16057: Inclusive Musical Sings With Latent & Blatant Exclusivity.

 

“Interracial Couple In A Cheerios Ad” is explained as follows:

 

Two comedians and advertising creative directors, David Roth and Yuriy Mikhalevskiy, have launched a music video teasing the advertising industry for its awkward treatment of race and social issues. The video is called “Interracial Couple in a Cheerios Ad” and is self-funded, not affiliated with the Cheerios marketing team.

 

Inspired by Walmart’s Juneteenth-flavored ice cream, Salesforce’s non-binary corporate mascot Astro, and Kendall Jenner’s BLM Pepsi ad, plus countless displays of performative inclusivity in meetings, the creative directors were inspired to poke fun at the industry.

 

Their Cheerios commercial is the opening number as they hope to fund a full-length Inclusive Musical which includes other songs like “Pride Month’s A-Comin’,” “New Black Lesbian Hire,” and “You’re Absolutely Right, But You’re White.”

 

This promotional project appears to represent the song-and-dance that White advertising executives routinely perform to conceal and/or deny their feelings of White Fragility, White Genocide, White Guilt, White Privilege, White Rage, and White Supremacy. The vanity URL—InclusiveMusical.com—links to an Indiegogo page for like-minded investors to provide financial support.

 

Yet even in this video scenario, the decision-making partners are White advertising agency leaders and racially/ethnically ambiguous clients. Can’t help but wonder if “Interracial Couple In A Cheerios Ad” is a parody or unintentional investigative documentary.

 

 

12174: Wondering About Whiteness.

In his recent USA TODAY interview, Silicon Valley Pioneer Ken Coleman wondered, “The real question is, what might I have done or been if I had been White?” Madison Avenue Pioneer Roy Eaton was told at his first interview, “If you were White, I’d hire you immediately.”

Another question to consider: “What if all of Coleman’s and/or Eaton’s White peers had been Black (or held to the standards placed upon Blacks)?” Imagine how some of the Whites might have fared if they had been restricted, scrutinized and judged—and expected to perform at the same ultra-extraordinary levels as Black executives of the times.

Stereotypical gripes surrounding diversity include the concern that hiring minorities would lessen the quality of the overall workforce. This belief is pure bullshit. Eaton, for example, was far more than a jingle writer—he was a renowned, classically trained composer and musician. His mother inspired him with the notion of doing 200% to get credit for 100%. If White candidates had been required to match Eaton’s credentials and qualifications—and consistently deliver 200% for 100% credit—just think of how high the quality of the overall workforce would have risen.

Perhaps the question should simply be, “What might I have done or been if I had not faced institutionalized discrimination and racism from Whites?”

7930: White Fright Takes Flight.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

White fright simmers in summer of anxiety

One crucial element of the American subconscious is about to become explicit and highly volatile. It is the realization that a white United States is within thinkable distance of a moment when it will no longer be the majority. This awareness already exists in places like New York and Texas and California, and there have been projections of when different nonwhite populations will collectively outnumber the former white majority. But it also exerts a strong subliminal effect in states like Alaska that have an overwhelming white preponderance.

Until recently, the tendency has been to think of this rather than to speak of it—or to speak of it delicately, lest the hard-won ideal of diversity be imperiled. But nobody with any feeling for the zeitgeist can avoid noticing the symptoms of white unease.

For example, so strong is the moral stature of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement that even the white right pretends to emulate it. Thus, I find that it is really quite rare to hear slurs against President Obama that are based purely on the color of his skin.

But it is increasingly common to hear allegations that Obama is foreign-born or a Muslim. And these insinuations are perfectly emblematic of the two main fears of the old majority: that it will be submerged by an influx from beyond the borders and that it will be challenged in its traditional ways and faiths by an alien and largely Third World religion.

This summer, then, has been the perfect register of the new anxiety, beginning with the fracas over Arizona’s immigration law, gaining in intensity with the proposal by some Republicans to amend the 14th Amendment so as to denaturalize “anchor babies,” cresting with the row over the “ground zero” mosque, and culminating with Glenn Beck, a quasi-educated Mormon broadcaster calling for a Christian religious revival from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

At the last Tea Party rally I attended, earlier this year at the Washington Monument, I stood behind signs that read: “We left our guns at home—this time” and “We invoke the First Amendment today—the Second Amendment tomorrow.” But Beck’s event was tepid by comparison: a call to sink to the knees rather than rise from them. The overall effect was large, vague, moist and undirected: the “Waterworld” of white self-pity.

The Washington Post quoted Linda Adams, a Beck supporter from Colorado, who said, “We want our country to get back to its original roots.” She also told the paper that “her ancestors were on the Mayflower and fought in the American Revolution.” She was upset that some schools no longer require students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Well, the U.S. population is simply not going to be replenished by Puritan pilgrims from England, and the original Pledge of Allegiance was fine with most people as a statement of national unity, until its “original intent” was compromised by a late insertion of the words “under God” in the McCarthyite 1950s. But one still sees what she means and can feel sympathy with the pulse of nostalgia.

In a curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one.

What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in the U.S. or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated? Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned?

It’s not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.

Saturday’s rally was quite largely confined to expressions of pathos and insecurity, voiced in a sickly and pious tone. The emotions that underlay it, however, may not be uttered that way indefinitely.

New York Times Syndicate

7371: The Young And The Clueless.

Check out this March 2009 video produced by Ad 2 Tampa Bay’s AdCast. The presentation and subsequent blog post deliberately and unknowingly reflect the industry’s diversity issues. That is, professionals clearly recognize that problems exist. Yet they seem baffled by the realities, unable to grasp and devise solutions. And ultimately, they don’t appear to be very concerned about it all.

6591: T.G.I.F. & T.I.

In the Black with a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• Brazilian President Luiz Inacio blasted “white people with blue eyes” for the economic woes in the world. Aiming his barbs at the European Union and the U.S., Inacio declared, “This crisis was caused by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who thought they knew everything and now show they know nothing.” When asked to elaborate, he replied, “I only record what I see in the press. I am not acquainted with a single Black banker.” Can’t even come up with a joke for this one, folks.

• Sears and Kmart are updating their websites to create more user-friendly experiences, allowing visitors to easily view items from both stores without clicking back and forth. For an even better experience, customers are encouraged to click Walmart.com.

• Charter Communications, the nation’s fourth-largest cable company, filed for bankruptcy. Customers are encouraged to click Comcast.com.

• T.I. was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for trying to buy machine guns and silencers. Machine guns and silencers make a weird combination. And the sentence seems light. After all, Foxy Brown got a similar sentence for attacking someone with a cell phone—without a silencer.

5493: Shades Of Whiteness.

From The Chicago Tribune…

The white vs. off-white election

By Meghan Daum

If you’re white and you like stuff, maybe you’ve bookmarked the Internet blog Stuff White People Like. The creation of Christian Lander, a 29-year-old Culver City, Calif., copywriter, it’s an ever-growing list of the kind of privileged preoccupations that traditionally are coded “white.”

Examples include not having a TV (“The No.1 reason why white people like not having a TV is so that they can tell you that they don’t have a TV.”), indie music (“To a white person, being a fan of a band before they get popular is one of the most important things they [sic] can do with their life.”) and, a bit abstrusely, awareness (“White people … firmly believe that all of the world’s problems can be solved through ‘awareness.’”).

To date, there are 99 items on Stuff White People Like.

Barack Obama, at No. 8, was among the first entries. Guess who is not on the list?

Somehow, Hillary Clinton, whose campaign now coasts on the fumes of a particular variety of white voter (the fuming kind), has failed to meet the rigorous standards of Stuff White People Like.

The reason, of course, is the same reason clichés such as mayonnaise and square dancing don’t make the cut either. The one thing Clinton has over Obama, which she has clumsily described as “hardworking Americans, white Americans,” is that certain white people like her more. But, to borrow a phrase from Lander and company, they are “the wrong kind of white people.” Could that mean they’re barely “white” at all?

Clinton’s white voters lack the salient feature of the white experience—privilege. As Stuff White People Like suggests, privilege now functions as a rarefied club that excludes people based not on their skin color but on their economic status, personal tastes and aesthetic sensibilities. The Web site tips toward progressive emblems of privilege (public radio), but because plenty of Republicans like iPods and farmers markets, it’s safe to say the actual cohort is bigger than that (or at least could support a sister site about white love for McMansions, mega-churches and golf). Yes, this club is still called “white,” but as time goes on, that whiteness becomes more conceptual than literal. You don’t have to be white to be white. You just need enough disposable income and the desire to buy the lifestyle accessories and adopt the points of view that were once exclusively associated with it.

So where does that leave Clinton’s last-ditch voting bloc? Barred from this new whiteness (and apparently unwilling or unable to make common cause with others who are also outside the pale), the people who handed Clinton a decisive victory in West Virginia have been stripped of so much social currency over the last few decades that you wonder if a new racial category—called “off-white” perhaps?—is about to emerge.

How else to explain the air of irrelevance that swirled around the primary? Granted, no one expected a nailbiter, but watching the media coverage, most notably the news clips in which one voter admitted to being “sort of scared of the other race” and another cavalierly insisted Obama was a Muslim, was to feel like the whole state had been written off as one big trailer park through which Clinton would take a final joy ride.

Some of that dismissiveness may be the result of the near-impossibility of Clinton getting the nomination. But it also may be a reflection of the way that, in the last 50 years, white people without college educations have gone from being the most dominant segment of American society to the most ignored.

A recent Brookings Institution paper on the decline of the white working class points out that in 1940, whites without a four-year college degree represented 86 percent of the over-25 population. Last year, they accounted for less than half. Moreover, in 1947, 86 percent of American families were white and earning (in 2005 dollars) less than $60,000 a year. By 2005, such families comprised only 33 percent.

But in addition to their dwindling demographic presence and their diminished status, these people constantly battle another head wind: culturally sanctioned mockery. Unprotected by the political correctness that makes deriding other minorities unacceptable or at least uncool, poor whites are often regarded not as people but as mullet-sporting, mobile-home-dwelling vessels of kitsch.

West Virginia had too few delegates at stake to matter much. Still, it’s been easy to get the feeling that some people, particularly those in the Stuff White People Like demographic, have concluded that the place is so backward it doesn’t matter at all.

The problem is, voters like those in West Virginia don’t see it that way. They may represent a shrinking demographic, but, as all the campaigns know, there are still enough of them that they can’t be ignored. The catch is that in an election in which race plays such a prominent role, the greatest tension may not be between black and white but white and off-white.

Meghan Daum is an essayist and novelist in Los Angeles.