On a sunny Portland day over a decade later, before a crowd of industrial designers, Nike vice president of global design John Hoke III, the company’s creative leader, stood before a projection of a slide that read:
B2B B2C B2ME ME2U
He was giving a primer on the history of American business.
When American advertising and marketing emerged from the crucible of the Industrial Revolution, he explained, its primary purpose was to help sell goods from businesses to other businesses—B2B. Then, as the twentieth century proceeded, the industry matured into the task of selling products directly to consumers—B2C. Brand-building eventually led businesses toward segmentation and embracing identity. Now the Information Revolution allowed sales to be customized to individual consumers. In the B2ME era we were now living in, Amazon knew your tastes better than your spouse.
What was coming next, Hoke said, would radicalize creativity. It would unleash the power of design to the masses, who would transform business as we knew it. “Creativity is the purest of human endeavors. Creativity is the ultimate act of optimism,” he said. Capitalist realism was transforming into something else—a kind of capitalist romanticism.
Hoke described Nike’s experimental iD storefront at 255 Elizabeth Street in Manhattan’s Soho district. There, he said, consumers could design their own sportswear lines using Nike’s parts and pieces. The first run would have a global, post-multicultural slant: baseball-themed gear with graphics and letters that celebrated sport traditions from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Japan, and Puerto Rico. Back in the hot crowded streets, consumers could then encourage friends and others to buy their designed “lines”: ME2U.
In this “conceptual retail destination,” the labor of production was invisible, a phantom act. Our labor no longer defined us. Consumption was the highest form of empowerment. Curating was a higher form of consumption. In this sense the act of creating oneself might be transacted. In capitalist romanticism, being radical was simply a matter of resources and taste.
The NIKEiD concept seemed awfully thin. But where else could they go? After consumerism incorporated formerly ignored markets of youths and minorities, after it shortened the process of mainstream adoption of subcultural stylistic uprisings to blink-time, the only place left to go was inside—to the heart of identity formation. There was no guarantee that this idea could succeed. But Nike was focusing on taming renegade creativity, the realest real thing, at its source. Imagination, the wellspring of identity and culture, was the last space left to privatize.
PRICELESS
This is where the Post Generation found itself in the new millennium, working at the confluence of surging tides—white elites still begrudging their inclusion, older generations doubting their commitment to the race, corporations anticipating their next step.
Kehinde Wiley offered epic high-definition portraits of young Black men, often queer, in the romantic easel-painting style. The pictures were about surface and concept at the same time. They flipped the context of traditional portraiture by depicting nonelite males in classical poses against ornamental, sometimes culturally specific textures that dipped and swung into the foreground. They were perfectly post-millennial hip-hop: low and high, visceral and intellectualized, glossy and flat, garish and beautiful, streetwise and aspirational, Renaissance and Harlem. Wiley’s portraits were power moves: the Black male as object of fascination, awe, and desire.
They were also about a different kind of capitalist romanticism, made possible by the new global circulation of identity in the brand economy. In 2006 he began a series entitled The World Stage, in which he depicted men of color from Senegal, Nigeria, China, India, Brazil, and Israel, countries he chose after reading a Goldman Sachs paper on the world economy of the new millennium. If, as Charles Stone had discovered, multiculturalism was now about whiteness, Wiley offered American Blackness as a stand-in for global non-whiteness.
Not unlike Jay-Z, with whom he was often compared, Wiley managed an easy flow between capital and art. He picked up commissions for Nike, VH1, Puma, Infiniti, and other consumer-goods companies. His division of labor even mimicked flows of global capital. Wiley did the intellectual, top-level work—scouting models, taking reference photos, laying out the paintings, working on the main subject and the foreground. Then he outsourced the completion of the intricate background patterns to studios of painters in China, Brazil, and India.
“These paintings are high-priced, luxury goods for wealthy consumers. I’m opening up studios in different cities, and the price of this painting would save their entire village, much less their individual lives,” Wiley admitted. “How do we interface the market economy with the fact that these objects are rude in their very existence? We don’t. I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can’t fix everything.”42
In Vancouver, the Canadian Aboriginal (Dunne-za First Nations) artist Brian Jungen created an alternative to Wiley’s work in a series called Prototype for a New Understanding. He ripped apart red, white, and black Air Jordans and refashioned the parts into stunning pieces resembling “authentic” Northwest Coast First Nations crow, orca, and warrior masks—authentic, that is, in the white imagination. As critic Cuauhtémoc Medina joked, Jungen was working in a time-honored Native tradition: “If they want masks, why not sell them their own reflection?”43
He constructed blankets from basketball jerseys, aviaries from IKEA magazine files, totem poles from golf bags, sharks and crocodiles from suitcases, whale skeletons from plastic deck chairs, and walk-through turtle carapaces from recycling bins. His process of retooling the products of consumerist excess seemed to summon the postcapitalist utopia of The Communist Manifesto or Adbusters. But Jungen said he had been inspired by the long tradition of Native bricolage, which he called “a counter-logic to colonialists.”44
He did drawings of little wood signs pointing away from each other, as if inspired by Kay WalkingStick’s dialectical diptychs. First Person and Third World read the opposing signs in one, First Nation and Second Nature in another. Jungen’s art suggested post-identity could play wildly in a hall of mirrors.
Between Wiley’s readiness to play the game and Jungen’s refusal, Hank Willis Thomas attempted to stake out a position of principled engagement, informed by personal tragedy. He created a series of photo images he called Branded—featuring the Nike swoosh burned onto Black men’s bodies. He had been devastated by the senseless murder of his cousin, Songha Willis, a charismatic scholar-athlete, “the guy who was good at everything.” Songha was the kind of person who could talk stickup kids stepping to him about his Air Jordans back down into some sense. Yet in the end, he had been shot for his gold chain outside a nightclub while prone on the ground.
At Songha’s funeral Hank had taken a picture of his mourning family. On the photo he superimposed this text:
3-piece suit:
$250
new socks:
$2
9mm pistol:
$80
gold chain:
$400
bullet:
$60
Picking the perfect casket for your son:
Priceless.
Then he affixed the MasterCard logo.
Hank went on to subvert other ads. A vodka bottle became a slave ship in Absolut Power. The Air Jordan logo was roped up and affixed to a tree in Hang Time Circa 1923. He replaced the basketball in one of the logos with a gun pointed at another. “Logos are our generation’s hieroglyphs,” Willis Thomas said. He wanted to appropriate them and the images they came with “to talk about things that advertising doesn’t responsibly talk about.”
These works became part of a series he called Pitch Blackness, a title that captured contradictory themes: his dark mood after Songha’s murder, the intense stoking of desire behind an advertising pitch, the slavery-old notion of the Black body as property, and the role of the artist of color—from Betye Saar’s armed Aunt Jemima to Ellen Gallagher’s alter
ed Black magazine ads to Michael Ray Charles’s fake promo posters for minstrels gone mad—in attacking consumerism’s pacification of identity.
By the end of the decade, in Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968–2008, Willis Thomas was presenting the ad art of Black Cool, largely made by white designers, meant to elicit consent from minorities who lacked positive representation. But he stripped the art of their copy, leaving only images that haunted a complicated Post Time.
Here was a 1969 ad of a man posing shirtless like Jack Johnson, flexing his chest and arms, wearing plaid slacks. The words Willis Thomas had erased were “Slack Power.” Another ad featured a white man holding a white-bread baloney sandwich staring covetously at a smiling Black man’s sloppy joe. It was from 1970, two years into the Southern strategy, the start of the desegregation and affirmative action era.
A 1978 ad featured Joe Frazier, not long after his “Thrilla in Manila” victory, leaning over a table, one fist raised like it was a Black Power salute, the other around a glass of milk. Syrup, a bowl of margarine, and stack of pancakes sit before him. He is wearing a feminine blue bonnet, completely demasculinized.
“Race is the most successful advertising campaign of all time,” Willis Thomas said. “We navigate our worlds around it. That’s what’s so fascinating to me.”
THE LAST WORD AND THE FIRST
In 1993, the same year Glenn Ligon and Byron Kim had been reaching new heights of recognition through the Whitney Biennial, the two friends collaborated on a series they called Black and White. The pieces mimicked Kim’s grand Synecdoche. Version 1 was a set of thirty-two chipboards mounted in a grid; the sixteen “black” pieces were hung to the left, the sixteen “white” boards to the right. The black pieces referred back to Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings. The variations in tone and intensity were subtle—Black was black was black was black. But the “white” pieces were ivory, beige, pink, tan, and a range of different shades.
Kim had been especially ambivalent about the reception of works like Synecdoche and Black and White. “I got pegged as ‘the skin guy’ for a number of years,” he said. For him the process was as important as the product. “When I look at it from my point of view, it’s about meeting all these people and then engaging with them in this very idiosyncratic way,” he said. “So the list of names is dear to me.”
By the turn of the millennium, as discussions around post-identity began to swirl, Kim had finally come to terms with Synecdoche’s success. “I made something and people saw it in a different way and I accepted that,” he said.45 He had moved on. Now he was exploring the poetics of painting in works inspired by the glaze of Korean pots or the day and night skies, especially the infinite varieties of blue. When might color, as Raymond Saunders had asked, just be color?
Glenn Ligon was now making neon light sculptures. He had been inspired by David Hammons’s 2002 piece, Concerto in Black and Blue, a piece so powerful it had changed even Black art criticism through Darby English’s influential How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Viewers of the work wandered through a darkened room armed with blue flashlights they could flick on and off. Beyond color, Hammons was moving toward playing with light, the source of sight itself.
Ligon’s most famous light sculptures would feature a single word, the last word and the first, where the conversation ended and where it needed to begin: “America.” He painted the front surfaces of the letters black so that the light—which fluctuated slowly in intensity—could only be thrown backward against the wall. As the pieces were being readied for his triumphant midcareer show at the Whitney in 2011, Ligon joked that critics would continue to read the piece too literally.
“Black America,” he groaned, “blah blah blah.”
Before the 2008 presidential election, Ligon had been pondering a national paradox: even as the United States was waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even as the market was on the verge of complete collapse, American optimism seemed sky-high. How could this be? One day, he came across a newspaper picture of a child in Afghanistan standing amid the bombed ruins of his home, his family dead in the rubble, calling on America to live up to its democratic ideals.
“America just bombed your house, but there’s still this belief in democratic ideas and America as this shining light and this beacon,” said Ligon. “That’s where the piece came from—light that is blacked out. It’s there and it’s not there.”
The other inspiration, he added, came from a well-worn epigraph, a set of very old words: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
The border at Nogales, with Mexico at left and Arizona, right. Photo by B+ for mochilla.com.
CHAPTER 12
DEMOGRAPHOBIA
RACIAL FEARS AND COLORIZED FUTURES
Mi vida va prohibida
Dice la autoridad
—Manu Chao, Clandestino
At the turn of the millennium, the economy was booming. Eminem—the white rapper from the other side of the Detroit tracks—and Shaggy—the Jamaican American immigrant who claimed both Kingston and Brooklyn—topped the pop charts. The culture wars seemed a memory, and the 2000 Census was a revelation.
Non-Hispanic whites had dropped to 69 percent of the U.S. population. Since 1980, the nonwhite population had grown at eleven times the rate of whites. Hispanic and Asian and Pacific Islander numbers had doubled. The key number was thirty-nine. It was the median age of non-Hispanic whites, and the percentage of those under twenty-five who were nonwhite. By 2050, demographers projected, the United States would be a “majority minority.”
As their elders had fought over identity, this generation of youths was being raised on Aladdin and In Living Color, Tupac and Biggie. A national survey of youth’s racial attitudes, jointly designed in 1999 by students and professors at Hamilton College for the polling firm Zogby, found large pluralities of young Blacks and whites supported diversity curricula, desegregated schools, and equal opportunity programs and policies.
But at the same time they expressed a deep pessimism. More than three-quarters described race relations in America as “fair” or “poor.” A majority agreed with the statement, “It’s OK if the races are basically separate from one another as long as everyone has equal opportunities.” Fifty-five percent believed that the United States was “somewhat unlikely” or “very unlikely” to elect a Black president in the near future. Fifty-four percent of young Blacks, compared to 22 percent of whites, chose “very unlikely.”1
The ebbing of the culture wars and the rise of state and corporate multiculturalism had changed everything and nothing. Young people seemed to have decided that diversity was good. But yet another American generation could not begin to discuss how to live together. Just as their elders once had difficulty imagining a post-segregated nation, they could not imagine a future after the culture wars.
THE NEW CITY
Then the September 11, 2001 attacks happened. Suddenly it seemed, Louis Menand wrote, as if “the divisions animating the so-called ‘culture wars’ ran less deep than the cultural warriors supposed … [T]he cultural pluralism that had once seemed threatening became, overnight, an all but official attribute of national identity. Inclusiveness turned out to be a flag around which Americans could rally. It was what most distinguished us from them.”2 Angela Davis called it “multicultural nationalism.”
Black-white relations changed in strange ways. In Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park, a group of Black teens took a break from tossing around a football to talk to two reporters. They slouched in a cooling dusk, relaxed and carefree. They explained that since 9/11, the city looked and felt different, as if suddenly a new racial geography had appeared.
Miqueo Rawell-Patterson, a slim seventeen-year-old from Far Rockaway, said, “Ever since the bombing happened, people [in the neighborhood] have gotten agitated to a higher level than what anybody ever dreamed. The Arabs around my house just closed shop and moved on. I don’t know where they’ve gone.”
Louis
Johnson, an eighteen-year-old from East New York, added that, in the past, “Police would probably racially profile everyone that’s here. But now it seems like they don’t really bother us. They stop everyone that has Middle Eastern features.” He and his friends wondered aloud if the women in hijabs on the subway trains or the shopkeepers on their corner might be terrorists. “I thought of myself as Black before, but now I feel like I’m more American than ever,” he said.
Culture had new uses. From the Hollywood Blacklist to the gangsta rap hearings, opposition to the entertainment industry had launched many conservatives’ careers. But after 9/11, Karl Rove met with more than forty TV and film industry leaders, including heads from Paramount, Viacom, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and the Motion Picture Association of America to discuss seven administration-approved themes. Rove avoided the word “propaganda.” “The word I like is ‘advocacy,’” one attendee said.
The big hit of the TV season, 24, featured a white federal agent charged with protecting a Black presidential candidate from being assassinated by terrorists. Brown-skinned Muslim terrorists lived among us, even got engaged to blond Americans. When the show began airing torture scenarios it may have even influenced the abuses in late 2003 and early 2004 in the Abu Ghraib prison.3
Soon the nation would be plunged into one war, then two, catalyzed to catastrophic action by images of factories of weapons of mass destruction not actually seen but imagined. From intelligence images to real damages—hundreds of thousands dead, bodies physically and psychologically destroyed, human rights abuses accumulated, cities ruined, cultures looted. And, as it turned out, even the new inclusiveness was only flag-deep.
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