No Beetle No Cry

Is the Volkswagen 2013 Superbowl commercial racist? asks CNN.com.  According to their poll the vote of NO is nearly unanimous. 

In it, a while office employee ( who drives a VW of course) tells everyone to be happy, not to worry in a very Jamaican accent.  The implication of course is that Jamaicans know how to be happy despite petty annoyances -- and that you can share in the Caribbean attitude by buying a Volkswagen. Although that may or may not be true, being Jamaican is a matter of citizenship, not heredity or race.  I suspect that many Jamaicans don't own cars at all. I suspect that not all of them walk around singing and bubbling with joy.

Are we hypersensitive to any mention of race, even one so abstract or tangential that it isn't a mention of race?  Maybe it's just CNN trying to create another controversy for profit. 

Of course the poll ( I voted no) didn't ask whether it was a silly, annoying commercial and perhaps more annoying still to actual Jamaicans, but that's OK.  I feel that way about nearly all of them and besides I'm a GM sort of guy.