By Toni Laws
TL: Good afternoon, for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Toni Laws, former Senior VP for NAA and NAMME Secretary. I’m excited to be here with you this afternoon and to have a conversation with a person that I’ve admired for quite some time. He’s the reason that I am a subscriber of the Wall Street Journal. His regular column, that he had done for 10 years, called Business and Race, was one of the columns that brought me back to the paper, held me there and enabled me to move to appreciate the other parts of it. So, it’s my delight to introduce Leon Wynter. We hope you will take advantage of what we trigger in this conversation this afternoon and spend some time with the book. It’s a wonderful read, it’s provocative, and we hope you will be prompted to ask questions.
For those of you who have not been introduced to his book, I’d like to ask Leon to briefly describe the premise of the book and especially the title, tell us why you chose it.
LW: Thank you so much Toni and for the introduction. Brief thanks to NAMME for having me here and to God, in whose spirit I speak to you today.
The premise of it{the title} echoes something a writer named Jim Sleeper, I heard say on a radio program, I’m a public radio addict. He asked a question to the effect, is there an American skin that is thick enough for all of us to live in. And it dawned on me at that very moment looking at the shifts that I was seeing in commercial popular culture relative to race and ethnicity that in fact there was one. At least I was convinced that if I went looking for it, I would find such an American skin beginning to appear. I started looking at on the surface of things, you know, baseball caps worn backwards and baggy jeans and all the things you can see on the surface of things that seem to indicate some sort of common traffic, some sort of common covering to us. But the more I looked, I just kept getting deeper, deeper into things like language, music, vernacular literature, and then that led me ultimately into history. So I started from the surface of things looking for this skin and went back ultimately well below the skin and then back into time. The first three chapters of the book, of course, are historical.
TL: In your book, you point to a commercial that was launched in 1979, a CocaCola commercial, and you called that the “first skin graft” in forging America’s new majority. Tell us about that particular commercial and why you feel that was such a watershed event, not only in terms of American advertising but also in foretelling what’s to come.
LW: How many people remember the mean Joe Green Coke commercial? Every hand goes up. OK, the thing about that commercial, as I say in the book, it was really the first, I think, to confront the fearful stereotype of the big, Black man as warrior and transmute that power into a positive feeling that would be associated with the product.
There’s mean Joe Green, in that tunnel, there’s no guards around or anything like that. It’s just him and this little white kid. And he wasn’t smiling and he wasn’t grinning, you know for all we know, he’s getting ready to dropkick this kid and the tension in that moment was so palatable, so powerfully strong, and of course, it gets relieved in that wonderful way, when there’s that gesture. The kid says, Mr. Green, I just wanted you to know, you’re the greatest or you’re the best or something like that, that affirmation, that time conditioned affirmation and adulation coming from this kid. And in him handing him the Coke and then the guy opens up the soda and downs the thing and the music swells up. And Green hands him his dirty, sweaty team shirt, well before wearing team shirts was the norm. But everybody in America felt good.
My thought is that this thing exploited this un-validated desire, especially on the part of that generation, which I go onto to call the Hey Kids, which is after the hey kid line when he tosses the jersey, that desire to embrace the non-white hero in all of their non-whiteness.
The ad agency really didn’t have such grand conscious design in mind. In fact they were thinking of using Steeler quarterback Terry Bradshaw, at first, but then, at least according to the interview I did with one of the creators, they realized that he wasn’t different enough, he wasn’t big enough, the chemistry wasn’t great enough for what they needed for this character.
And it’s interesting when they talk to mean Joe Green years later; he said that changed his life because it humanized him in the marketplace. It literally transformed how we saw him, in fact by extension, it prepared us for being able to see black athletes specifically in a different light. It sort of paved the way for Shaquille O’ Neil to be this, on one hand to be this clearly fearsome, clearly black giant, but it was also safe to pop out of a genie bottle in a terrible movie.
TL: Also the extension to Michael Jordan, we all know about the “I wanna be like Mike series of commercials”.
LW: Yes, you could say that. Again, different imagery. What we witnessed in the 80s, and really going into the 90s, relative specifically to black athletes and to a certain extent Latino athletes, almost another different category from what we’re talking about, was this sort of brand proliferation, if you will, where we could have David Robinson, one image, pretty good and enduring brand, and you have Charles Barkley and you have Dennis Rodman. I knew I had to write a book about something when I saw what happened with Dennis Rodman, I mean for Christ’s sake, the guy, cross dressing, dating white women, just his actual on court persona, as long as he played his cards right, they ate it up. Make movies, personal appearances and do all sorts of things. I mean that was unheard of and didn’t happen 10 years ago. And then Michael Jordan, a different one, and now in this next generation of basketball players, the Alan Iverson’s, and it’s interesting to see many people, including Jordan himself, have been convinced that the hip hop generation of ball players and athletes were in the process of killing the goose that had laid the golden egg just because they just didn’t want to act right. That jury is still out because as long as their performances on the field are credible as sports but more to the point entertaining, compelling and engaging as entertainment, I don’t know. Does anybody here really think one way or another whatever comes of Kobe Bryant’s recently alleged sexual assault. And of course, brother’s innocent until proven guilty. But does anybody really think that’s going to put much of a dent in his value to the NBA or as a marketing pitch person but I guess if he gets convicted or something. But, the extreme case, going from the sublime to the ridiculous, OJ Simpson, still has a life, a certain amount of celebrity, can still do things and when he does stuff, it’s still actually news. And we know what he got away with.
TL: Earlier, I referred to the extent of research you’d done to demonstrate throughout history, the historical and cultural dissonance between America’s dream and America’s reality. We’re all familiar with blacks, at the time, being viewed as 3/5s of a man, but what I was surprised to read how very narrowly the nation’s founding fathers defined whiteness and about the evolution of how that term, whiteness, is now being expanded and changed.
LW: Not so much the term, but the concept, the reality. First and foremost, whiteness is of course, an artificial construct but it’s really a system of privilege. Now, it’s a privilege that was initially set up and there wasn’t any need for it because whiteness was one and the same as the founding fathers, the Protestants of English descent and or English birth. What we think of as white and whiteness developed and evolved primarily to account for the subsequent presence and immigration of every other European group to come to America, the Irish, German, etc. Sometime right before the time of the Civil War, what was left of the founding father’s generation quickly realized that they were already at that point being outnumbered, certainly by the combination of Irish and German immigrants at that point. And so that notion of franchise had to be established also to continue to know who was an American person within all of what American personhood and citizenship granted and who was a slave or a formally enslaved African depending for the portion of that population that was in fact free. It was only a halting acceptance though of these other European immigrant groups. Each of them had to go through a kind of a provisional whiteness or a kind of a hazing.
There’s also this other idea of whiteness, that it has a self-concealing quality. This idea that, to many people not familiar with this, white people are just people, whiteness to those who created it and for those who unthinkingly swim in it, is not limited in its authority to what is particular to white people. Whiteness assumes the covering of humanity in general and in that guise under normal conditions, like Windex glass, it tends to disappear.
The equation of being white, being human secures the position of power. White people have power and believe they think, feel and act like all people unable to see their own particularity, creating dominant images of the world and not quite seeing that they thus construct the world in their own image. But a special case of this aspect of whiteness is the white privilege to inhabit all of humanity, the power to don the cultural garb in any particular so called ethnic group or race as needs dictate. This corollorary of whiteness as humanity actively applied to America since the 19th century is directly responsible for the misogyny and ultimately trans-racial nature of American popular culture and identity.
TL: The book focuses a lot on Black America, but in what ways have Native Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans contributed to the trans-racial acculturation of America?
LW: My thesis at its core is this, American identity, American-ness is not really European, not really African, but it’s centered, it’s prime ingredient is that experience that the European has in their encounters with the enslaved Africans and later the free Africans, and to a lesser and different extent with the Native Americans they found and quickly displaced here, and a certain amount of the Asian population that came here as well as the Mexicans whom they also engulfed and partially displaced.
Where the impact of Asian and Hispanics have been really felt has been just in the last 15-20 years with that surge of immigration, indeed just the force in numbers and the kind of penetration into American whiteness that has been historically certainly barred for African Americans and also by reason of our own preferences, kind of resisted in ways which, frankly, is not resisted by Asians and by Hispanics. You may ask me the question a bit later where we talk about the impact of the out-marriage, which depending on the subgroup and so on, with some Asian groups, is as much as 40-50% marrying outside of Asians for what we call Asian-ness itself and the very high rate of self identification for Latinos as in fact racial, not necessary culturally, but racially white. And that has an important impact, but it’s a differential impact I think than for African America.
TL: You also speak to the issue of technology, new technologies, and their role in the browning of popular culture in America. In what ways have these industries change American culture?
LW: Well, not the industries but the technology itself. In general, the long term trend of technology and the expansion of individual freedom and choice, and that just had really subversive effect on the maintenance and construction of whiteness as the barrier of all things. For example, phonograph records led people to bring Betsy Smith home into their living rooms, in places where she was otherwise not really welcome. The blues could come through the front door and so could jazz under somebody’s arm in a phonograph record. Even though conditions of segregation and subjugation and everything else still continued, this technology, when it became widespread, allowed it {that music}to come in. Otherwise I don’t know, you had to go to the other side of the tracks or god knows where. But with records, who knew. Radio was even more powerful in that way. I just want to read a small excerpt,
“To an even greater degree than the phonograph, it allowed Americans to freely identify with their individual interests and desires without regards to barriers of class, gender, ethnicity or race. They could convene an unprecedented audience, create a simultaneous experience of mass community, on a concert, a comedy or show. In the radio age just as in the culture of minstrelsy nothing tied Americans of all backgrounds together like their fear and loathing of black people, except perhaps their profound dependence on the black experience for cohering a distinct American identity. Radio also insidiously expanded the possibilities for this trans-racial identification by whites by simultaneously embedding the fundamental and volatile contradiction of American race much deeper into the American psyche.”
What I was talking about in this part was making reference to essentially the first sitcom in America, and really the first mass phenomenon in America was that radio show, Amos and Andy. Again, on one hand, we could all easily see what was, we really couldn’t call this progress, seeing two White actors doing a black face routine of pretending to be two cab drivers in Harlem. But at the same time, and I’m quoting now, somebody, or quoting the book on Susan Douglas on radio,
“Radio supplied white people that private place, that trapdoor into a culture many Whites imagined to be more authentic, more vibrant and richer than their own. Through radio, whites can partake of the spirit of that black culture without being forced to witness or experience deprivations or injustices. On radio, white ridicule of black culture and African Americans mixed with envy, desire and imitation. Radio may have been used throughout its history to reaffirm the supposed superiority of whites but it has also been used since the 1920s to challenge, laugh at and undermine this flimsy conceit.”
So, ditto more or less for television. The last thing I would say though is by the time you come to our present, with cable and the whole proliferation of – choices, I invoke and until economists call to tell me I can’t do this, I’m going to keep on invoking, something called Says Law, that supply creates it own demand. When you had the explosion of cable in the early 80s, suddenly there was this pipeline that needed to be filled, this whole idea of content, which we’ve gotten used to now in the concept, but that became a big thing. Suddenly there was this huge demand for more, more of anything that people might want to see and how. And that has a profound effect again, even more than radio did but in the same direction of saying, well, we’ll throw some money and see if we can get some advertising dollars behind any number of things because, even if it’s only a 2% rating or something like that, that’s a lot of folks.
TL: Well, let’s move forward a little. There is a program that was launched at NAA called GOLD, Growth Opportunities by Leveraging Diversity. It has as its premise that there are revenue opportunities inherent in diverse markets and newspapers have missed the boat, perhaps other media too, in failing to leverage the opportunity in those markets. You devoted a whole chapter to the whole issue of ethnic marketing and its shortcomings, share your views.
LW: Yes, that chapter, for those of you interested, is chapter 8, called the rise and fall of ethnic marketing, what race had to do with it. If you read the chapter, here it is
“Ethnic marketing began with this recognition of the black consumer dollar and existence of those markets. And it is ending as the same marketers understand the power of non-white cultures and icons over all consumers.”
And in fact the very same thing the black and then patterned after that, Asian, Hispanic media and marketing industries, most hope for. The idea that advertisers and markets, and so on, would value them as consumers and value and even need for their unique cultural tropes in the marketplace of ideas, certainly in the marketplace of entertainment. They discovered that, that was the good news.
The bad news is that they would not need a black media marketing industry and by extension they really are not going to need that much of a Hispanic or Asian media and marketing industry in order to be able to do it. I talk about any number of advertising campaigns and marketing things and a number of things you see on television, hey that somebody looks like me or that’s my music, but they didn’t necessarily need the middle man, if you will, to make it happen.
This chapter is built on a very long and extensive interview with Byron Lewis, founder and president of Uniworld Advertising. Essentially, he talked about the fact that it is unfortunate, I remember he said to me, it is sad but true that no or very, very few black agencies can actually afford to work with the biggest hip hop or rap talent. He had this phrase, I really love it, it was their ambition, his generation of folks, he called it, the ownership of the black psyche. There was this notion that they, and you can substitute whether it’s Byron Lewis or Earl Graves or Ed Lewis and the Essence folks, their big ambition was they were going to own that loyalty, they were going to own that field and sell it to the man. But the man figured out that not only could they do it themselves and they suffered no loss and in fact suffered in some cases great gains.
Currently right now the next big thing you’ll be seeing on television representing Pepsi is Beyonce Knowles for example and that is coming to you not from any black ad agency not even for any consideration of black target marketing. The same thing, by the way when you see Ricky Martin popping up, or you know, Lucy Liu whose image seems to be staring at us everywhere in the Charlie Angels, is not necessarily about target marketing at all. It’s that notion that says wait a minute, we don’t lose anything by this and moreover, we don’t necessarily need to go to any minority controlled entity to put this thing together. But we do need to recognize what’s going on in the culture but guess what, the latest generation of people who make these decisions, again I spoke to Pepsi the other day, there was this whole sea of basically kids, mostly white and a certain amount representative of a mixture of nonwhite in there. They’re kids and this is their culture, it’s organic with them. They know in ways that their boomer parent really did not know. So, good news and bad news to that.
TL: A logical extension to that is, are we moving towards images that are composites where they’re pretty much racially ambiguous. In a doll for example, each young girl can look at this image and can see a part of themselves reflected in the image and take it and feel good about it and walk away. So, will there be no black Barbie dolls anymore, is that where we’re heading?
LW: No, there will be black barbies. The market is totally agnostic towards these things, whatever you will buy, they will sell you but any of you have small kids? They have this new line of dolls, they are, and I hate this word, multicultural. What they really are, they are like racial composites. One of them is supposed to be black, one is supposed to be Latino, one of them Asian, I think the black one is named Sasha, so I guess she’s a black Russian or something. Their features combine certain things that have always been exploited in terms of the psychographics of these things, they are adolescents, they have disproportionately big eyes, but they look almost like a new race from the planet Ghetto Fabulous, and, its interesting, these guys gave Barbie a run for their money for the last two Christmases in a row. And Barbie and Mattel have responded with a line of the same kind of thing. You can barely tell what race they are suppose to be, but they’re hip hop, they’re urban and racially indistinct in that way. And racial indistinctness is definitely a long term trend on the rise and it’s something very real going on in California. And it also mirrors an aspiration that we have; if it wasn’t aspirational it wouldn’t sell.
TL: Let’s continue, what does this mean, in terms of how you would cast the diversity movement as you’ve seen it applied to the media industry and ,overall, to other organizations and institutions in this country?
LW: The diversity movement, I don’t know. I often refer to it as the diversity industry. When I was writing the column for the Wall Street Journal, I think I was the only national journalist in town whose mailbox literally was, if you have anything to do with the diversity business, it comes here. And I saw that thing rise and frankly I have since seen it fall. More than anything else to keep in mind about diversity within that is, it’s always something that corporations could always control exactly how much of it they purchase--separate and apart from aspects of affirmative action.
Affirmative action began with a moral and a legal imperative. People, literally, were being ordered by courts or enforcement actions, especially coming from executive branches from the federal government, labor dept., justice dept., to act in certain kinds of ways affirmatively. We know of course they became undercut with the shift in politics--so essentially the legal, moral part of it went away.
At the same time, there was a vacuum, corporations still had a need, sometimes I say a genuine need, to be doing some things that are right if you will, if only by our existing base of minority employees. And then after that Workforce 2000 came out in 1986-87, it sounds like, my god, what’s going to happen to white men in 10 years. So people started really looking at these questions about where are the workers going to come from and it is there in that vacuum, where once there were civil rights and moral leadership, some of the people changed hats and changed to diversity consultants. And they went to corporations and said, we’re not going to burden you with questions of whether you’re wrong or not, we’ll hope a court will get around to it. But we will sell you on this idea that you ought to be doing this thing, cause diversity of opinions will make your products better or there was a subtle thing that said if you don’t do this we might get Jesse Jackson or somebody to make some noise or the equivalent in the Latino or Asian leadership, of course they always were more admiring because nobody can get louder than Jesse or Al Sharpton. So that model of you might get a bad name so you should do this as well as some statistical things like that.
So, the good news, I see corporations continuing to buy, to have a certain budget, or to give a certain amount of attention to diversity, whether that’s outreach or support of scholarship or support of organizations like NAMME. But it’s, I still say, it’s convenient for them and it will never be a substitute for a returned, a renewed focus on the question of the wrong that is attached to discrimination, the wrong that is attached to treatment of people just on the basis of their skins within corporations or wherever it is they want to go.
Again, the good news is that, for a variety of reasons, including all this transition we’ve gone through, more and more institutions and corporations, they don’t have much of investment in deciding to turn around and say we’re not going to hire them, there’s no need for them to do that, they can clearly see it’s not in their interest and, in fact, there is still enough of a legal and moral framework to say you will get sued and you will get embarrassed and it will cost you way more than it’s worth.
Better you excise whatever remaining really stupid white guys they can that act this way, to eliminate racism and sexism or other isms that are going on. It’s just not in their interest anymore and in that sense of the bottom line in diversity that remains. But that other part of the argument, diversity in itself, the Supreme Court gave more legs, at least with the province of college admissions, that at schools it is a worthwhile goal in and of itself because school should look a certain way and the education experience benefits by that.
I think it’s a spurious argument and it worries me that my own rank might be hanging on the notion that I add a distinctiveness to the mix and that’s why they should have me around--but otherwise I really don’t think I have any more legs.
In terms of something you could use to continue prod more jobs and more advancements, you could tell me how successful it is, I say we’ve gone as far as we can go with that. And, that we actually really need to shift our focuses back towards the moral and back towards the legal. It depends on the consultant to talk businesses into doing something more than they really are doing when, in fact, they {businesses} pay their salaries.
TL: Leon, you end with a great deal of optimism about our ability to become one race, human, one culture American. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t feel like we’re quite there. From a popular culture standpoint, you say we are really progressing very quickly, but somehow I’m feeling there’s still a lot of injustices and inequities in society. How do we narrow and bridge that gap? Let’s conclude with that and if you could add, where do you see NAMME, perhaps, providing leadership in the media industry.
LW: I want to read two paragraphs at the end of the book that touch on this cause there has been a lot of confusion on what my thesis has been.
“I never claimed that trans-racial pop culture represents a trend towards political and racial equality. In other words, what we see happening in television is not necessarily directly reflective of the state of political stalemates around finishing the pursuit of justice and equality that I think to a certain extent was shelved or sidelined in the early 1970s in the wake of the civil rights movement and again civil rights victory.”
What I mean is that what’s taking place in the pop culture has created the necessary condition, particularly the part that points to really, racial amalgamation, for a leadership that can address the very real disparities that still exist on their moral basis—that basically says, you cannot do this to my brother--in some cases, literally, my brother.
This is why I think Latinos are so very important in what is getting ready to happen now because they’re the first trans-racial ethnic group in America. They have that range of colors. And as they penetrate, I know this is controversial but whatever you can say about the great number of Asian and Latinos folk who have come to this country and who have been in this country for along time as well, and who are growing in proportion as well, whatever you will say about them, they did not come here to become part of a racially identifiable minority group in the model that African Americans have been confined, some say continue to confine themselves. That’s not what they came here to do, in fact, that’s not what they’re doing.
And so, that moral thing I think is the hope and I think it is what’s going on in the culture and what you see on television, whether it’s Tiger Woods or my favorite, Derek Jeter of the NY Yankees, people who are just in the business of being themselves, as distinct individuals. Or even Oprah Winfrey, another important person in this phenomenon, {these people} create conditions for a kind of leadership that really can change some things.
And to end that point, I think about the first black president of the United States. Bill Clinton. You know, and we kind of laugh and so on but that’s a kind of hyperbole in a way. But there is an underlying point. Because we can have a white Southern guy who is straight up and unequivocal about the fact that part of who he is is black, an important part of who he is. And it’s not just talk but it’s something that he walks. My business takes me to 126 street in Harlem a couple of times a week these days and I get a kick out of the idea that, hey Bill is next door, right next to the Apollo. That sort of thing to me is the future.
The future is not necessarily black folks leading black folks, Latino folks leading Latino folks, Asian folks leading Asian folks, it’s eventually about any number of those folks leading everybody in this society and having the opportunity to lead them in this society. They now do so to a remarkable extent in popular culture, leading that way across racial lines and I think it increases the conditions for that same kind of leadership in political and social.