If you’re a brand owner or creative practitioner and you weren’t living on the moon, chances are you made a commitment to diversity and inclusion this year.

You may have been shocked by murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, stirred by the full-throated protests and demands that followed, and decided that your workplace and work needed to be more inclusive. If so, you responded entirely fittingly not just to a Black Lives Matter moment but to systemic injustice that’s been part of our society as long as immigration. In fact, longer – since slavery and colonisation. Basically, you were doing the right thing.

Then along came Sainsbury’s and its Gravy Song. In the UK supermarket’s Christmas 2020 commercial, a daughter calls her father to say she’ll miss seeing her parents this Christmas, while her father asks her if she’ll most miss his Christmas signature dish, the gravy. Sainsbury’s gave us a nicely observed, good humoured mini-slice of pandemic life – featuring a family that happened to be Black. The twinkly score had barely faded when the racists hit twitter (boy they love to hit Twitter) and suddenly our Christmas run-up swapped comfort and joy for hatred and bile. It was ugly stuff that no brand or agency would want.

But there’s no need to let this incident shake your commitment to inclusivity in your work. Because when you pick over the turkey carcass of the last three weeks, there’s more than one way of interpreting the story.

Sure, a gloomy view of what happened says that Sainsbury’s miscalculated on many fronts. They were flattered by the increasingly important role that supermarkets played in 2020, feeding the nation in a year of a pandemic. They overlooked the entirely white composition of their five executive directors and nine operating board members. They failed to notice that Brexit is still an open sore on the flesh of people of many colours. And they miscalculated the cauldron effect of lockdown.

And having forgotten all of these things – or hubristically decided they didn’t matter – Sainsbury’s chose the sanctity of Christmas and the extra sanctity of a big retailer’s Christmas commercial to do a spot of Black bandwagoning.

In a Covid year, it made a message of Christmas f2f nostalgia. But in a Black Lives Matter year, it virtue-signalled and cast a Black family in roles that detractors said a white family could have played. In this cautionary tale, Sainsbury’s pushed every conceivable button of everyone fervently on one side of the nation’s identity politics. When seen this way, the resulting barrage of social media hate almost makes sense.