Kendall Jenner is cashing in on the very fashionable trend of resistance and it’s going about as well as you could expect.
The 21-year-old — who attended Fashion Week instead of the Women’s March — has partnered with Pepsi for an ad that is as straight up bananas as it is tone-deaf.
In the ad, Jenner decides to quit a modeling gig halfway through, because there’s a protest going on and she just has to join! The protest, of course, looks more like a fun weekend activity — what with all the choreographed dancing and impromptu jam seshes — instead of a necessary, sometimes dangerous plea for change. All these people are literally filled with joy because I guess in this commercial, Trump’s America is not real nor worrisome. Even worse, at the end of the commercial, Jenner hands a cop a cold, gleaming can of Pepsi. Because if anything is going to bring our torn country back together, it’s a can of America’s second favorite cola.
This is literally what happens when you don’t have people of color in a room to help you make decisions. The thought of Kendall Jenner as the face of some sort of anti-Trump resistance is laughable. As is Pepsi’s attempt at inclusion — it legitimately looks like they had a checklist of what different racial stereotypes they could include. It’s really very bad.
But perhaps more importantly, does anybody even drink Pepsi anymore?
Update: On Wednesday afternoon, Pepsi pulled the ad after an intense wave of criticism. Maybe someone realized that an ad that essentially minimizes police brutality wasn’t a great idea.
