Juice and Stereotypes

Zuma Juice made the worst piece of disability stereotyping commercial I've ever seen. The disability community let them know what was going on, and I wrote it up for Pacific Standard.

This ad trades on two of the most pervasive stereotypes facing disabled folks. First, that their disability is attributable to poor lifestyle choices—i.e. drinking soda and eating junk food. Second, that lots of them are faking and are just lazy. The choices in this ad reflect deeply held stigmas about bodies, health, and disability. As we've reported at Pacific Standard, people working to cut disability benefits tend to blame disabled people for their disabilities, while simultaneously accusing many people receiving those benefits of having perpetrated fraud. Moreover, the belief that lots of people are just pretending to be disabled leads to public accusations and humiliation, even violence.

See more on the ad here.

Zuma Juice: Drink Our Product or Be Fat and Disabled

This ad from @zumajuice features a wheelchair user with cheese poofs and a big soda as "lazy," in contrast to the slender juicing women. pic.twitter.com/KzqNPvPM7w

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) June 6, 2017

I'm on vacation this week, but felt the need to post about this:

I was alerted by a twitter friend to an ad from a juicing company that shows two slender women making some kind of juice. The woman on the left is using a blender and, ew! On the right, slender woman number two uses this Zuma thing to make juice more easily!

And then a woman in a wheelchair, not slender, with a huge vat of cheese puffs and a giant mug of soda, rolls up. They begin fighting over the Zuma juice. The ad sets the fat disabled junk food eater against the thin Zuma-drinking women. It's meant to be comic. It's wholly unacceptable.

UPDATE: Here's the story, as I now understand it: Zuma Juice, by their own statements, wanted to compare the health conscious people who juice with a caricature of a health unconscious lazy slob - so they gave her junk food, soda, a big vat of cheese puffs, and a power wheelchair. In their "apologies," they indicate that they would have used a hover board if they had them, but that since many power wheelchair users don't even need them (just being lazy, in their minds).

The idea that disabled people are lazy and self-damaging is widely prevalent, linked to all kinds of stigma, from social shaming, police violence, and attacks on Social Security.

Zuma Juice rarely tweets.  You can contact them here.

Update with tweets (thanks to Karrie Higgins for pointing these out): More context with screenshots from various interactions with them.

RT if you'll NEVER buy health products that shame people with disabilities as @zumajuice did in their commercial mocking a wheelchair user. pic.twitter.com/V3KAAzTajh

— April Resists (@AprilDelRario) June 6, 2017

@Sophieneechan here are the screenshots to their "apology" pic.twitter.com/fe47QoYprM

— Megan ⛧⚢♿🔮🕯 (@Skrambled_Megs) June 6, 2017

Images captioned here.

Screenshots of Zuma Juice's "apology". https://t.co/Jo4PR4BCwJ

— Sofie H. Solbakken (@Sophieneechan) June 6, 2017