I was tweeting today in response to media coverage of a white, male suicide bomber who flew his plane into an IRS building in Texas, and the coverage of Tiger Woods’ press conference about his marital infidelities.

b/c that’s what i do, instead of blogging as often as i should. I tweet.
anyway, I wondered why so-called ‘news’ organizations were not treating the former as a terrorist attack, and why we were still hearing about tiger woods at all.

in my string of tweets, i mentioned racism as marketing, and one of my twitter folks asked for clarification. I doubted I could explain what I meant in 140 characters or less, so I wrote this post. enjoy.

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The mark of a great marketing campaign is when the idea or slogan transcends the product. it attaches to the cultural consciousness, and when attached to the product, makes the product greater.

for instance, nike’s campaign, “Just Do It’ transcended the product, and began to be applied to everything from winning a basketball game, to graduating from college, to giving birth. it’s now a part of our cultural vocabulary. another example is the 1930s ad campaign for diamonds. prompted by a flagging demand, advertisers coined the phrase ‘a diamond is forever,’ and promoted the idea that one was simply necessary to cement an engagement. the advertisers even came up with an arbitrary ‘2 months salary’ rule. prior to that campaign, diamonds were NOT traditionally associated with marriage or engagement. but the concept has become so entrenched in our culture most of us have no idea it originated as marketing.

racism as we know it in the new world, was also implemented as a marketing ploy. the goal of this campaign was to devalue human beings to the status of chattel. this had to be accomplished in order for other human beings to be able to kidnap, buy, sell, torture, maim, rape, kill, and work them to death, while maintaining a sense of their moral correctness.

The product was slavery. a free work force. you couldn’t have a free work force if everyone was catching feelings every time someone dropped dead from exhaustion, screamed for their stolen child, etc. in order to ’sell’ the idea that human beings should be treated as chattel, the marketing ploy of racism had to be employed. the message was, ‘these people are not like you and me, they are different, inferior, subhuman.’

The next step was branding. Adidas brand is represented by three stripes. Nike’s brand is represented by the swoop. When you see the swoop, you think ‘just do it.’ the ‘brand’ of inferior human being, came to be represented by darker skin. this campaign was so successful, that dark people were associated with this product almost exclusively. Conversely, light people were associated with the opposite of this product, so that even those who could not afford slaves (the vast majority) felt a sense of entitlement.

Dark skin had become a shorthand, a symbol for the campaign. the media message of racism was so successful, it transcended the initial product and became attached to the cultural consciousness, so that even when the initial product (chattel slavery) no longer existed, the marketing message was entrenched enough that it could be handily applied to dismantling reconstruction efforts, segregating bathrooms and burial plots, and instituting jim crow laws.

so, that’s that.

When we talk about American media, and racism, I can’t help but think about ‘the birth of a nation.’ the first feature-length film made in America was a 3 hour diatribe about the reprehensibility of black people and the ‘heroic’ rise of the klan. All the blacks in the film were played by white actors, and most of the racist film stereotypes that we know of were introduced for the first time in that film. this was the INTRODUCTION of a brand new and extremely powerful medium of communication, and it was used to reinforce the brand message of racism. Race riots ensued across the country when the film was shown.

Racism the marketing concept had become unmoored from its attachment of the ‘product’ of slavery, and turned into a cultural trope that could be used in any arena to generate an emotional response, to turn a profit, etc.

As the world changed, the applications have changed, but the fact that racism can still be used, for example, as a wedge issue in an election to rouse people to vote against their own self-interest out of fear, is proof of the power of the marketing message.

Compound that w/the fact that this country has been pushing this advertising for four centuries, that’s a LOT of brand recognition.

by pierre bennu
edited/big words by jamyla bennu
(lol)