Category: race

Pepsi, Please

I read an interesting story last month: “How Pepsi Opened Door to Diversity; A 1940s All-Black Team Targeted a New Market And Broke a Barrier” by Stephanie Capparell, in the Wall Street Journal: January 9, 2007. pg. B.1., adapted from her new book The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business.

Here’s the article abstract:

Their jobs turned most of the men into Pepsi fanatics. Said team member [Jean Emmons]: “All of my friends had to buy Pepsi. I kept stockpiles of Pepsi in my house. All the places I went had to have Pepsi. If I was out with someone and they ordered Coke, I might have thrown a glass of water in their face. . . . My wife would say, ‘I think you’re going crazy — Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi!'”

He launched three major press campaigns from 1948 to 1951. For the first, he found accomplished African-Americans to profile for a “Leaders in Their Fields” series — about 20 names in all. The campaign compared the professionals with Pepsi, a “Leader in Its Field.” It began in April 1948 with United Nations diplomat Ralph Bunche. That series was complemented in the upstart Ebony magazine by a seven-ad series drawn by award-winning African-American cartoonist Jay Jackson, known for his biting satire of racists and red-baiters. For his third series, Mr. Boyd took a crew to the campuses of black universities to photograph top students enjoying Pepsi.

All the way, they continued to break down color barriers to their careers. Mr. Boyd proudly takes credit for helping open the door to diversity. “It was a contribution to social progress,” said Mr. Boyd of his work at Pepsi. “I didn’t make that much of a dollar. I wasn’t paid on the basis of other executives. It was at the beginning.”

However, as the article noted, it wasn’t easy. Pepsi’s decision to go after the black consumers, based on the assessment that they were missing out on a part of a $10 billion market, was done somewhat quietly, lest they offend some of their white Pepsi drinkers. The team of black employees hired to promote the beverage were not only paid less, but suffered not a few indignities.

If you’re interested in reading the whole article, please let me know, and I will make it available to you.

Not so incidentally, the picture is from Pepsi’s diversity timeline webpage. The little boy in the photo is the late Ron Brown, who would grow up to be Secretary of Commerce under President Clinton.
“PEPSI and PEPSI-COLA are registered trademarks of PepsiCo, Inc.”

ROG

I Talk Well English

Here’s something that I’ve long found peculiar: people saying to me, to my face, “You don’t sound black.” I know this is going on even when they don’t actually voice it. I’ve talked to folks on the phone, usually for work, and then they meet me and they have that “You’re not at ALL what I expected you to look like” look on their faces. It’s quite entertaining, actually. And I get it from black people as well as with white people, except it’s tinged with, “Oh, you’re a BROTHER” vibe; I’m, to their surprise, part of the fraternity.

First time someone said I didn’t “sound black”, I was deeply offended. OK, first several times. Then I started intellectualizing:
PERSON: You don’t sound black.
ME: Oh, but since I AM black, and this is how I sound, I must sound black.
That always confused them.

Now, I just don’t care. The joy of being of a certain age is that stuff which used to hurt now are just funny. Anyway, I blame my father, who was no friend of what later became known as Ebonics. I talk as I talk, and, in the words of Walter Cronkite, “That’s the way it is.”

Your Linguistic Profile::
55% General American English
35% Yankee
5% Upper Midwestern
0% Dixie
0% Midwestern

***
Here’s one of those statistical errors that madden. In reporting on the possible Rudy Guiliani campaign for President this weekend, ABC News’ Geoff Morrell noted that Guiliani was in a “virtual dead heat” with Hillary Clinton (Clinton led 49-47), but that he “beats” Barack Obama, 47-45. Since the margin of error of the survey was plus or minus three points, that race is in a statistical dead heat as well.
***
“She tried to warn us: With the publication of Shrub in early 2000, syndicated columnist Molly Ivins detailed George W. Bush’s privileged rise and disastrous reign as governor of Texas in the mid- to late ‘90s.” That’s a great line from the Amazon review of Ms. Ivins‘ follow-up book, Bushwhacked. Unfortunately, Molly Ivins died yesterday of breast cancer at the age of 62.

ROG

Sports and Race QUESTIONS

Unrelated forward-
Note to Tom the Dog: Now that you are a game show maven, perhaps you can be a source of pithy quotes on other cultural matters. For instance, an Albany-area woman made it onto the next round of American Idol – a show I’m not currently watching, BTW – but had to keep it a secret for a few months, until the program aired this week. Hey, let’s find other folks who’ve had similar experiences, like that guy who was on JEOPARDY! eight years ago! Voila!
***
1. Here’s an excerpt from Boss Talk: ‘Welcome to My World’; NBA Commissioner Stern Gets Kudos for Expansion But Has Share of Problems
Russell Adams and Adam Thompson. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Jan 17, 2007. pg. B.1
WSJ: It’s often been said that when brawls break out on the court in the NBA, everybody makes a big deal out of it, even though other sports frequently have fights among players. Why?

Mr. Stern: My own take is the burden of the fans being so close to the stands. Because of the spectacular view of our game from courtside — which is the closest to the action of any game, and it’s replicated by a camera, and increasingly by high-def, the prospect of players, in any shape or form, crossing the barrier between them and the fans — that’s a problem that we have and no one else has.

WSJ: Do you believe it also might have something to do with racial attitudes in this country, that the NBA is judged more harshly for that reason?

Mr. Stern: Well, I choose not to dwell on it, but you may be on to something. We were the first sport to be identified as black. And, despite the fact that the starters in other sports like football could be equally, percentage-wise, black, our guys are [visible] out there. We can see them, they don’t come encumbered by hat, helmet, long sleeves and pants. You just touched on the global conversation, which is the role of race, and certainly, I would not be fully honest if I didn’t say it’s always there, in some shape or form.

Yes, the NBA is 80% black. But the NFL is about 70% black. Is race a factor in perceptions of NBA players, or is it the proximity to the stands, the fact that, unlike football players, they don’t wear helmets, and that changes the dynamic?

2. Much has been written about the two head coaches in the Super Bowl being black. What’s your reaction? This is my take on firsts in everything: Firsts are important when they get us to the point where it doesn’t matter anymore. Doug Williams, the first black Super Bowl quarterback was important, but I couldn’t tell you the second or third. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby were important, but one doesn’t make note of every black baseball player, as Ebony magazine did in the 1950s and 1960s; interestingly, black baseball players at the major league level is declining.

Once upon a time, I could tell you the name of every female U.S. Senator, but now there are 16, and I can’t; it’s not enough, but it’s a start. However, I can name all of the black members of the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, since there have been only three: Brooke, Moseley-Braun, and Obama.

Progress is measured when you stop having to measure.

***
Unrelated postlude;

From May 4, 2004 WSJ

A Better PDB?

Jessica Mintz writes in the Wall Street Journal:

“The presidential daily brief titled ‘Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US’ triggered a political firestorm. But for Greg Storey, what was most striking about the document was its lack of style.
“‘Why is it that the president puts up with these horribly written and laid out documents to assess the threat against our nation?’ wondered Mr. Storey, a 33-year old Web designer.
“So he set out to do something about it.”

Here’s Storey’s blog item explaining what he did and why.

ROG

USA News

I’ve been musing over the London bombing fall week. Not about why. One of my fellow bloggers, Greg Burgas has an interesting theory on that. He’s kidding. Sorta.

It’s more about what is the news and why do we respond the way we do. It was the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill that famously said: “All politics is local.” And in THIS country, it seems that almost all NEWS is local. Oh, yeah, there’s an international segment in the broadcast, but it’s so often about OUR soldier in Iraq or OUR local celebrity. When Ismail Merchant of the Merchant-Ivory films’ fame died, it was a LOCAL story in the local paper, because Merchant had a farm in nearby Columbia County. (Two mentions of Columbia County in three days. Gads.) Of course, it does not always have to be positive. The Houston trucker who transported illegal immigrants in his vehicle, several of whom died, is a local story because he used to live in Schenectady.

Bombings

Some guy I read was complaining, and this is a heavy-duty paraphrase, “London was bombed. Why is the second lead, ‘Is America next?’ Why is it always about us?”

If someone conducted a poll, and the responses were honest, I’m betting that the 7/7 bombing in London was more palpable to most Americans than…let’s take a comparable example, the 3/11 bombing in Madrid last year. Both attacks likely the work of the same organization, and twice as many people died in Spain than in Great Britain. So why IS that? Is it because the Brits speak our language? (Actually, we speak THEIR language, but let’s not complicate things here.) Is it because of our common heritage? (They’re more like US.)

Who’s she?

I remember seeing a story on ABC News about a young black woman of 22 who disappeared in Illinois, and her mother, who was NOT well-spoken, trying to get the media involved in her disappearance. Her mother was told, “No, she’s 22. NO one would be interested.” Then Dru Sjodin, a 22-year old blonde student from North Dakota goes missing, and it’s national news. Indeed, now there’s Dru’s Law, the National Sex Offender Public Database Act of 2005 being offered up in Congress. Meanwhile, I don’t even remember the name of that young black woman or know whether she was ever found. Was it that Dru Sjodin looked more like US (well, not me specifically…)

Why Laci Peterson and not other victims of violent crimes have something to do, I’m told, with identification with Laci – heck, we call her by her first name, as though we KNEW her.

Their disasters

Bam, Iran was destroyed by an earthquake on December 26, 2003. The initial reports said that 30,000 were killed, later upped to 43,000. It barely made two news cycles. I had initially thought that the reason that the Christmastime tsunami of 2004 was so newsworthy, long before anyone knew the death toll, was because there were so many people with video cameras showing the devastation, and that may be true. But inevitably, there were those stories about how Americans and people like US lost their lives because we can RELATE to them.

Indeed, there have been floods in Bangladesh and China over the past 40 years that have taken more lives than the tsunami, but that barely hit our consciousness, if at all. Maybe it was also the novelty of the tsunami. Or maybe it’s that news people like to say “tsunami” and hope that the graphics department spells it correctly.

When I’m close to the border with Canada and watch the CBC news, it seemed to be more…balanced. When I watched the news in Barbados in 1999, the same thing- a greater awareness of the whole world picture.

How is it that the Great Melting Pot can be so xenophobic? I ask, not out of anger, but out of concern.

(I always hate posing questions that I really can’t answer.)

Crash

If it’s true that “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist”, as the Avenue Q song suggests, nothing lately has brought that home more for me than the movie Crash, the first flick Carol & I have seen in months. We both thought it was excellent, and we have been playing back scenes and bits of dialogue all week. In addition to race and ethnicity, it’s also about class, power and crime. I wasn’t at all bothered by the coincidences; I thought it was the conceit of the film. It was less violent than I feared, given its R rating, which was due largely to language, I’m guessing.

Coincidentally, I got an e-mail this week from the Tyler Perry fan club also touting the film. Don’t know Tyler Perry? How about the character Madea in Diary of a Mad Black Woman? He says that “CRASH is on a whole other level and will move you in ways which everyone should experience.”  

The real cool thing is that Carol & I used a babysitter for the first time in I don’t know how long. Oh, we’ve had people over, but we’ve (or at least Carol has) been there at home with them. But Lydia took to Anna really well. When we left, Lydia didn’t cry; heck, she didn’t even seem to care that we were leaving. And when Anna left, she stood at the door, watching her leave like she does for her mother when I’m home with her. So, perhaps we’ll have more films in our near future.

ROG
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