How Big Business Paved the Way for ‘Transracial America’
AMERICAN SKIN
Pop Culture, Big Business,
and the End of White America
By Leon E. Wynter
Crown
288 pages, $25
Move over, Tom Friedman! Another prophet has arrived to sing the praises of the profit motive. Leon E. Wynter, a familiar voice on National Public Radio and a former Wall Street Journal columnist, has some good news. Despite the incendiary subtitle promising (or threatening) “the end of white America,” Wynter proclaims the end of racism and the triumph of something he calls “transracial America.”
What Wynter means by “the end of white America” is the end of an era when “whiteness” was assumed to be the norm and automatically conveyed privilege. Indeed, as Wynter illustrates with a quote from the writings of Benjamin Franklin, whiteness was always a rather dubitable term, referring to something existing more in the eye of the beholder than in reality. “In Europe,” Franklin observed, “the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English make up the principal body of white people on the face of the earth.”
Despite this privileging of “whiteness,” Wynter argues, black people have always been central to American culture, even before “White America” was prepared to admit it. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, corporate America (from Hollywood to Wall Street, from Madison Avenue to the malls and chain stores) began to discover that a transracial approach was the profitable way to go. Although businesses had long been familiar with the idea of targeting specific ethnic markets, they learned that black, brown and multiracial images are more effective than all-white ones in selling their products to everyone.
Color sells, whether it’s Michael Jackson singing the praises of Pepsi or--the ad that Wynter singles out as a crucial turning point--football player Mean Joe Green accepting a frosty Coke from a cute little white kid.
Among the many stories Wynter tells is a tale of three cosmetics lines. In 1991, Maybelline launched a makeup line aimed at dark-skinned women. It was marketed primarily through black and Latino media and displayed separately from other Maybelline products. Revlon followed suit with a line of its own targeted at the same market. But Cover Girl took a different approach, simply adding the darker colors to its main line. It was this tack that proved the most profitable. White women liked the darker shades, while black and Hispanic women “didn’t want to be separated out from the main brand.” Separate displays for two kinds of makeup were also more expensive, cutting into profits. And it turned out that many women not only liked to see women of their own color in ads, but also responded favorably to the beauty of models of other shades.
What makes color such a hot selling point? According to Wynter, what American consumers want is something “real,” and “real” means urban, multiracial, multiethnic. And for at least the last two centuries, black Americans have been a central part of American cultural reality, no matter how much they were slighted or ignored in the political realm. Wynter treats us to a brisk romp through the history of popular culture, from minstrel shows, ragtime, blues, jazz and the fusion of black and Jewish sensibilities in Tin Pan Alley, to the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, disco and hip-hop.
(One correction that should be made: the composer of “Dixie” was not Stephen Foster, but Daniel Decatur Emmett.)
There’s no doubt, black American culture is “real” and central to American culture. But no culture is a monolith, and black experience has been as complex, rich and varied as any other. Wynter doesn’t seem too worried about which aspects of black culture are picked out by the media as “authentic” specimens of “reality.” He compares the “materialism and self-centered nihilism” of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s to the ethos of rap/hip-hop, which he describes as even more “violent in its selfish nihilism, predatory in its sexuality, and absolutely preening in devotion to brand-name materialism.” It doesn’t seem to disturb him much that violence, misogyny and crassness are considered tokens of authenticity these days, rather than kindness, wisdom, sensuality or generosity.
Wynter is so excited by the fact that white stockbroker types go around echoing black lingo they’ve picked up from beer commercials, one wonders if he fails to see that make-believe street smarts and fake downward mobility do nothing to arrest the truly serious matter of the widening gap between rich and poor. Sure, it’s nice that not all the rich are white, and not all the poor are black, but that doesn’t solve the worsening problem of economic injustice.
To be fair, Wynter acknowledges that cultural success is not the same as economic, political and social betterment.
But as a child of that commercial culture, he seems to feel greater trust in the marketplace than perhaps it merits. Then again, traditional leftists can take heart from his report on the latest generation: the old black-white race dichotomy is not an issue to them; the only dichotomy they know is the one between rich and poor. Can socialism--or, at very least, trade unionism--be far behind?
Elsewhere, Wynter urges his fellow black Americans that the time has come to stop thinking like a low-status minority and recognize that they are part of the majority. This can be done, he believes, by elevating “individual identity a little bit higher than group identity, as every other group in the United States slowly but surely does.” Quibble though one may with some of its assumptions, this intelligent and invigorating portrait of an emerging transracial America is one of those books that helps you see what has been staring you in the face.
