Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  Forget data points, history, money, power. Of course race was a construct. And if race, like beauty, was only skin deep, then racism, like ugliness, was just a personal problem to be confessed and corrected. Perhaps this was all the depth that the moment could bear. Was it all that any American race conversation could ever bear?

  Jacobs’s editorial would be her last. She had found her disagreements with Kalman increasingly unworkable. After the race issue closed, she left. Many years later, when she returned to the magazine, she wondered whether she had been naive. Back then she and Kalman had juxtaposed a photo of Blacks in Atlanta beating a white man after the policeman in the Rodney King case had been acquitted against a photo of neo-Nazis threatening a Southeast Asian family on a German subway. Next to this she had written:

  We wish we could step into these pictures and say politely, ‘Hey you guys listen: the differences between peoples and between individuals are humanity’s most valuable resources.’

  We wish that sort of thing worked.

  ‘Hey guys,’ we’d say, ‘imagine a world in which everyone looks, talks, and thinks exactly like you. Everything, absolutely everything—sex, movies, fashion, football matches—would be boring.’ Yeah, we know. Those would be our last words.

  But listen: we said this is in the very first issue of Colors and, unlike Machiavelli, we need to repeat ourselves: Diversity is good.

  IDENTITY’S IDENTITY CRISIS

  A decade before Oliviero Toscani and Luciano Benetton began their collaboration, Susan Sontag had described the image world in which they would be working. Our desire for images was endless, she wrote. We had all become “image-junkies.” “As we make images and consume them we need still more images; and still more,” she wrote. “Images consume reality.”25

  She wrote, “A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex.”

  From this hunger, she argued, a new ideology would rise: “Social change is replaced by a change in images. Freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself.” This cycle was iterative, she concluded, “The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.”26

  A decade after Toscani and Benetton had been working together, not long after Kalman had come aboard, the company had trashed the cardinal rule of advertising—make the buyer feel good. But Benetton seemed to aspire to social significance, and so it found itself alone in the marketing vanguard. An unusual Advertising Age survey was commissioned in 1992, finding that more than 80 percent of U.S. ad industry employees believed Benetton’s approach was ineffectual.27

  At first the dramatically shifting demographics of the North American market had vindicated their instincts. Canadian researchers found that while executives believed they might lose 1 in 5 consumers if they ran ads that included minorities, only 4 percent of consumers were actually turned off. Moreover, 46 percent of consumers of color and 21 percent of all consumers said they were more likely to buy the product if ads featured people of color.28 Benetton had pursued consumerism’s last frontier with more passion than perhaps any other postmodern conglomerate.

  But advertising’s moment is always in the eyeblink, in the languid decisiveness of a dream state, the place that Baudrillard once called the “instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten.”29 Benetton’s success had changed the image world. Toscani had had the right instincts about that moment as well. He knew the image world needed new images. Perhaps instinctively he understood that if capitalism were to triumph, even reality would have to fall before it.

  But his new capitalist realism—in which nothing, not war or racism or misery or oppression, would escape capital’s panoptic eye; in which the masses would be mobilized to transform the world through the marketplace—threatened to collapse under its contradictions. Toscani had argued that if you saw misery and oppression and war in an ad, you would be forced to confront it. But what happened when the buying season ended? When the apocalypse itself became a trend, the moment of social possibility was over, too. It’s hard to get worked up over anything disposable.

  Toscani labored on, earnestly. As Gran Fury and ACT UP were dissolving in the midnineties, he began using Benetton ads to talk about AIDS. He and Luciano Benetton organized a campaign on hunger, a clothing donation program for the Third World. But by 1995 there were only 120 stores left in the United States, down from a peak of 750 during the mid-1980s.30 As Benetton’s profits and stock price slid, Toscani became the scapegoat. In Germany, angry storeowners filed a class-action lawsuit against the company claiming his ads were hurting their businesses.

  Kalman, who had shuttered his company and moved to Italy to work more closely with Toscani, contracted terminal non-Hodgkins lymphoma and left Colors at the end of 1995 with issue eleven, a beautiful Koyaanisqatsi-style issue of pure wordless imagery. He passed away in 1999. Toscani’s own tenure at the clothing company would come to an end a year later. The final offense: a ninety-six-page insert placed in Talk magazine and Benetton stores. Its subject: twenty-six death-row inmates. Toscani had made the politically unforgivable mistake of trying to humanize and individualize the incarcerated men.

  Near the end of his time at the company, Toscani had returned to shooting photos of diverse children against white backgrounds. They had appeared alongside excerpts from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They offended no one. They felt nostalgic. The emerging global hip-hop generation—the image of which all marketers were trying to capture—was both edgier and more optimistic than the children of Benetton had been. The United Colors now signified the diversity that signified nothing.

  Naomi Klein, who had spent her college years absorbed in the antiracist and feminist movements, wrote in No Logo,

  [F]or many of the activists who had, at one point not so long ago, believed that better media representation would make for a more just world, one thing became abundantly clear: identity politics weren’t fighting the system, or even subverting it. When it came to the vast new industry of corporate branding, they were feeding it.

  The crowning of sexual and racial diversity as the new superstars of advertising and pop culture has understandably created a sort of Identity Crisis.

  Why, in other words, were our ideas about political rebellion so deeply non-threatening to the smooth flow of business as usual?31

  If advertising had been desegregated (in its content, at any rate, because the ad industry itself remained overwhelmingly white), if it had made diversity sexy, smart, and aspirational, if the image world had been colorized, then what exactly had been won?

  Back in 1993, after Jacobs had struggled with the question and decided to leave Colors, Kalman had thought hard about it. His half-answer read like a confession: “Instead of accusing Benetton of trying to sell sweaters with images of human suffering, think of their advertising as an exercise in challenging assumptions and raising issues: a media experiment sponsored by a clothing company,” he wrote. Here was where usually Toscani ended his analysis. But Kalman, the former ’68er, the former Marxist, somehow felt compelled to go further.

  “We should value anything that encourages us not to believe in both pictures and the media,” the anti-designer said, exposing capitalist realism on its own terms. “After all, the media are subject to manipulation by the government, police, and business. I’d be lying if I did not say that media is subject to manipulation by Benetton, too. So to be responsible, those of us who work in the media have to tell people not to believe us. In the final analysis, it is the only honest course open to us.”32

  In the nineties, capitalism had at long last embraced its future in identity and diversity. But had it been only a temperature-controlled reverie, something that melted into air once one, jolted awake by the humid pavement rush of the masses, was back out on the hot, flat, crowded streets?

&
nbsp; After the L.A. riots, amalgamation by algorithim—the face of “Eve,” November 18, 1993.

  CHAPTER 10

  WE ARE ALL MULTICULTURALISTS NOW

  VISIONS OF ONE AMERICA

  Must I strive toward colorlessness?

  —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

  In November 1993—twenty months after multiracial looters had filled Los Angeles streets with shopping carts full of shoes, diapers, soft drinks, and stereos; even fewer since the Whitney Biennial had closed and Tibor Kalman’s “What If?” spread ran in Colors—Time magazine featured a computer-generated photo of a coyly attractive, brown-haired, brown-eyed golden lady. This product of amalgamation by algorithm looked uncannily like future CNN “race expert” Soledad O’Brien.

  The Golden Lady’s appearance was a breach into mass consciousness of the long-repressed eugenicist nightmare/liberal fantasy—seen in Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or John Sayles’s Lone Star or Warren Beatty’s Bulworth—a nation united through miscegenation. Just thirty-five years before, a few years before Barack Obama was born, the Gallup Poll had found 96 percent of white Americans opposed interracial marriage.1 She was the belated projection of triumph over the old order. But she could only have been born into a world busily disappearing race into the marketplace. Maybe that was the reason for her silent Mona Lisa smile.

  For those who thought the riots had been a malign virus or a system failure, Kalman’s art prank and this New Face of America might have appeared as a kind of a rebuild. It was all very Baudrillard in Disneyland: history as tragedy, then as farce, finally the farce making history. But for American-led globalization to work, this is exactly what it needed to do: absorb the world’s markets into itself. What was the alternative? More fires?

  As the decade moved forward, multiculturalism began to look less like an insurgency and more like a fait accompli. In the rush to reconstruct America, conservatives became racially liberal; liberals became racially conservative; and through it all, colorization accelerated the creation of new images, new visions of one America. Words could barely keep up.

  Difference was quickly deradicalized. With the image of this new American über-mestiza—the digital sum of what Time had termed the “World’s First Multicultural Society” and Paul Beatty in his post-Black bildungsroman The White Boy Shuffle had called “the monochrome utopia”—America seemed to have acceded to its ethnically ambiguous future. Emphasis on “ambiguous.” It might not be the past of cultural hierarchy that the traditionalists had defended. But it also might not be the future of cultural equity that the multiculturalists had imagined.

  ONE MARKET FROM MANY: GIVE ME YOUR HUNGRY SEGMENTS

  Multiculturalism-as-arts insurrection had run into the buzz saw of elite disdain and was in retreat. Multiculturalism-as-public-discourse would lurch forward and back. But multiculturalism-as-consumer lifestyle only just begun its insinuation at the micro level: colorized Barbies, “ethnic cosmetics,” a sudden efflorescence of flesh-colored crayons.

  There was another name for this phenomenon: market segmentation. After the 1980s, national advertising was less about reaching the mass market than about absorbing all of the as-yet-unincorporated niche markets. Capital had long seen itself, in the words of pioneering adman Albert Lasker, as “making a homogenous people out of a nation of immigrants.”2 Benetton-style globalization extended this logic horizontally; it was about putting all the world’s diversity into the same sweaters. Market segmentation shared the same imperial aspirations, but its logic was vertical. It was about changing the sweaters slightly for each of the different slivers along the entire spectrum.

  The term “market segmentation” was coined by scholar Wendell Smith in 1956. Its first blockbuster success came four years later in the Pepsi Generation ads. Pepsi had shown that smart segmenting could turn a whole industry to its advantage, and that lifestyle appeals could create a more loyal consumer. A decade later, the consumer data revolution had begun in places like Palo Alto’s Stanford Research Institute and Alexandria, Virginia’s Claritas corporation where data miners sliced and diced the flow of information into market segments.

  Claritas’s “clusters” approach, for instance, explicitly tied geography to identity, offering forty different neighborhood descriptions with funny names. It could tell you that dieters tended to live in the places they called “Furs & Station Wagons,” “God’s Country,” “Urban Gold Coast,” “Young Suburbia,” and “Blue-Collar Nursery.”3 It could tell you that in the “Furs & Station Wagons” zip codes, they read Fortune; and in the “Blue-Collar Nursery” codes, they read Lakeland Boating.

  In other words, each segment demanded its own lifestyle, serviced with its own cart of goods. Identity could be eventually reduced to an algorithm finding the sum of all one bought. In this way, identity could be separated from fears and hopes, histories and yearnings, even ethics and values, and could simply be assigned a value.

  Out of many markets, one. Here was a vision of one America as 100 percent sold-in, a summing of the differences. “Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable,” wrote Mark Fisher, even the idea of the nation.4

  This logic might have seemed elementary to anyone whose purchasing power was respected. And yet it would still take decades before people of color became demographically correct to American business, before capital would learn to speak their language, try their dances, and copy their styles in order to help them part with their disposable income. For a long time one size would have to fit all.

  RECOGNITION, IDENTIFICATION, AND INVITATION

  Scholars and publishers began studying the Black market seriously in the 1930s. As the national market expanded, a small number of large companies like Pepsi, Coke, and Sears became regular ad buyers in the Black radio and magazine industries. Yet for the most part people of color were still stigmatized as poor, ghettoized, and brand-indifferent, too insignificant a market to trifle with.

  Market research on Blacks grew again in the 1960s, driven by the political and moral triumphs of the civil rights movement, which had in turn been catalyzed largely by strikes and demonstrations of Black buying power—bus boycotts and counter sit-ins. But experts seemed to find very little to be excited about.

  Business scholars first tried to distinguish the Black market from those of, as one study put it, other “lower-income, lower-educated, and geographically concentrated group(s).”5 In a 1961 study, Henry Allen Bullock argued that all consumers purchased things in order to have the security of “belonging,” but that Blacks and whites had very different motivations. He bulleted his two main points:

  • Negroes want group identification; whites, feeling that they already have this, want group distinction.

  • More specifically, Negroes want to be identified with the general American society and all its peoples, while whites want to remain generally acceptable but particularly exclusive.6

  Bullock illustrated his point by pointing to how Southern whites and Blacks that he interviewed completed the sentence “If I could change the world, I would.…” The list of whites’ most frequent replies included:

  • “Make it so that people would not park in front of my driveway.”

  • “Stop the neighbors’ children from cutting across my lawn.”

  • “Destroy the United Nations.”

  • “Change the Supreme Court.”

  But Blacks said:

  • “Make all people the same.”

  • “Establish brotherhood.”

  • “Do away with war.”

  • “Break down segregation.”7

  To Bullock, consumption was key in helping Blacks overcome a sense of inferiority and attain a sense of security. On the other hand, moving the needle on white anger with the desegregationist Warren Court—an opinion apparently so banal that it appeared equivalent to stopping the neighborhood kids from crossing one’s lawn—was far beyond the scope of an advertiser. So Bullock’s central research question was tailo
red accordingly: “How can advertisers win Negro identification while avoiding white alienation?”8 Bullock called his solution “integrated advertising”—companies only needed to carve out one smartly designed campaign for all of America.

  In a later study, published the year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, white researchers found that Black men liked Scotch whiskey because it made them feel rich. On the other hand, they learned that department store shopping made Black women anxious. In their view, the Negro problem was wholly one of assimilation.

  “Negroes as a group have accepted the values of the majority white middle-class culture, but are at a disadvantage in acquiring the goods which represent some of these values,” the authors Raymond Bauer, Scott Cunningham, and Lawrence Wortzel wrote. “In other words, the basic dilemma of Negroes is whether to strive against odds to attain these middle-class values (and the goods which come with them), or to give in and live without most of them.”9

  This kind of scholarship caused a frustrated Black public relations pioneer named D. Parke Gibson to publish a book-long pitch, The $30 Billion Negro. What the Negro wanted in the marketplace, he wrote, was the same thing he wanted in American society: “recognition, identification, and invitation.”10

  Writing not long after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Gibson argued for a cold realism around race, free of assimilationist illusions. “There is little likelihood that in the near future the Negro community in the United States will be absorbed into the white community,” wrote Gibson, “and this is the basis upon which business and industrial management will have to operate in the sale of goods and services to this expanding market segment.”11