Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  America has lived for decades with this myth that mixing races lowers property values. In fact, the opposite may be true. Some studies from the 1970s showed that mixed-race neighborhoods, if they could stabilize, held their property values better than homogenous ones. If anyone can live in a particular neighborhood, then it has a larger customer base. On top of which, quality mixed-race housing is an incredibly scarce resource. When demand is greater than supply, prices go up. Joe Beckerman bought his place at $25,000, furnished, and now he’s sitting on a quarter million in equity. Other residents attest to home values that have increased five- and tenfold as well. “Best investment I ever made” is a phrase you hear a lot around here. “If I put up a sign listing my house for $140,000,” Calvin Williford says, “I would have an offer in a couple of days. If I put it at $130,000, my phone would ring off the hook. My neighbor sold her house in forty-five minutes.”

  Capitalism: it actually works sometimes. If only America would let it.

  Before leaving Kansas City, I thumb through the local white pages on a whim and discover, somewhat to my surprise, that I have one last stop to make. I check out of my hotel, drive into town, and head south in search of 7530 Troost Avenue, still listed as the home of Bob Wood Realty.

  From the outside, it’s what you’d expect: a run-down, two-story office building. Red brick with a tacked-on facade of columns, the whitewash cracked and peeling. Inside, the cramped hallways are a sad and dingy shade of beige. All the offices seem either closed or vacant, but there’s activity on the second floor. I go up and poke my head into the only room with any lights on. Half-opened boxes line the floor. Bubble-wrapped shelving units lean against the wall, awaiting assembly. New tenants. Behind the reception desk, a black guy about my age is busy unpacking and setting up a fax machine. “Can I help you?” he asks as I wander in.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m looking for Bob Wood.”

  “The Realtors?” he says. “They’re gone. But I can tell you all about Bob Wood.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Because I lost my house in a subprime balloon mortgage Bob Wood sold me ten years ago.”

  Wood’s been dead a few years now, it turns out, still hanging around the white pages like an infection. The properties he managed in his slumlord days are still around, too—run-down houses that attract marginal tenants and cause headaches for the neighborhood. I talked to some of the neighborhood cops on 49/63’s safety committee, and they say whenever they get a call for a domestic disturbance or some other unpleasantness, odds are good it’s coming from an old Bob Wood house.

  Despicable as Wood may be, it’s important to make one small point in the man’s defense: from blockbusting to slumlording to subprime lending, most of what he was doing was perfectly legal at the time he was doing it—not just legal, but explicitly encouraged by the federal government and the real estate industry’s leading trade organization. And even where Wood’s actions were illegal on paper, authorities were purposefully denied the enforcement tools that might have shut him down. The problem was with the housing market and the people we elected to regulate it for us. Bob Wood was just an asshole.

  “It takes a long time,” Joe Beckerman says. “As you can see today, it takes generations to get people thinking differently about their fellow man. All the country clubs I’ve ever belonged to, people always say, ‘You live where?’ Or, ‘Do I have to bring a gun over there?’ But I tell them I live in a great neighborhood. I’ve got black neighbors, Asian neighbors, a socioeconomic strata from people on food stamps to people that make a quarter of a million dollars a year, and that’s the way the world is. That’s very important to me and my kids, who are very much that way, too. Forget about the neighborhood, it’s about how you think about the other person.”

  To sift through the census data for 49/63 and ask “Is the neighborhood integrated?” is to pose the wrong question. The only question you can ask is “Who in the neighborhood has integrated?” Ruth Austin has. Helen Palmer has. The woman with the littering problem has not. A lot of the white folks west of Troost haven’t, either. It’s entirely possible that 49/63 will gentrify, drive out older residents, and lose all its character. It could also backslide into urban decay, sending families with children out the door. The relationships in the neighborhood will decide. “True integration,” as Martin Luther King said, “will be achieved by true neighbors who are willingly obedient to unenforceable obligations.”

  If you turn on your television these days, you hear a lot of old white people talking about this “real America,” some apple-pie, Bedford Falls, Walt Disneyfied idea of a simpler country, a “time of innocence” that we’ve lost. They’re right. It’s gone. We destroyed it so we wouldn’t have to share it with black people. We gave up real neighborhoods in real cities so we could pay more to have “protection” inside the regional profit silos of HomeServices of America. We gutted Blue Hills, and now you have to go to Orlando to buy it back. Only that’s the big lie at the heart of the J. C. Nichols dream. Desirable associations aren’t something you can buy. They’re something you have to make.

  There’s only one way America’s neighborhoods will begin to integrate: people have to want it more than vested public and corporate interests are opposed to it. And more people should want it. Mixed-race, mixed-income housing is a product we need on the market. It’s the only real solution to segregated schools, for one. So how do you sell that idea to a country still beholden to outdated stereotypes and fears? The same way J. C. Nichols did. You advertise it.

  [PART 3]

  WHY DO BLACK PEOPLE DRINK HAWAIIAN PUNCH?

  [1]

  The Old Boys’ Network

  “Some fifty years ago, the late, great Nat King Cole, when Madison Avenue had canceled his groundbreaking TV show, said that Madison Avenue was afraid of the dark. Well, it’s 2009, and dark still ain’t gettin’ it on Madison Avenue.”

  Big applause.

  “Madison Avenue is like the segregated graveyards of the South where unrecognized and unnamed black people and their talent and ambitions lie buried.”

  “Amen!”

  “The money that we spend as consumers drops to the bottom line of the companies that we support, these Pepsis, these AT&Ts, these Johnson & Johnsons, these Procter & Gambles. They take that money and it becomes their advertising budget and with that money they subsidize the growth, proliferation, and ascendancy of white media, which does nothing more than advance and perpetualize and institutionalize white supremacy in America!”

  “Tell it!”

  I’m not in church. It’s July 12, 2009, and I’m in a conference room at New York’s midtown Hilton Hotel for the centennial convention of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, legal architects of Brown v. Board. In the coming days, dozens of panels and seminars will convene here to reflect on the past hundred years of race relations in America—and to plan for the next hundred. The week will end with a roof-raising speech from the freshly inaugurated President Obama. The event I’m attending at this moment is a Continuing Legal Education seminar. The topic at hand is workplace discrimination in America’s advertising industry.

  “You’ve heard of a show called Mad Men? Well, I think it should be Gone With the Wind, ’cause there ain’t no difference.”

  Up on the dais, a panel of lawyers, activists, and disgruntled former advertising employees are all taking turns lambasting the hostile, unconscionable racism they’ve experienced in the business. At the microphone just now is Sanford Moore, onetime account executive at the BBDO ad agency.

  “Madison Avenue is the last bastion of corporate segregation in America. They’re the Men in the Gray Flannel Sheets, and it’s time to take the hoods off!”

  Crazy applause. Emotions in the room are running high, because the NAACP is getting ready to sue the crap out of some white people.

  From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, the dearth of black faces in the ad business was not a matter that received much public att
ention. Part of the problem, as one lawyer here explains it, is that there weren’t enough black people in advertising to get mad about the fact that there weren’t enough black people in advertising. Over the past decade, that has changed. (The getting-mad part, not the having-enough-black-people part.) In January 2009, the NAACP launched the Madison Avenue Project, which is having a coming-out party here at the centennial convention with the very ambitious slogan “Ending racial discrimination in America’s advertising industry.”

  “Madison Avenue” is the colloquial catchall term for the advertising industry; the name derives from the fact that the nucleus of the industry was once located along that particular stretch of midtown Manhattan, much like investment banks are associated with Wall Street. Today, the industry is no longer clustered geographically. It’s clustered corporately. Eighty percent of America’s ad agencies are consolidated within four major holding companies—WPP, Publicis, Interpublic, and Omnicom. They’re the ones on the hook, as far as the NAACP is concerned.

  A few months back, the Madison Avenue Project published an extensive report on minority hiring patterns in the four conglomerates. The median share of employment for black managers and professionals in advertising is 5.2 percent, but that includes black-owned agencies that specifically target the black consumer market. Once you factor the black agencies out, the percentage is substantially lower. Then, once you move beyond the back office and into the upper-level creative and client-facing positions—the writers and art directors who actually make the advertising, and who make the real money—the numbers fall off a cliff. According to the economists who compiled the NAACP’s report, the black-white employment gap in advertising is 38 percent worse than the U.S. labor market as a whole. When the study was published, USA Today called Madison Avenue “the poster child for the death of diversity.”

  Employment figures aside, what advertising has, ironically, is an image problem. It is seen as a “racist industry” in the same way Vestavia Hills is seen as a “racist suburb”; the business doesn’t so much practice discrimination as it is discriminatory in its nature. Today’s hit TV show Mad Men, about the lives of advertising professionals in the 1960s, has drawn critical raves for its portrayal of that era’s retrograde racial and gender politics. It’s also proven to be a handy visual aide for those who insist that the business has barely changed since. Whole websites exist just to vent frustration about the deplorable state of race and advertising.

  Madison Avenue is Whiteytown. It is, according to Sanford Moore, “The last business where undereducated, undercredentialed white people can make big money.” On this point he is certainly correct. I should know. The poster child for undereducated, undercredentialed white people making big money in advertising is the author of this book.

  Advertising used to be a closed shop. On the creative side, agencies took on very few entry-level hires, weeding out most of them with a brutal apprenticeship process. Anyone who got in the door to begin with probably came from one of a handful of places: the expensive portfolio schools that feed the industry or the social class of friends and relatives of people already in the industry.

  In 1964, the Civil Rights Act banned discrimination in the workplace “on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” But the law didn’t say what discrimination was, just that you couldn’t do it. Since the act of hiring or promoting someone is discriminating in and of itself (i.e., choosing one person over another), arresting bias in the workplace has always been a hit-and-miss proposition. And as racial attitudes have slowly improved, overt discrimination has become that much harder to document and prosecute. For the fight against workplace discrimination to continue, new legal standards are constantly seeking judicial precedent.

  Lawyers for the NAACP are offering a standard they call “second-generation discrimination,” hiring based on “informal social groups that over time tend to exclude nondominant groups.” The NAACP isn’t really after the four media conglomerates. They’re after the old boys’ network that feeds them. The guy they’re after, really, is me.

  I wasn’t born a member of Madison Avenue’s elite club. “Tanner Colby” is really just poor white trash who cleans up okay. My working-class grandparents were born to Louisiana sharecroppers; I’m only two generations and a college diploma away from a life of subsistence farming in the swamp. But eighty years and a piece of paper will get a white guy in America pretty far. I graduated from college in the 1990s, the early Stone Age of the Internet. Media outlets and major retailers were just making their first tentative forays onto the web. Few, if any, were turning a profit. Still, certain visionaries proclaimed, if people can look at it then you can sell advertising on it, which means eventually it has to start making money. “Interactive advertising,” people were calling it. Clients wanted it, and since nobody really knew what it was, if you were standing in the right place at the right time, people would throw money at you for no reason at all. Compared with the hardship of today’s job market, it seems almost criminal that we had as much luck and opportunity as we did.

  In 1999, I lived in New York. I had a history degree and not a whole lot going on. I knew almost nothing about the Internet and even less about advertising. I did know one thing, though: I knew somebody who knew somebody. I knew an actress who was dating my college roommate and who happened to be temping as an admin at the Ogilvy & Mather agency. When she heard that the interactive advertising department was looking for writers, she offered to pass on my résumé and writing samples. Two weeks later I was a copywriter at an ad agency.

  For a brief window, Madison Avenue’s closed shop was wide open. You could get a job in interactive advertising if you could write your name in the sand with a stick. And once you were in, you were in. My cubicle-mate had a degree in furniture design, not web design. Didn’t matter. He knew somebody who knew somebody, too. One colleague of ours got in because somebody remembered him as “that guy who writes those funny emails.” One of our art directors had some experience in traditional advertising, but wasn’t really up on the web stuff when she got hired for interactive. “I remember designing an email for Sears,” she tells me. “I didn’t know what an email was.”

  And if you did know computer stuff, you could pretty much write your own ticket. I had one friend who’d taught himself those digital animation programs while he was trying to get his rock band off the ground. With that, he was billing the agency as a computer animator at four grand a week. And since he was hired by a pal, he’d never even given anybody a résumé. “For all anyone knew,” he says, “I might not have graduated from high school.” Of course, all of us had graduated from high school. And college. But nobody really needed to check because we’d all gone to the right colleges, which is how we all knew one another. Everybody hired everybody they knew, and everybody that everybody knew was white. Or Asian.

  At the exact same time this was happening, in the spring of 1999, Representatives Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-MI) and James Clyburn (D-SC) of the Congressional Black Caucus began publicly denouncing Ogilvy & Mather, expressing “alarm” over the agency’s “lack of diversity.” Ogilvy was, at that point, a contractor for the federal government, responsible for making all those commercials to get kids off drugs that don’t actually get kids off drugs; as such, affirmative action law mandated that a percentage of the agency’s workforce be composed of minorities and that a percentage of all government accounts be subcontracted to minority-owned businesses. Whatever Ogilvy was doing, it wasn’t enough. In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order mandating that the allocation of government ad dollars be “fully reflective of the nation’s diversity.” And in 2004, the New York City Commission on Human Rights (NYCCHR) led a protest in front of Ogilvy’s world headquarters in midtown calling for “an end to Jim Crow on Madison Avenue.”

  Ogilvy, of course, was just being made the example for a problem that was industry-wide. Shortly after the protests, the four holding companies agreed to submit to hearings
with the NYCCHR. In 2006, sixteen major agencies came to a voluntary agreement with the city, vowing to increase hiring goals for minorities, particularly in the creative, professional, and managerial ranks. One of the conglomerates, Omnicom, even pledged $1.2 million to fund an executive-level Diversity Development Advisory Committee. Various agencies announced new programs for diversity training and diversity outreach. And come Black History Month, the industry trade papers Advertising Age and AdWeek were all flush with wall-to-wall, full-page ads from ad agencies advertising their passion for, and commitment to, diversity. Two years later, despite its newfound love for diversity, Madison Avenue was still the poster child for its demise, and the NAACP stepped in.