Africa” at 11-years old in 2012 IN CANADA has probably suffered through the most f**ked-up child-rearing ever and should be with one of the other 34-million-and-change Canadians who won’t raise him to be a weird cartoon villain.

Or, you know, feed him someone in a chili.

[banner image via Flickr, story h/t to Prep Rally]

Despite me watching it last night, the NBA posted its new “BIG Color” commercial on YouTube today to celebrate both the holiday season and the surprisingly plain jerseys that some teams will be wearing on Christmas day. As we already know, the Christmas day NBA schedule looks like this:

Boston Celtics at Brooklyn Nets
New York Knicks at Los Angeles Lakers
Oklahoma City Thunder at Miami Heat
Houston Rockets at Chicago Bulls
Denver Nuggets at Los Angeles Clippers

It’s a regular potpourri of games that we both care and don’t care about. Thanks NBA! But back to the uniforms and commercial at hand. The BIG Color commercial features four of the league’s most recognizable stars and Joe Johnson, as they bounce their jingle balls in rhythm to the tune of “Carol of the Bells”. For what it is, it’s a simple but cool spot that doesn’t play any favorites, except that 25 teams are left out of the fun. But that’s their fault for stinking.

Check out the commercial after the jump, as well as some special holiday cheer commentary from my favorite and most intelligent people on the Internet – YouTube commenters.

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Burnsy sent me this story in an e-mail this morning. The text read:

In case you want to write about this. I tried, but UGH

If you haven’t heard about this yet, Friday’s update on the official Asian Football Confederation website published “UAE to take cautious approach,” an article about the United Arab Emirates national team trying to qualify for the 2015 AFC Asian Cup. In the third paragraph, the team (also known as “Al-Abyad”) is refereed to as, “”Al-Abyad or Sand Monkeys”.

No, seriously.

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I don’t know the specifics of what’s happening here, but here’s the gist: A gent on the Korean baseball team claims he was hit by a pitch, but everyone else in the game/stadium/world saw him lean out and elbow smash the ball. It’s a line drive foul, and one of the most hilariously dirty attempts at a play I’ve seen in a while. It’s like what happens in Derek Jeter’s mind every time the ball misses him by a foot and he collapses to the ground in agony.

Looks clean to me.

What I didn’t expect (because I’m stupid, and apparently just started blogging) is the response of YouTube commenters. I can’t read a lot of them, but the ones attempted in English are a wonderful mix of folky, racist and offensively general. Here are a few of my favorite examples from the last hour.

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Soccer racism is something we rarely talk about at With Leather, because 1) it’s one of those ridiculous, inexcusable traditions hanging on as “part of the sport” because people in Europe never officially got a Civil Rights movement, and 2) we never write about soccer. But soccer racism is real, and when it’s not seeping out in the form of “monkey” chants or black players having bananas thrown at them, it shows up in Italian newspaper cartoons. I shouldn’t have to explain why the above comic picturing Italian footballer Mario Balotelli as a giant ape is awful, unless you’re one of those people who thought that LeBron James Vogue cover was just beautiful people showing passion.

Anyway, Mario Balotelli (pretty accurately described by Rumors & Rants as “Italy’s Ron Artest”) is King Kong and that picture went through at least five stages of publication before showing up in a newspaper without anyone thinking it was a bad idea. Gazzetta dello Sport eventually issued an apology, kind of, but … well, read it yourself.

Gazzetta acknowledged its mistake, saying: “It wasn’t our cartoonist’s best product. In these times we need a bit more moderation, caution and good taste. But we have always fought against racism and condemned booing against Balotelli as unacceptable.”

At least now we know who’d win a fight between Mario Balotelli and Hideki Matsui, right?

Racist and prejudiced cartoons and nicknames are the “black face Halloween costume” of journalism — they’re a bad idea and you’re pretty stupid for not just knowing it. Plus, the only reason you’re doing it is for shocked publicity, which those of us who DON’T want to draw black people as apes end up having to report on. Is “Mario Balotelli is an ape” really the most creative thing you can come up with? Put five more minutes of effort into the process and you’ll come up with something better. Hell, here’s a freebie: draw him drinking a bunch of urine.

As a bonus, here’s a clip of Balotelli accidentally drinking somebody’s urine.

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