ADWEEK quotes me for diversity, bias and Obama piece

So Mark Dolliver, an editor from ADWEEK, one of the nation’s more prominent business trade mags hits me up the other day with a couple of questions. He’s working on a piece about the impact of Obama on race-relations among consumers and ad industry professionals and is looking for different viewpoints to round out his piece. So I spit my 2.5 cents…

Here’s the result, from Dolliver's, "Double Vision."

Double Vision: The Race Issue Revisited

Ads may suggest that the race issue is behind us, but black Americans know that it isn'tJuly 14, 2008:

To the post-racial Promised Land:

UCLA's Hunt compares it to the differing ways in which black and white people viewed The Cosby Show and its very successful Huxtable family. White viewers saw an America that had moved beyond race "and it made them feel very progressive that they were inviting this African American family into their homes every week," he says. Black viewers enjoyed the show as well, "but it also didn't seem realistic to them. It was something on the verge of a fantasy. The feeling was, maybe we can look at this more as a goal than as a reality now." Something similar is likely going on in perceptions of Haysbert's Allstate commercials, he suggests. "Whites may see a post-racial society, while African Americans see it more as somewhere we'd like to go," he says.

Hadji Williams, a former copywriter whose 2005 book Knock the Hustle garnered attention in advertising circles, offers a sterner take on the whole genre of advertising that presents a post-racial Eden at which the country hasn't really arrived. "There's something kind of ironic about a 90 percent white industry presenting anything as 'aspirational' to ethnic consumers, most of whom they choose not to hire/work with, live near or associate with," he says.

As for how consumers react to such advertising, he notes that "there are people from all ethnic backgrounds who see ads that reflect a 'post-racial' view -- the notion that we've gotten over race, as if being black is some sort of nuisance or social crutch -- as an aspirational fantasy. There are also those who are irritated by work that portrays the Grey's Anatomy world where race/ethnicity are never mentioned, much less discussed, as disingenuous and not based on the reality that most live in."

There's a multi-ethnic consensus, reflected in a recent Economist/YouGov/Polimetrix survey, that the topic of race attracts too much chatter. But as Williams says, this sentiment reflects a wide range of motives. "I think everyone wants to move on, but for different reasons -- some because they feel that being black is always going to be an uphill battle until it isn't, and others because they don't want to have an honest discussion about why it's an uphill battle," he says.

If advertising tends to present a comfortable notion that we're all leading the bourgeois good life together, the real-world economy is a perennial wild card in shaping the way ethnic groups get along. Will rising income inequality end up yielding more solidarity between working-class white people and their black counterparts? Teixeira has his doubts. "Solidarity along class lines has always been less strong in the U.S. than you suspect it should be," he says. His take is broadly in sync with the findings of a recent Newsweek poll of white registered voters. Asked whether "you feel like you have a lot of common interests with blacks in your social class," just 30 percent said they do; 49 percent said they have "some" interests in common.

Looking ahead, McWhorter suggests we're in a transitional phase in the way people feel about race as a national obsession. In the short run, "I suspect that where we are going is whites feeling ever more that it's time we blacks get over it, while an ever shrinking population of blacks continue hoping that whites will change their tune and 'wake up,' " he says. But this too shall (eventually) pass. "In about 50 years," he adds, "we will be so hybrid a nation that any idea of black-white relations as a major problem in need of address will seem archaic."

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Now if you want to read the article in full, here’s the link:

ADWEEK. http://www.adweek.com/aw/special-reports/other-reports/index.jsp

Check it out. It’s a good, provocative little read.

Thanks to M. Dolliver for the look.