In 2023, PopCorners (a snack brand owned by PepsiCo)  created an ad for Super Bowl LVII, which was a spoof on the American crime drama series Breaking Bad.  

Description from the YouTube video states:

“One of the best-received commercials during the Super Bowl featured a call back to one of the best television shows of all time. PopCorners recruited Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul to reprise their Breaking Bad characters for the ad.

In the commercial, Walter White and Jesse Pinkman are in their famous trailer, but instead of manufacturing crystal meth, they are making PopCorners snacks. However, White and Pinkman need to find a distributor for their creation, so they call another familiar face.”

What shocked me, was in the middle of the ad, the character of Walter demands that the character Tuco,

“Say. Their. Name.”

(The ad is available for viewing on the PopCorners website.)

Who wrote this ad?

Who approved this ad?

      The phrase, “Say Their Name(s)” was popularized to bring attention to victims of police brutality, especially to the human rights violations by police towards Black and Brown people. This includes beatings, racial abuse, unlawful killings, torture, or indiscriminate use of riot control agents at protests.

     The 21st century resistance to police brutality began with the 2014 movement SayHerName, the response to the death of Sandra Bland, who died while in police custody.

     The phrase has not only gained traction when discussing police brutality, but has become  eponymous with the Black Lives Matter movement.  A movement, The New York Times writes, “that may be the largest social movement in the history of the United States”.  (They report that about 15 million to 26 million people in the United States have participated in demonstrations over the death of George Floyd alone.) It is a movement archived in the Library of Congress.

      How then, do these powerful words, which define and describe an international, political and social movement that demands racial justice; words so loud and so huge, words so noted and so notorious, words that are now part of the global lexicon of rallying-cries, be used to hawk a product? 

Scholar-Activist Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. writes:

     The phrase Say Their Names itself serves multiple purposes: it is a form of protest, a demand for justice, and a communal act of mourning. By invoking the names of the deceased, such as Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and many others, the community asserts their humanity, insists on the recognition of their unjust deaths, and calls for accountability from the systems that failed them.

The practice of calling out the names of the dead in a public or communal setting has deeper roots in African traditions, where the spoken word is believed to hold power. In many African cultures, naming is considered a vital act that connects an individual to their community and their ancestors. The act of speaking a name aloud can be seen as a way to honor the deceased and ensure they are not forgotten.

This form of ritualized remembrance is also reminiscent of religious and spiritual practices found in many cultures around the world, where saying the names of the dead is believed to help in the mourning process and in some beliefs, aid in the journey of the soul.

In the context of African American history, this practice takes on additional layers of significance given the long history of systemic violence and oppression. It serves as a form of resistance and a declaration that these lives mattered, directly challenging narratives that might seek to undermine or minimize the significance of their lives and deaths.

The use of Say Their Names in protests and memorials continues to be a potent reminder of the need for change and the ongoing struggle for racial justice and equality in America.

     How did the creators of this ad not know this?  Why did Pepsico approve this ad? Did they not learn from their 2017 tone-deaf ad that used imagery from the Black Lives Matter movement? They pulled that ad after a day of intense criticism arguing that it trivialized the widespread protests against the killings of Black people by the police.

      And, where was the backlash for the PopCorners ad?  

     This is what it means to be White in America.  You can have a short memory.  You can have a short attention span.  Black suffering continues to be normalized and minimized.  Powerful protest rhetoric once again becomes reduced to a pool of slang for advertisers to pull from.  

     And still, police continue to kill people during arrests. The numbers are increasing.  Police in the US killed the highest number of people on record in 2023.  And, Black Americans are still killed at a much higher rate than White Americans.  On April 26th, the news agency Reuters  reported “Ohio police released video of a Black man who died at a local hospital after repeatedly telling officers “I can’t breathe” as they pinned him to the floor of a bar and handcuffed him. ”  Write his name: Frank Tyson. 

Say Their Name should never be used to advertise popcorn or any other product. Ever.