14720: We Don’t Need Another Hero Lager Campaign.

This Hero Premium Lager campaign urges Nigerians to never forget their true identities—by drinking beer…?

12401: Cash For Culture.

Hijacking culture is bad enough. But haggling over culture…?

From Ads of the World.

11996: Wukchumni Words.

From The New York Times…

‘Who Speaks Wukchumni?’

Throughout the United States, many Native American languages are struggling to survive. According to Unesco, more than 130 of these languages are currently at risk, with 74 languages considered “critically endangered.” These languages preserve priceless cultural heritage, and some hold unexpected value — nuances in these languages convey unparalleled knowledge of the natural world. Many of these at-risk languages are found in my home state of California. Now for some, only a few fluent speakers remain.

This Op-Doc tells the story of Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language, and the dictionary she has created. I met her through the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, an organization that encourages the revival of languages like Wukchumni. Through training and mentorship, it has supported Ms. Wilcox’s work for several years. Ms. Wilcox’s tribe, the Wukchumni, is not recognized by the federal government. It is part of the broader Yokuts tribal group native to Central California. Before European contact, as many as 50,000 Yokuts lived in the region, but those numbers have steadily diminished. Today, it is estimated that less than 200 Wukchumni remain.

Like most Native Americans, the Wukchumni did not write their language until recently. Although several linguists documented the grammar of the Wukchumni language in the 20th century, Ms. Wilcox’s dictionary is the longest work of its kind. Ms. Wilcox has also recorded an oral version of the dictionary, including traditional Wukchumni stories like the “How We Got Our Hands” parable featured in the film. The pronunciation of the language, including intricate accents, will be preserved, which will assist future learners of the language.

For Ms. Wilcox, the Wukchumni language has become her life. She spent more than seven years working on the dictionary and she continues to refine and update the text. Through her hard work and dedication, she has created a document that will support the revitalization of the Wukchumni language for decades to come. And Ms. Wilcox isn’t slowing down. Along with her daughter Jennifer Malone she travels to conferences throughout California and meets other tribes who also struggle with language loss.

Although Wukchumni is now being taught to tribe members at a local career center, the language still struggles to gain traction and move beyond a rudimentary level. Few seem able to dedicate the time needed to learn Wukchumni and become fluent speakers. Without additional resources and interest, I fear the language, in any meaningful form, may soon exist only in Ms. Wilcox’s dictionary.

11860: Corporate Cultures Clueless…?

The 10 companies with the best corporate cultures were listed in a recent survey. Oddly enough, only one company—Colgate-Palmolive—was also on DiversityInc’s Top 50 Companies for Diversity. Guess corporate culture and cultural competence don’t necessarily go hand in hand.

Here are the 10 companies with the best corporate cultures:

1. Progressive Corp.

2. Range Resources

3. American Electric Power

4. CNA Financial

5. CSX Corp.

6. LinkedIn

7. AFLAC

8. Under Armour

9. Colgate-Palmolive

10. Whole Foods Market

11467: This Is How Latinas Roll.

From The Los Angeles Times…

Latina bicyclists answer macho bike culture with their own chain gang

In many Latino families, women are considered fragile. That doesn’t apply to the members of the Ovarian Psyco Cycles Brigade.

By Denise Florez

Growing up, Evelyn Martinez’s mother didn’t want her to ride a bike.

“She thinks it’s not safe for women to be riding late at night, and cars are dangerous too,” Martinez said.

Moreover, her mother told her: “Bicycles are for men.”

But after a chance meeting last year, Martinez joined an all-female, predominantly Latino cycling group that is both an answer and a challenge to the aggressive male biking culture. Like men’s bike crews, it defies L.A.’s monolithic car culture with an in-your-face ethic, reflected in its name: the Ovarian Psyco Cycles Brigade.

The group says the name “is a play on words intended to be playful and simultaneously create some sort of acknowledgment/acceptance/pride in one’s historically oppressed body.”

Without blushing, the women use “feminine positive” slogans and catchphrases too risque for a family newspaper.

“This is a way to empower ourselves and use language that describes and empowers us,” said Maryann Aguirre, this summer’s group leader.

Martinez isn’t the only one in the group who started riding at a later age because of parental apprehension. In many Latino families, women are considered fragile and must be protected.

“A lot of the times the women that have never had the privilege of riding a bike is because they don’t have the resources, or it’s the fear of physically falling, or no one was there to teach them or motivate them,” Martinez said.

The nine core members are mostly Latinas in their 20s from Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles and Lincoln Heights who work for nonprofits. Each month, they organize a women’s “Luna Ride” during the full moon, usually around their neighborhoods.

Their August ride, the biggest of the year, was a takeoff on Critical Mass, a monthly ride that spread from San Francisco to 300 cities, including Los Angeles. Just over 100 female riders joined the 30-mile ride from the Watts Towers to Hollenbeck Park, making five other stops along the way. They often choose political themes for their trips; July’s was the California prison hunger strike.

The women also sponsor coed rides — although the men might have to listen to a lecture on male privilege and machismo.

Cycling is growing among young women but still lags far behind men’s participation; only one in five riders in Los Angeles is female, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition reported in 2011. The cyclists believe more women will turn out for rides with a female stride.

With male riders, “there’s that whole bro-ish kind of stuff,” Aguirre said. “We’re not about who can ride fastest, we’re about sisterhood.”

One Sunday evening In June, 10 howling and cheering women started off from the Soto Street Metro station for the Supermoon Ride, celebrating the biggest and brightest moon of 2013.

Instead of the typical spandex gear, the women wore skinny jeans, houndstooth and plaid printed tights, studded vests and huarache sandals. Two of the women had T-shirts with the group’s logo, the torso of a woman forming the ovarian “gang” sign: thumb and forefinger touching to represent ovaries and fallopian tubes.

As they passed Cesar Chavez Avenue, a few obscenities rang out from passing motorists. The Brigade didn’t hesitate to respond.

Passers-by occasionally encourage them, including older Latinas who say they never had a chance to ride a bike, Martinez said.

“Older women come up to me and tell me ‘Mija que bueno! Es muy bien ejercicio!’ (That’s so good my daughter! It’s really good exercise),” Martinez said.

Aguirre, 23, is a single mother who started biking two years ago with the group; now it’s her main mode of transportation. She even tows her 5-year-old daughter to day care in a trailer.

Martinez, meanwhile, has lost more than 50 pounds over dozens of rides in her year with the Psycos.

“I wanted to be able to show other women on bikes that your weight, age or size doesn’t matter,” said the 21-year-old. Now her mother wants to learn to ride too.

10570: The Truly Disadvantaged Today.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Revisiting the ‘truly disadvantaged’ 25 years later

By Clarence Page

Twenty-five years after sociologist William Julius Wilson’s important study on urban decline and vanishing marriageable men, poverty is still with us. And we’re finding lots of new ways to argue about it.

Back then, Ronald Reagan-era conservatives were blaming urban “areas of concentrated poverty,” single parenthood and welfare dependency. Many liberals mounted soapboxes to blame racism as their convenient one-size-fits-all explanation.

Wilson, then a University of Chicago sociologist who since has moved to Harvard, offered an alternative view in “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy,” a short book — 176 pages — that stirred hundreds of follow-up studies and changed the national conversation about poverty.

Wilson blamed the decline on post-World War II industrial America and the evaporation of good-paying jobs. Without the resources that enabled two-parent families to sustain themselves, inner cities were left with a new largely dependent “underclass.”

Memorably, the book introduced such new terms as “marriageable men” to describe the shortage of men who were capable economically and otherwise to make good husbands. Even if you agree with social conservatives, as I do, about the importance of two-parent families, efforts to improve the supply of marriageable men have fallen woefully short of demand.

That message echoed at a conference sponsored by the Century Foundation in Washington, D.C., to revisit Wilson’s book on its 25th anniversary. Wilson’s book offered a center-left counterweight to conservative Charles Murray’s provocative1984 book “Losing Ground,” which argued for ending welfare dependency by ending welfare. Murray didn’t get that wish, but his book stirred a national debate that led to the 1996 welfare reform law that President Bill Clinton signed, after vetoing two other harsher bills passed by a Republican Congress.

The good news: Children on welfare dropped to their lowest level in 30 years after welfare reform was passed, helped by the era’s economic boom. The bad news, Wilson said at the Century forum, is that the “underclass” is still with us, although the word has fallen out of political correctness in many circles.

“There is little wrong with our ‘underclass’ that a little time and a lot of jobs would not cure,” I wrote in a column about Wilson’s then-new book. I have since expanded that view. Culture matters, too, I have realized. It doesn’t do any good to offer some people a job if their values don’t lead them to take it. That concerns Wilson, too. At the conference, he and other policy experts explored the importance of “neighborhood effects” that can undermine values and incentives to, for example, pack up and move to where jobs might be more available.

Wilson credited welfare reform and the robust economy of the 1990s with reducing underclass poverty, but noted that poverty has rebounded since 2000. The dip in the 1990s might prove to be only a “blip” in the long-term decline of concentrated poverty communities, he said.

Black prison incarceration also has increased, putting even more of a chill on black incomes, family life and marriageable men.

“Quite frankly I think that (President Barack) Obama’s programs have prevented poverty, including concentrated poverty, from rapidly rising, considering the terrible economy,” Wilson said. He included Obama’s stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which earmarked $80 billion for low-income Americans. It included such emergency benefits as an extension of unemployment benefits, a temporary increase in the earned income tax credit and additional funds for food stamps. It also offered $4 billion in job-training and workforce enhancement programs and $2 billion for neighborhood stabilization efforts, Wilson noted.

Taken together, Wilson said, Obama’s programs exceed the spending on low-income Americans by any of the six previous presidents. “Now given all of this action during Obama’s first term,” in terms of addressing problems of concentrated poverty, Wilson concluded in his prepared remarks, “which presidential candidate would you take your chances on …?” Which one, indeed.

Neither side has all the answers in our national poverty debate. But we need to at least talk about it, before we make the matter worse.

9895: Importing Cultural Cluelessness.

Adweek interviewed Draftfcb Chief Strategy Officer Jamie Shuttleworth, whose mumbo-jumbo about “Importing Culture” completely crystallized his agency’s cultural cluelessness. Bonus points to anyone who can decipher what the fuck Shuttleworth is attempting to communicate.

9679: Defining Latinos.

From The New York Times…

For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture Than Color

By Mireya Navarro

Every decade, the Census Bureau spends billions of dollars and deploys hundreds of thousands of workers to get an accurate portrait of the American population. Among the questions on the census form is one about race, with 15 choices, including “some other race.”

More than 18 million Latinos checked this “other” box in the 2010 census, up from 14.9 million in 2000. It was an indicator of the sharp disconnect between how Latinos view themselves and how the government wants to count them. Many Latinos argue that the country’s race categories — indeed, the government’s very conception of identity — do not fit them.

The main reason for the split is that the census categorizes people by race, which typically refers to a set of common physical traits. But Latinos, as a group in this country, tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of cultural traits, like language or customs.

So when they encounter the census, they see one question that asks them whether they identify themselves as having Hispanic ethnic origins and many answer it as their main identifier. But then there is another question, asking them about their race, because, as the census guide notes, “people of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin may be of any race,” and more than a third of Latinos check “other.”

This argument over identity has gained momentum with the growth of the Latino population, which in 2010 stood at more than 50 million. Census Bureau officials have acknowledged that the questionnaire has a problem, and say they are wrestling with how to get more Latinos to pick a race. In 2010, they tested different wording in questions and last year they held focus groups, with a report on the research scheduled to be released by this summer.

Some experts say officials are right to go back to the drawing table. “Whenever you have people who can’t find themselves in the question, it’s a bad question,” said Mary C. Waters, a sociology professor at Harvard who specializes in the challenges of measuring race and ethnicity.

The problem is more than academic — the census data on race serves many purposes, including determining the makeup of voting districts, and monitoring discriminatory practices in hiring and racial disparities in education and health. When respondents do not choose a race, the Census Bureau assigns them one, based on factors like the racial makeup of their neighborhood, inevitably leading to a less accurate count.

Latinos, who make up close to 20 percent of the American population, generally hold a fundamentally different view of race. Many Latinos say they are too racially mixed to settle on one of the government-sanctioned standard races — white, black, American Indian, Alaska native, native Hawaiian, and a collection of Asian and Pacific Island backgrounds.

Some regard white or black as separate demographic groups from Latino. Still others say Latinos are already the equivalent of another race in this country, defined by a shared set of challenges.

“The issues within the Latino community — language, immigration status — do not take into account race,” said Peter L. Cedeño, 43, a lawyer and native New Yorker born to Dominican immigrants. “We share the same hurdles.”

Read the full story here.

9122: Patriotic Muslims.

From The New York Times…

Muslims Say They’re Loyal Americans, Poll Finds

By Laurie Goodstein

A decade after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a Gallup poll released on Tuesday found that the vast majority of Muslim Americans say they are loyal to the United States and optimistic about the future, even though they are more likely than other religious groups to say they recently experienced discrimination.

Nine out of 10 Muslim Americans said that their co-religionists in the United States were not sympathetic to Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization held responsible for the attacks 10 years ago. Majorities in other religious groups agreed that Muslim Americans did not sympathize with Al Qaeda, although the percentages were much lower.

The poll in many ways contradicts the stereotype of Muslim Americans as an alienated and discontented religious minority. It was conducted by telephone from Feb. 10 to March 11, 2010, and Oct. 1 to 21, 2010, by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center, a Gallup-affiliated research group based in the United Arab Emirates. The poll, which included interviews with 2,482 adults of whom 475 said they were Muslim, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus seven percentage points for Muslims.

“It’s not a completely rosy picture,” said Mohamed Younis, senior analyst with the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies in Washington and a main author of the study.

“The prejudice and discrimination are definitely there, and that’s something we have consistently seen in the data,” Mr. Younis said. “But at the same time many of the people in the Muslim-American community seem to be doing relatively well, and part of their doing well is being able to be full-fledged Americans, to participate in the American experience.”

The poll found that Muslim Americans were the most likely of any religious group to express confidence in the fairness of elections. The researchers speculated that this might be because of their high levels of support for President Obama, who said early in his administration that he would make it a priority to repair relationships with the Muslim world.

Since the terrorist attacks 10 years ago, Muslim Americans have been the target of intense scrutiny by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in counterterrorism investigations. Sixty percent of Muslims said in the survey that they had confidence in the F.B.I. That was fewer than those in other religious groups: about 75 percent of Americans in other religious groups said they had confidence in the F.B.I.

The sphere in which Muslim Americans were most critical of their country is in foreign policy. They are more likely than any other religious group to call the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a mistake. Muslims also have the lowest level of confidence in the United States military of any faith group (70 percent for Muslims compared with more than 90 percent for all other religious groups, with the exception of atheists, with about 80 percent).

Two-thirds of Muslims who were asked the question said that the reason people in Muslim countries have unfavorable views of the United States was “based mostly on what the U.S. has done” — and not “based mostly on misinformation.”

Among the most intriguing findings: two-thirds of American Muslims say they identify strongly with the United States, about the same percentage as those who say they identify strongly with their religion. But other religious groups identified far more than Muslims with the United States. Protestants, Catholics and Jews said they identified with the United States far more strongly than they identified with their respective faiths.

Almost half of Muslim Americans said that they had experienced religious or racial discrimination in the last year. That was far more than the members of any other religious group. About one-third of Mormons said they had experienced discrimination in the last year, putting them second in that category after Muslims. About one-fifth of Jews, Catholics and Protestants said they had experienced prejudice.

On many key questions in the poll, it was American Jews whose answers most resembled those of Muslims. Jews were the most likely of any religious group besides Muslims to say that Muslims are loyal Americans, and that the war in Iraq was a mistake. Jews were just as likely as Muslims to say that American Muslims face prejudice.

9014: Guided Graffiti Tours.

From USA TODAY…

Graffiti tours turn Miami street art into attraction

By Suzette Laboy, Associated Press

Graffiti was once considered a sign of urban decay, the sort of thing that might keep tourists away from a neighborhood. Now, not only is it an accepted art form, but it’s also the subject of a new tour in one of Miami’s trendiest neighborhoods, Wynwood, where legal outdoor murals by graffiti artists cover the walls near art galleries and restaurants.

The two-hour tour — which takes place on Vespas — is offered by a company called Roam Rides. It starts with a 15-minute ride from Miami Beach over the Venetian Causeway to the Wynwood Arts District, considered the mecca of Miami’s emerging arts scene, and includes four or five stops to survey the area’s best graffiti. The tour ends with lunch at a happening Wynwood restaurant.

Once considered a rough neighborhood, Wynwood has become a destination for artists from all over the world. Art galleries abound and events are held here each December as part of the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair. Wynwood is also now home to one of the world’s largest installations of murals by multiple graffiti artists.

“It’s gotten to be so pervasive and it really brightens up the neighborhood,” Kit Sullivan of Roam Rides said.

“It’s so not what you would expect of Miami,” said Jesse Bull, an economics professor who took one of Roam Rides’ recent graffiti tours. “The graffiti has kind of added to that. It livens it up and makes it fresh and artsy and I think that’s a good thing.”

Guides point out work by different local artists — such as Typoe and “Tribe Called Phresh” aka TCP — while explaining the evolution of graffiti from the days when artists plastered their names on vacant buildings and train cars as a way to gain street cred.

These days, building owners give permission to artists to spray paint their designs, and these legal pieces share the walls of dozens of neighborhood art galleries and chic restaurants. They’re easy to distinguish from illegal graffiti, which is often done fast, in secret and at night, with a single color or very few colors. The sanctioned murals, in contrast, allow artists to take their time, use multiple colors and work in-depth in large spaces with elaborate details.

“It’s definitely a changing art form,” Sullivan said. “It’s gotten to the point where a lot of these guys don’t even use their names at all. They just have a certain distinctive style. You can recognize it when you see it.”

For example, artist Chor Boogie’s signature work includes geometric elements and half-hidden faces, as well as an eye.

Major paint companies are even helping graffiti artists make the transition to a legitimate art form by donating spray paint.

“Graffiti has been a bad word in America for a long time. We are trying to change that,” said Jayson Moreira, co-owner of Montana Colors North America, a spray paint company based in San Francisco, which donated 8,000 cans of spray paint used to create many of the murals in Miami during Art Basel. He even helped paint a mural of Japanese girls on the side of a two-story building that was once an RC Cola Plant.

The world of graffiti has its own lingo. Artists “tag” their works with their names. A “throw up” is a quick piece. A “bomb” is usually illegal work that is “thrown up” fast, often at night, in a place that’s difficult to access. “Slashing” is when an artist disrespectfully “throws up” his names over a legal piece. A legally done mural or elaborate work that took days or weeks to complete is considered a “masterpiece.”

Artists looking for a space to paint legally here may seek help from Primary Flight, an organization that has brought hundreds of artists to the streets of Wynwood.

“A lot of people don’t go to museums or aren’t art collectors or art-educated,” Primary Flight founder Books Bischof said. “If you can take the same exact image from a street and put it in the museum, it doesn’t speak as loudly as it would if it were illegally on the street corner or in a gritty part of the neighborhood.”

Oscar Montes, 36, has been painting since he was a young teenager. Better known as Trek6, the artist wanted to pay tribute to his origins and the Puerto Rican community that once made up the Wynwood area, so he painted a legal mural that included a coqui, the island frog named for the ‘ko-kee’ sound it makes at night.

Montes said he spent around $2,000 of his own money on paint — as well as hours of his time under Miami’s hot sun — creating the mural.

Graffiti is changing, he said. “A purist would tell you it’s gotten really soft,” he said. “When I started, everything was illegal. There was (a) serious graffiti task force. They’re less aggressive now because so much of it is legit.”

But while the artists are invited to do their work on buildings and sometimes get donated materials, for the most part they are not paid. Some predict that may change, and that the Miami graffiti community may eventually find fame and profit in their designs, the way artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat did in New York several decades ago.

“That generation is going to bring it to another level where one day,” said Erni Vales, who runs a studio in the arts district, “it’s going to be like Pop Art.”

8980: Twitterasta…?

From Jamacians.com

8972: Joking About Racism.

From The Chicago Tribune…

‘That’s racist’ as a punch line

By Jonah Goldberg

It is the sort of thing those darn kids today say to make fun of their aging Gen X and baby boomer parents.

“That’s racist.”

It’s a comedic catchphrase these days, popularized by an online clip from a 2005 TV show “Wonder Showzen” on MTV2. It’s not as iconic as Gary Coleman’s “What ‘chu talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?” or Fonzie’s “Ayyyyyy” or even Bart Simpson’s “Don’t have a cow, man.” But what it lacks in pedigree, it makes up for in ubiquity and social relevance.

Across the country, it’s a staple of schoolyards, Internet discussion groups, Twitter and sitcoms.

For instance, when a character on NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” explains to a co-worker how to do laundry, he says, “OK, so you always separate your lights from your darks.”

She responds, “That’s racist.”

Perhaps the greatest sign that the punch line has gone mainstream came recently when NPR’s “All Things Considered” reported on “that’s racist.” Correspondent Neda Ulaby explored how a phrase once considered one of the most serious accusations possible has become a gag line. The only problem? It’s not clear she actually gets the joke.

Ulaby relied heavily on Regina Bradley, who teaches African-American literature at Florida State University. Bradley admits her students say “that’s racist” all the time: “They were simply using it to lump discussions of race and race discourse all together. Because they were just saying because we brought up issues of race that was considered to be racist.”

OK, so apparently the reason these kids say “that’s racist” is that they’re not too bright. But, wait, there’s more. According to Ulaby, Bradley also believes that the students are using the joke to establish up front that they themselves aren’t racist. Good for them!

Hold on, another explanation is that kids simply mimic the stuff they see on TV shows like “30 Rock” and “South Park.”

I don’t want to overanalyze, but it seems as if everyone’s bending over backward to come up with the least obvious explanations for a pretty obvious joke.

For instance, here’s Ulaby again, talking about Hannibal Buress, a comedian and writer for NBC’s “30 Rock,” who uses the phrase. “ ‘That’s racist’ works in comedy,” Buress says, “because it pushes buttons.” OK. How does it push buttons? Why does it push buttons?

We’re never told. Instead, we get a NPR tutorial on the persistence of racism. “Scholar Regina Bradley says it also works because racism’s often expressed differently than from a generation or two ago,” Ulaby explains. “The segregated neighborhoods and swimming pools of Bradley’s grandparents have yielded to more subtle forms of discrimination. That’s reflected in how ‘that’s racist’ is being used — to shut down conversations or as a joke.”

But what’s the joke? We don’t find out until a 14-year-old-boy says it plainly: “I think I or other people just sort of do it as a way of mocking people who are overly sensitive about race issues.”

Bingo!

NPR could have done the whole story in 30 seconds. But instead it spent more than five minutes trying to grapple with a wonderful yet utterly inconvenient truth for the ostentatiously liberal network: Young people just aren’t as uptight about race as their parents, never mind their grandparents, are. And, by the way, the days of segregated swimming pools and neighborhoods haven’t merely “yielded” to “more subtle forms of discrimination”; they’ve yielded to — wait for it — less discrimination.

No, racism hasn’t vanished. And the legacy of racism still has a long half-life.

But the simple fact is “that’s racist” is the sort of thing those darn kids today say to make fun of their aging Gen X and baby boomer parents.

It’s also a common joke among conservatives, precisely because we’re used to being called racists for the weirdest things. If I write on Twitter something about how I don’t like “Obamacare,” some fellow right-winger will immediately respond with some variant of “that’s racist!”

And that’s the joke. And the people who’ve spent the last few decades screaming, “That’s racist,” not as a punch line but as a heinously unfair accusation or in an attempt to bully people, don’t seem to get that the joke is on them.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

8699: Confederacy Of Dunces & Dunderheads.

Southern comforts in a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• A new study shows over 38 percent of Southerners still sympathize with the Confederacy. They probably also have aspirations to someday be just like the characters on The Dukes of Hazzard.

• Amazon is offering a Kindle at $25 below the typical cost, provided customers are willing to have advertisements appear along the bottom of the screen. Not sure who is benefiting here. Seems like $25 is not much of a discount for customers. And for advertisers, is the implied message that Amazon will pay people to ignore your messages? Amazon would probably be more successful selling special Kindles in the South featuring a Confederate flag along the bottom of the screen.

8634: Too Many Chiefs.

Advertising Age published a ridiculous column titled, “Want to Retain Talent? Time to Appoint a Chief Culture Officer.” Can’t knock author Lorraine Lockhart for capitalizing on the recent talent management crisis that surfaced at the 4As 2011 Transformation Conference to hype her book—which happens to be a semi-new release in the 4As Management Series. But her basic premise displays a culture cluelessness, likely rooted in an unfamiliarity with agencies today. Otherwise, Lockhart would realize that it will only be beneficial to hire a Chief Culture Officer if agencies simultaneously fire the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Creative Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Diversity Officer and all the other Chiefs who make life unbearable for the “Indians” doing the work.

8528: Culturally Competent Plastic Surgery…?

From The New York Times…

Ethnic Differences Emerge in Plastic Surgery

By Sam Dolnick

At a plastic surgery clinic in Upper Manhattan that caters to Dominicans, one of the most popular procedures is an operation to lift women’s buttocks, because — as the doctor explains — “they all like the curve.”

In Flushing, Queens, surgeons have their attention trained a few feet higher, on upturned noses that their Chinese patients want flipped down. Russian women in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, are having their breasts enlarged, while Koreans in Chinatown are having jaw lines slimmed.

As the demand for surgical enhancement explodes around the world, New York has developed a host of niche markets that allow the city’s many immigrants to get tucks and tweaks that are carefully tailored to their cultural preferences and ideals of beauty. Just as they can find Lebanese grape leaves or bowls of Vietnamese pho that taste of home, immigrants can locate surgeons able to recreate the cleavage of Thalía, the Mexican singer, or the bright eyes of Lee Hyori, the Korean pop star.

They can also find a growing number of doctors offering layaway plans to help them afford operations. If the price is still too high, illegal surgery by unlicensed practitioners is available in many neighborhoods.

As these specialized clinics reshape Asian eyelids and Latina silhouettes, they provide a pore-level perspective on the aspirations and insecurities of immigrants in 21st-century New York — a mosaic portrait buffed with Botox.

“When a patient comes in from a certain ethnic background and of a certain age, we know what they’re going to be looking for,” said Dr. Kaveh Alizadeh, the president of Long Island Plastic Surgical Group, which has three clinics in the city. “We are sort of amateur sociologists.”

Dr. Alizadeh, himself an immigrant from Iran, admits that the results can seem less like science than like stereotyping. Still, he and other doctors who work in ethnic communities say they can scan their appointment books and spot unmistakable trends: Many Egyptians are getting face lifts. Many Italians are reshaping their knees. Dr. Alizadeh says his fellow Iranians favor nose jobs.

And there is no questioning the surge in demand in immigrant neighborhoods, where Mandarin and Arabic are spoken in the operating room and patients range in age “from 18 to 80,” as one doctor put it.

About 750,000 Asians in the United States underwent cosmetic procedures, from surgery to less invasive work like Botox injections, in 2009 — roughly 5 percent of the Asian population, and more than double the number in 2000, according to projections by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Among Latinos, the number was about 1.4 million, nearly 3 percent of that population and a threefold increase from nine years earlier. In 2009, about 4 percent of whites had cosmetic work done.

Read the full story here.

8375: Timket, American Style.

From The Los Angeles Times…

Ethiopian community gathers to celebrate Timket

Immigrants reconnect with their cultural roots in marking Epiphany in the largest such ceremonies in the U.S.

By Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times

Huddled beneath a large white tent, hundreds of people sang together in the early morning darkness. For hours, they repeated a single word: Hallelujah.

They were gathered last Sunday to mark Timket, the Ethiopian Orthodox celebration of the Epiphany. For the faithful, the holiday commemorates Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan and his revelation as the son of God.

Los Angeles’ Timket celebration is the largest in the United States. It takes place over a January weekend each year in a parking lot outside the Forum in Inglewood.

Ethiopian immigrants flock from across the country and Canada to receive blessings from church bishops who wear elaborate beaded cloaks and full gray beards. Organizers say it may be the largest gathering of Ethiopians outside that nation in the Horn of Africa.

The highlight takes place Sunday afternoon, when the bishops dip their crosses into a plastic pool of water and sprinkle it on the bowed heads of believers.

The feeling during the reenactment of the baptism is beyond words, said one participant, Tsehay Tseghun. “It blesses you the whole year,” she said.

Tsehay and some friends were sitting near the tent last Sunday, preparing lunch. They chatted as they trimmed slices of beef that would be cooked with chili peppers, rosemary and onions and piled onto sourdough flatbread.

The festival, she said, goes beyond religion. It’s a chance for Ethiopians to reconnect with their friends, family and culture.

Tsehay, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1980 and lives with her family in Baldwin Hills, grew up in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. She remembers the way Timket is celebrated there.

Schools and shops are closed during the weeklong festivities, she said. And there are splendid processions, in which bishops carry replicas of the Ark of the Covenant, venerated as the vessel that carried the Ten Commandments, on their heads.

In Los Angeles, organizers have made some adaptations. Timket lasts only two days, and replicas of the covenant are brought to the Forum not on bishops’ heads, but in limousines.

Read the full story here.

7997: Interracial Identity Is In.

From The Los Angeles Times…

Where the interracials may take us
Of all Americans, they represent the best opportunity to end identity politics and point America back to its tradition of individualism.

By Eli Steele

We may be in the midst of an interracial baby boom. A recent Pew Research Center study reported that interracial marriages rose from 6.7% in 1980 to a record 14.6% in 2008. If these marriages produce children at the national average, one out of seven Americans could claim two or more races. In Western states where interracial marriage is more common, the ratio rises to nearly one out of four.

The day will arrive when this interracial generation reaches political consciousness and finds itself at odds with America’s divisive identity politics. Of all Americans, they represent the best opportunity to end these politics and point America back to its tradition of individualism.

Most minorities today fall conveniently within categories such as African American, Chinese American or Mexican American. These labels arose during an era of political correctness that literally placed race, ethnicity or religion before national identity. Since the 1960s, minorities have found in their racial identity a preferential gateway into public and private institutions.

Will such identity politics survive the interracial baby boom? Will new categories arise for the African German American or Chinese Latino American? Will a critical mass of interracials become an eclectic race in their own right? Or will they bypass the labels and embrace individualism?

These questions await my children. The birth of my son two years ago, and my daughter four months ago, marks the third interracial generation in my family. At first glance, their names — Shelby Jack Steele and June Rose Steele — signify little. But in fact these are what might be called melting pot names.

Shelby is the name of their paternal great-grandfather, who was born to slaves and married a white woman he met in the early civil rights movement. Jack is their other paternal great-grandfather, who survived the Holocaust and rebuilt his life in New York City. June is their maternal great-aunt, who was a flower child and a direct descendant of the first Mormons. Rose is their paternal great-great-grandmother (great-grandfather Shelby’s mother), a slave who gave birth to 13 children. Rose is also Rosario, their maternal great-grandfather, who raised cattle in the Sonora mountains of Mexico.

Jack and June will grow up hearing stories of their ancestors’ struggles, triumphs and defeats. They will learn how each forebear’s unique journey converges in their blood, giving them no easy allegiance to a single race. Individuals rather than tribes will form the foundation for their individuality.

Then one day a stranger will stare into their faces, unable to deduce a single race in the mix of features: “What are you?” If they are anything like I was when I was growing up, they will begin with their family history, only to be asked again, “But, what are you?” In the age of identity politics, it is not stories but race that matters.

Jack and June may have a hard row to hoe. Identity politics have made racial identity a social currency, rewarded by preferences in college admissions, government contracts and employment. Jack and June have the bloodlines to win preferences. But if they do, they enter into a world where no choice is clean-cut. Do they join the black, Jewish or Latino organizations — or all of them? Do they publicly cultivate one racial identity while privately living free of such categories with family and friends? Or do they come to the conclusion that identity politics cannot offer anything but the pretense of racial purity?

And then the ultimate irony: Jack and June are naturally more diverse than any amount of social engineering in neighborhoods, schools or offices can achieve. They are creations of a high humanism: the love of their parents, grandparents and great-great grandparents. Jack and June are the result that social engineering — integration, inclusion and diversity — often fails to achieve.

My hope is that my children and their peers will restore a weakened American legacy: the self-invented and self-made individual. If they do, they will be free, as their ancestors were, to carve out identities and contribute to an already rich heritage for future generations.

Eli Steele is a filmmaker and graduate student at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. He is developing a documentary on interracial Americans.

7724: Playing With Culture.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Buzz kill

Just as we were getting used to the monotonous drone of the South African vuvuzelas, an even louder din arose from the 2010 World Cup: the whining of players and fans who want to silence the host nation’s traditional stadium horns.

Tens of thousands of the colorful plastic trumpets have been sold every day since the World Cup opened for the first time in an African country. A single vuvuzela (voo-voo-ZAY-la) emits a sound variously described as a bleat, blast, honk or wail; thousands blown in unison produce a buzz that has been likened to a swarm of mosquitoes, a flock of mating geese, a giant kazoo or a sustained bout of flatulence. You can download the ringtone from iTunes. You know you want it.

We’ve noticed that players coming off a disappointing performance are disproportionately likely to grouse that they couldn’t hear their teammates’ shouts or the referee’s whistle. Tough luck. The vuvuzela is essential to the South African football experience. You’re a guest in their country. Act like it.

This controversy reminds us of nothing so much as the local uproar over Blackhawks fans screaming the national anthem. Fair-weather fans tuning in for the first time in almost 50 years couldn’t stand the sight of the hockey faithful doing its thing in its own house. Who asked for their opinion?

The vuvuzela haters claim the horns are a health risk. A team of researchers determined that the noise at one game averaged 100.5 decibels and peaked at 144; doctors recommend ear protection at 85 decibels. The trumpets also spread colds and flu by spraying tiny germ-filled droplets. But still. People who are bothered by germs and noise have no business in a venue that seats 44,000.

Even those watching on television are complaining. They paid $1,800 for that HD model and it’s humming like an old analog. Sound technicians have their work cut out for them, adjusting the mics constantly to amplify the action closest to the ball, but they’re doing a pretty good job of it, and the BBC offers one channel with the horns filtered out. You can get the same effect by watching the Cup surrounded by the table buzz at your local tavern. Or of course, there’s always the mute button.

Cup organizers won’t ban vuvuzelas as long as the revelers don’t blow them during national anthems, throw them on the field or whack each other with them.

”We should not try to Europeanize an African World Cup,” said Sepp Blatter, president of soccer’s international governing body. “Vuvuzelas, drums and singing are part of African football culture. It is part of their celebration. Let them blow it.” In other words, buzz off.

7612: International Cultural Clichés…?

Advertising Age published the story below on military recruitment advertising for Afghanistan. The campaign allegedly taps into cultural insights with efforts that include appealing to one’s sense of pride, inspiring feelings of community and honoring family. In other words, it’s a complete mirror of U.S. multicultural clichés efforts.

U.S. Military Goes Native in Afghanistan Ad Push

Former P&G Marketer Lt. Col. Allen McCormick Turns to One of Few Local Agencies Around for a Positive Campaign Built on Cultural Insight

By Laurel Wentz

NEW YORK — Outdoor, TV and radio ads starring cuddly babies and folkloric warriors are spreading across Afghanistan, a country that’s seen so little advertising that finding a local agency was one of the first hurdles of mounting a campaign. But the U.S.-backed push is using insights into traditional Afghan culture to try to encourage a war-ravaged population to help build a more peaceful nation.

The soldier-marketer behind the effort, Lt. Col. Allen McCormick, is deploying the marketing expertise he gained at Procter & Gamble and other U.S. companies to target Afghan citizens.

“The [U.S.] military does two of three things well—they know who they want to reach and what they want to say, but they don’t know how to say it,” said Mr. McCormick, who is chief of information operations and psychological operations (PSYOP) for the U.S.’s combined joint task force in eastern Afghanistan.

Despite the often dismal situation in the country, Mr. McCormick was interested in seeking a more positive alternative to the messaging already being used by the military and other operators in theater.

“A lot of messages are about countering IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and suicide bombers,” McCormick said. “They use images of death and destruction. I don’t need to show people that in ads—they see enough of it. I wanted to show them something beautiful. The last thing they need is a billboard of a guy carrying the bloody body of his son and saying, ‘Don’t support suicide bombers.’”

A partner
But before dealing with the messaging, Mr. McCormick had another challenge: finding a local agency that could develop strategy and ads “with Afghan consumer insight and be true to Afghan culture and norms.”

He found Lapis. “Traveling by helicopter throughout a combat zone in body armor to hear a response to an RFP is a big change from New York, Chicago or L.A.,” Mr. McCormick said.

The Kabul-based agency, owned by Moby Group, was started in 2002 by a family of four siblings who returned to Afghanistan and filled the country’s media gap themselves by opening a wide range of businesses—TV and radio stations, a production company, an ad agency and a record label—in which they had no prior experience but are now the market leaders.

“Our real mission is to develop Afghan capabilities,” said Mr. McCormick, who spends much of his time visiting local villages with the Afghan army.

The ad campaign has three themes, each backed by radio, TV, print and billboards.

The first, called “Guardians,” is intended to improve the image of the Afghan army by forging an almost romantic connection with the country’s long folkloric tradition of warriors who protect their people.

“It creates an emotional and iconic imagery that’s easy to understand, in almost a movie poster format,” said Cyrus Oshidar, the creative lead for the campaign at Lapis. “The warrior concept was researched and found appealing to young Afghan males. In a country ravaged by war, with a certain air of cynicism, they can have a sense of pride and hope.”

Focus groups thought the traditional warrior figure didn’t look strong enough, so the ad was reshot, Mr. McCormick said.

The second theme is governance, illustrated with images of hands holding objects, from bricks to ballots, to help rebuild Afghanistan with the tagline, “The future of Afghanistan is in your hands.”

The third and final part, which involved a widespread casting call for cute babies, is “New Afghan, New Afghanistan.”

Children
Each of six different ads features a baby, with his name, birth date and province, and a welcoming message. The copy makes clear the responsibility to raise children well and the stark choices faced in a war-torn country. One ad, celebrating the birth of Massoud Sanjeer, is headlined: “Suicide Bomber. Or Doctor?”

“It’s a very tribal country, but a common thread is love and passion for children, especially sons,” Mr. McCormick said. One lesson he learned was that in the completely male-dominated Afghan culture, the babies all had to be boys, and the ad copy focused on males.

Ads started breaking in January and all three themes—security, governance and development—will be running by this month and will continue until later in the year, although McCormick returns to the U.S. in May when his one-year tour of duty ends. An active-duty officer earlier in his career, he stayed in the reserves after leaving the military and working as a marketing manager at Revlon, at creative agencies and in game development, and at P&G.

Although it’s too early for formal post-testing, he said initial response to the ads has been favorable, and many vanish from billboards to be put up in peoples’ homes.

For Afghan siblings, an unlikely rise to media moguls
The four Mohseni siblings, founders of Afghanistan’s 700-person Moby Group, didn’t set out to be media moguls back in 2002. After growing up in the West, they planned to return to Afghanistan as venture capitalists, but the businesses they wanted to invest in didn’t exist. So they had to start them.

The Mohsenis—former investment banker Saad, administrator Jahid, lawyer Zaid and their only sister, Wajma, who had worked in marketing—opened radio and TV stations, playing songs that hadn’t been heard during the five years music was banned under Taliban rule until 2001.”We were the only ones playing music,” said Moby Group CEO Jahid Mohseni.

Potential advertisers needed an agency, so the Mohsenis started Lapis, and then a production company that produces 14 hours a day of programming and TV commercials. Few people have internet access, so they opened cyber-café chain AndeshaGah.

“TV ads used to cost $1 for a 30-second commercial,” said Jahid Mohseni. “We’ve created the market, in terms of the ad side.” Ad rates have risen considerably, but discounting is widespread.

Stepping up
Their most daring venture is “Afghan Star,” the “American Idol”-like hit show Moby created five years ago. At first, Afghans found it strange to put people who couldn’t really sing on TV. For many who texted a vote for their favorite performer, it was the first vote they ever cast. (They also learned that if their candidate loses, they’re not supposed to seek revenge.) The first season, contenders who were eliminated lost their tempers—and saw their tirades broadcast on TV. “Contestants are more PR savvy now,” Mr. Mohseni said.

The show airs on Moby’s Tolo TV, and wins up to an 80% audience share. There are no TV ratings in Afghanistan, Mr. Mohseni said, but a show’s popularity can be roughly gauged by how many people are in the street, rather than at home potentially watching TV, which reaches about 60% of the population.

Each season’s finale is an eagerly awaited concert in a country with little entertainment. Last year Moby’s Kaboora Production company co-produced a documentary called “Afghan Star,” focusing on a single season of the show and four young contestants, including a woman who risked her life by dancing on stage.

The documentary was a winner at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, and Saad Mohseni, executive producer of the “Afghan Star” TV show, told Jon Stewart in an interview on “The Daily Show”: “It’s a form of rebellion … this is how you make a stand, by singing.”

7453: Shades Of Bias.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Bigotry takes on a different shade
Experts see an increase in skin-tone bias

By Dahleen Glanton, Tribune reporter

Tamara Field is no longer shocked when people make offensive remarks about her light African-American skin tone. But sometimes, she said, the comments cause her to pause.

Once, Field said, she had to explain to a white supervisor at work why she was having lunch with the company’s minority recruiter, a common practice at jobs with few minority employees.

“I said, ‘She wants to know if I am happy with my career path here,’” said Field, 41, of Evanston, a former journalist who works in public relations. When the supervisor asked why, Field answered, “Because I’m black!”

The supervisor responded, “Oh, you’re not that black,” Field said.

The delicate issue of skin-tone bias, as opposed to traditional racism, rose to the surface recently with the revelation that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had partly attributed President Barack Obama’s appeal among voters to his being a “light-skinned” African-American.

The controversy sparked a debate among academics and those in civil rights circles over the changing face of racism, as the nation grows more ethnically diverse and multiracial and discrimination becomes increasingly subtle.

Like Obama, Field is biracial and light-skinned, a trait that she said has given her entree into diverse environments. In a changing American culture with an increasing minority population, skin color is becoming a more common gauge for some Americans—of all races—to determine who fits in and who does not, sociologists said.

A caste system that novelist Alice Walker termed “colorism” has existed within the black community since slavery, stemming from the hierarchy established by slave masters for the light-skinned blacks who worked in the house and dark-skinned slaves who tended the fields.

Pigmentocracy also has long been a divisive issue among Hispanics, Asians and other ethnic groups. Now, it has flowed into the mainstream, according to experts who follow bias trends.

Minorities whose skin tone is closer to white are better able to assimilate and be accepted by whites, said Ronald Hall, a sociologist at Michigan State University and co-author of “Racism in the 21st Century: An Empirical Analysis of Skin Color.”

“The basic psychological tendency is that people are less threatened by those who are perceived to be in proximity of their own racial or ethnic group,” said Hall. “Because of the increase in interracial marriages, it is more difficult now to discern someone’s racial background. But we can evaluate them by skin color.”

Last year, minorities filed a record number of color-bias complaints, specifically addressing skin-tone discrimination. Over the last two decades, the number of claims rose to 2,949 in 2009 from fewer than 400 in 1992, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported. They represent a small percentage of the more than 93,000 discrimination complaints filed last year.

While most cases involve minorities discriminating against each other for being too light or too dark, most often within the same racial group, there also are cases where whites were found to have discriminated against minorities on that basis. Federal law distinguishes race and color discrimination but they often overlap, officials said.

Historically, racial discrimination cases have targeted whites who sought to limit the hiring or advancement of blacks. In cases that involve color, white employers often make a distinction between two minorities, one light-skinned and the other dark. Such cases, according to Trina Jones, a law professor at Duke University, can be difficult to prove in court.

“Now you don’t have individuals excluding an entire racial group; they are screening and finding people who are more racially desirable within a racial group,” said Jones, who researches color bias. “A lot of it is subconscious. ... They’ve been socialized to think of dark as threatening and menacing and white as pure and innocent.”

High-profile lawsuits such as the racial discrimination case against Niketown in Chicago that resulted in a $7.6 million settlement in 2007 to former and current African-American employees, points to the modern nuances of racial bias, as people find new ways to discriminate when race is not easily determined, attorneys said.

According to the lawsuit, African-American employees in the Michigan Avenue store routinely were given lower-paying stockroom and cashier jobs, and were subjected to comments such as, “You’re lucky to be light-skinned” and “You have a big nose; I can tell you’re black.”

A growing number of sociological studies have documented that skin tone can affect economic well-being, said Joni Hersch, a professor of law and economics at Vanderbilt University and the author of several studies on skin color.

Researchers found that darker-skinned blacks tend to have less education than their lighter counterparts, earn less, are more likely to be unemployed and have lower job status. Her study of new immigrant workers showed those with light skin earned 17 percent more than those with darker skin.

Reid sought to defuse tensions, but Jones said, “It is not enough just to say he apologized; President Obama accepted, let’s move on.”