Labels: African Americans, Deep Thoughts, Empire, Politics and African Americans

By GAYLE WHITE

Historically black colleges and universities, like many other schools, are struggling with both fewer resources and a growing demand from students for financial aid.

But the institutions known as HBCUs have another problem that some leaders contend is theirs alone: Many African-American students are finding their needs met elsewhere.

In 1977, 35 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to black students were from historically black colleges. By 2002, the share was down to 22 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, even though the number of African-American students earning bachelor’s degrees from historically black colleges actually grew.

In the days of segregation, African-American students had limited options. Now, with a wide range of choices, only 13 percent of African-American college students are enrolled in HBCUs.

Kristin Mason, a junior English major at Atlanta’s Spelman College, is one. Mason, who is from Colorado, chose Spelman, she said, because of the “sense of belonging” she felt surrounded by smart black women.

Morehouse College senior Shaun Harris, a business major from Illinois, said he was “looking for brotherhood” at the Atlanta men’s school whose alumni include the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

But Mark Gamble of Columbus said he “embraced the diversity” at Georgia State University, where about 60 percent of the students are white, 26 percent African-American, and the rest are other ethnicities or identify themselves as multiracial.

“I like being around whites, blacks, Asians and all the other minorities,” said Gamble, a sophomore film major.

Georgia State freshman Mercedes Callaway of Atlanta said she chose the state research university over Spelman, a private women’s HBCU, because of money. A friend at Spelman is “getting a good education,” said Callaway, who is on the HOPE scholarship. “But she’s in debt to pay for school.”

HBCUs are losing students to a range of institutions, said William “Sonny” Walker, who graduated from a historically black college in Arkansas and has served on the boards of three others, including, currently, Atlanta’s Morris Brown College.

“Many of the students who came from middle- and upper-income families, whose parents could afford to pay tuition, are going to Harvard, are going to Georgia, are going to Georgia Tech, are going to Vanderbilt,” Walker said.

Many historically black schools have lower endowments than other colleges, making less money available for scholarships, school officials say. But those institutions play an important role, said Leonard L. Haynes, executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

At historically black institutions, he said, students of color can “get an education, get nurturing, get to mature and get to be good citizens after they graduate” in an environment that celebrates their cultures. “If they didn’t exist today, they would have to be created,” Haynes said.

The current economic climate — which is hitting universities across the country, public and private — is making it harder to pay the bills, exacerbating problems both for families of students and for the schools themselves, officials of local colleges say.

Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse and Spelman all revealed this month that they are cutting back on expenses.

Clark Atlanta President Carlton E. Brown said 70 faculty members and 30 other staffers were being laid off because of an “enrollment emergency” after years of declining numbers. At least 200 students recently dropped out or transferred to state colleges because they could no longer afford Clark Atlanta, Brown said.

Morehouse officials confirmed that they had not renewed the contracts of about 25 adjunct professors, about a third of the school’s part-time instructors.

And Spelman officials announced that they are eliminating 35 positions, 23 of them staffed, phasing out the college’s department of education and discontinuing some programs.

Spelman, whose donors include Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey, is in high demand among black women, said its president, Beverly Tatum.

“Students want to go to Spelman,” she said. “The issue is whether they can afford to go to Spelman.”

Morris Brown has struggled for years. It faces a Feb. 17 deadline to pay the remaining $214,000 of past-due water bills to the city of Atlanta. The college lost its accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 2002, largely because of financial instability.

The Morris Brown board and its president, Stanley Pritchett, say they are looking at specialty programs and projects that might save the school, which, he said, would probably not be able to continue as a traditional liberal arts college.

Despite their troubles, historically black colleges and universities have fierce defenders.

“We need to find a way to preserve these institutions,” said state Sen. Emanuel Jones (D-Decatur), chairman of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus. “Our universities have struggled

to survive just as we as a people have struggled to survive.”

Historically black colleges “speak to the legacy of our forefathers,” he said.

Jones, whose degrees are from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, packed his oldest child off to college this fall.

He’s a freshman at Johns Hopkins University.

Labels: African Americans

by Hua Hsu

The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?

"Civilization’s going to pieces,” he remarks. He is in polite company, gathered with friends around a bottle of wine in the late-afternoon sun, chatting and gossiping. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?” They hadn’t. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

He is Tom Buchanan, a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book that nearly everyone who passes through the American education system is compelled to read at least once. Although Gatsby doesn’t gloss as a book on racial anxiety—it’s too busy exploring a different set of anxieties entirely—Buchanan was hardly alone in feeling besieged. The book by “this man Goddard” had a real-world analogue: Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, published in 1920, five years before Gatsby. Nine decades later, Stoddard’s polemic remains oddly engrossing. He refers to World War I as the “White Civil War” and laments the “cycle of ruin” that may result if the “white world” continues its infighting. The book features a series of foldout maps depicting the distribution of “color” throughout the world and warns, “Colored migration is a universal peril, menacing every part of the white world.”

As briefs for racial supremacy go, The Rising Tide of Color is eerily serene. Its tone is scholarly and gentlemanly, its hatred rationalized and, in Buchanan’s term, “scientific.” And the book was hardly a fringe phenomenon. It was published by Scribner, also Fitzgerald’s publisher, and Stoddard, who received a doctorate in history from Harvard, was a member of many professional academic associations. It was precisely the kind of book that a 1920s man of Buchanan’s profile—wealthy, Ivy League–educated, at once pretentious and intellectually insecure—might have been expected to bring up in casual conversation.

As white men of comfort and privilege living in an age of limited social mobility, of course, Stoddard and the Buchanans in his audience had nothing literal to fear. Their sense of dread hovered somewhere above the concerns of everyday life. It was linked less to any immediate danger to their class’s political and cultural power than to the perceived fraying of the fixed, monolithic identity of whiteness that sewed together the fortunes of the fair-skinned.

From the hysteria over Eastern European immigration to the vibrant cultural miscegenation of the Harlem Renaissance, it is easy to see how this imagined worldwide white kinship might have seemed imperiled in the 1920s. There’s no better example of the era’s insecurities than the 1923 Supreme Court case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, in which an Indian American veteran of World War I sought to become a naturalized citizen by proving that he was Caucasian. The Court considered new anthropological studies that expanded the definition of the Caucasian race to include Indians, and the justices even agreed that traces of “Aryan blood” coursed through Thind’s body. But these technicalities availed him little. The Court determined that Thind was not white “in accordance with the understanding of the common man” and therefore could be excluded from the “statutory category” of whiteness. Put another way: Thind was white, in that he was Caucasian and even Aryan. But he was not white in the way Stoddard or Buchanan were white.

The ’20s debate over the definition of whiteness—a legal category? a commonsense understanding? a worldwide civilization?—took place in a society gripped by an acute sense of racial paranoia, and it is easy to regard these episodes as evidence of how far we have come. But consider that these anxieties surfaced when whiteness was synonymous with the American mainstream, when threats to its status were largely imaginary. What happens once this is no longer the case—when the fears of Lothrop Stoddard and Tom Buchanan are realized, and white people actually become an American minority?

Whether you describe it as the dawning of a post-racial age or just the end of white America, we’re approaching a profound demographic tipping point. According to an August 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, those groups currently categorized as racial minorities—blacks and Hispanics, East Asians and South Asians—will account for a majority of the U.S. population by the year 2042. Among Americans under the age of 18, this shift is projected to take place in 2023, which means that every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.

Obviously, steadily ascending rates of interracial marriage complicate this picture, pointing toward what Michael Lind has described as the “beiging” of America. And it’s possible that “beige Americans” will self-identify as “white” in sufficient numbers to push the tipping point further into the future than the Census Bureau projects. But even if they do, whiteness will be a label adopted out of convenience and even indifference, rather than aspiration and necessity. For an earlier generation of minorities and immigrants, to be recognized as a “white American,” whether you were an Italian or a Pole or a Hungarian, was to enter the mainstream of American life; to be recognized as something else, as the Thind case suggests, was to be permanently excluded. As Bill Imada, head of the IW Group, a prominent Asian American communications and marketing company, puts it: “I think in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, [for] anyone who immigrated, the aspiration was to blend in and be as American as possible so that white America wouldn’t be intimidated by them. They wanted to imitate white America as much as possible: learn English, go to church, go to the same schools.”

Today, the picture is far more complex. To take the most obvious example, whiteness is no longer a precondition for entry into the highest levels of public office. The son of Indian immigrants doesn’t have to become “white” in order to be elected governor of Louisiana. A half-Kenyan, half-Kansan politician can self-identify as black and be elected president of the United States.

As a purely demographic matter, then, the “white America” that Lothrop Stoddard believed in so fervently may cease to exist in 2040, 2050, or 2060, or later still. But where the culture is concerned, it’s already all but finished. Instead of the long-standing model of assimilation toward a common center, the culture is being remade in the image of white America’s multiethnic, multicolored heirs.

For some, the disappearance of this centrifugal core heralds a future rich with promise. In 1998, President Bill Clinton, in a now-famous address to students at Portland State University, remarked:

Today, largely because of immigration, there is no majority race in Hawaii or Houston or New York City. Within five years, there will be no majority race in our largest state, California. In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time ... [These immigrants] are energizing our culture and broadening our vision of the world. They are renewing our most basic values and reminding us all of what it truly means to be American.

Not everyone was so enthused. Clinton’s remarks caught the attention of another anxious Buchanan—Pat Buchanan, the conservative thinker. Revisiting the president’s speech in his 2001 book, The Death of the West, Buchanan wrote: “Mr. Clinton assured us that it will be a better America when we are all minorities and realize true ‘diversity.’ Well, those students [at Portland State] are going to find out, for they will spend their golden years in a Third World America.”

Today, the arrival of what Buchanan derided as “Third World America” is all but inevitable. What will the new mainstream of America look like, and what ideas or values might it rally around? What will it mean to be white after “whiteness” no longer defines the mainstream? Will anyone mourn the end of white America? Will anyone try to preserve it?

Another moment from The Great Gatsby: as Fitzgerald’s narrator and Gatsby drive across the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan, a car passes them, and Nick Carraway notices that it is a limousine “driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl.” The novelty of this topsy-turvy arrangement inspires Carraway to laugh aloud and think to himself, “Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge, anything at all …”

For a contemporary embodiment of the upheaval that this scene portended, consider Sean Combs, a hip-hop mogul and one of the most famous African Americans on the planet. Combs grew up during hip-hop’s late-1970s rise, and he belongs to the first generation that could safely make a living working in the industry—as a plucky young promoter and record-label intern in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and as a fashion designer, artist, and music executive worth hundreds of millions of dollars a brief decade later.

In the late 1990s, Combs made a fascinating gesture toward New York’s high society. He announced his arrival into the circles of the rich and powerful not by crashing their parties, but by inviting them into his own spectacularly over-the-top world. Combs began to stage elaborate annual parties in the Hamptons, not far from where Fitzgerald’s novel takes place. These “white parties”—attendees are required to wear white—quickly became legendary for their opulence (in 2004, Combs showcased a 1776 copy of the Declaration of Independence) as well as for the cultures-colliding quality of Hamptons elites paying their respects to someone so comfortably nouveau riche. Prospective business partners angled to get close to him and praised him as a guru of the lucrative “urban” market, while grateful partygoers hailed him as a modern-day Gatsby.

“Have I read The Great Gatsby?” Combs said to a London newspaper in 2001. “I am the Great Gatsby.”

Yet whereas Gatsby felt pressure to hide his status as an arriviste, Combs celebrated his position as an outsider-insider—someone who appropriates elements of the culture he seeks to join without attempting to assimilate outright. In a sense, Combs was imitating the old WASP establishment; in another sense, he was subtly provoking it, by over-enunciating its formality and never letting his guests forget that there was something slightly off about his presence. There’s a silent power to throwing parties where the best-dressed man in the room is also the one whose public profile once consisted primarily of dancing in the background of Biggie Smalls videos. (“No one would ever expect a young black man to be coming to a party with the Declaration of Independence, but I got it, and it’s coming with me,” Combs joked at his 2004 party, as he made the rounds with the document, promising not to spill champagne on it.)

In this regard, Combs is both a product and a hero of the new cultural mainstream, which prizes diversity above all else, and whose ultimate goal is some vague notion of racial transcendence, rather than subversion or assimilation. Although Combs’s vision is far from representative—not many hip-hop stars vacation in St. Tropez with a parasol-toting manservant shading their every step—his industry lies at the heart of this new mainstream. Over the past 30 years, few changes in American culture have been as significant as the rise of hip-hop. The genre has radically reshaped the way we listen to and consume music, first by opposing the pop mainstream and then by becoming it. From its constant sampling of past styles and eras—old records, fashions, slang, anything—to its mythologization of the self-made black antihero, hip-hop is more than a musical genre: it’s a philosophy, a political statement, a way of approaching and remaking culture. It’s a lingua franca not just among kids in America, but also among young people worldwide. And its economic impact extends beyond the music industry, to fashion, advertising, and film. (Consider the producer Russell Simmons—the ur-Combs and a music, fashion, and television mogul—or the rapper 50 Cent, who has parlayed his rags-to-riches story line into extracurricular successes that include a clothing line; book, video-game, and film deals; and a startlingly lucrative partnership with the makers of Vitamin Water.)

But hip-hop’s deepest impact is symbolic. During popular music’s rise in the 20th century, white artists and producers consistently “mainstreamed” African American innovations. Hip-hop’s ascension has been different. Eminem notwithstanding, hip-hop never suffered through anything like an Elvis Presley moment, in which a white artist made a musical form safe for white America. This is no dig at Elvis—the constrictive racial logic of the 1950s demanded the erasure of rock and roll’s black roots, and if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else. But hip-hop—the sound of the post- civil-rights, post-soul generation—found a global audience on its own terms.

Today, hip-hop’s colonization of the global imagination, from fashion runways in Europe to dance competitions in Asia, is Disney-esque. This transformation has bred an unprecedented cultural confidence in its black originators. Whiteness is no longer a threat, or an ideal: it’s kitsch to be appropriated, whether with gestures like Combs’s “white parties” or the trickle-down epidemic of collared shirts and cuff links currently afflicting rappers. And an expansive multiculturalism is replacing the us-against-the-world bunker mentality that lent a thrilling edge to hip-hop’s mid-1990s rise.

Peter Rosenberg, a self-proclaimed “nerdy Jewish kid” and radio personality on New York’s Hot 97 FM—and a living example of how hip-hop has created new identities for its listeners that don’t fall neatly along lines of black and white—shares another example: “I interviewed [the St. Louis rapper] Nelly this morning, and he said it’s now very cool and in to have multicultural friends. Like you’re not really considered hip or ‘you’ve made it’ if you’re rolling with all the same people.”

Just as Tiger Woods forever changed the country-club culture of golf, and Will Smith confounded stereotypes about the ideal Hollywood leading man, hip-hop’s rise is helping redefine the American mainstream, which no longer aspires toward a single iconic image of style or class. Successful network-television shows like Lost, Heroes, and Grey’s Anatomy feature wildly diverse casts, and an entire genre of half-hour comedy, from The Colbert Report to The Office, seems dedicated to having fun with the persona of the clueless white male. The youth market is following the same pattern: consider the Cheetah Girls, a multicultural, multiplatinum, multiplatform trio of teenyboppers who recently starred in their third movie, or Dora the Explorer, the precocious bilingual 7-year-old Latina adventurer who is arguably the most successful animated character on children’s television today. In a recent address to the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies, Brown Johnson, the Nickelodeon executive who has overseen Dora’s rise, explained the importance of creating a character who does not conform to “the white, middle-class mold.” When Johnson pointed out that Dora’s wares were outselling Barbie’s in France, the crowd hooted in delight.

Pop culture today rallies around an ethic of multicultural inclusion that seems to value every identity—except whiteness. “It’s become harder for the blond-haired, blue-eyed commercial actor,” remarks Rochelle Newman-Carrasco, of the Hispanic marketing firm Enlace. “You read casting notices, and they like to cast people with brown hair because they could be Hispanic. The language of casting notices is pretty shocking because it’s so specific: ‘Brown hair, brown eyes, could look Hispanic.’ Or, as one notice put it: ‘Ethnically ambiguous.’”

“I think white people feel like they’re under siege right now—like it’s not okay to be white right now, especially if you’re a white male,” laughs Bill Imada, of the IW Group. Imada and Newman-Carrasco are part of a movement within advertising, marketing, and communications firms to reimagine the profile of the typical American consumer. (Tellingly, every person I spoke with from these industries knew the Census Bureau’s projections by heart.)

“There’s a lot of fear and a lot of resentment,” Newman-Carrasco observes, describing the flak she caught after writing an article for a trade publication on the need for more-diverse hiring practices. “I got a response from a friend—he’s, like, a 60-something white male, and he’s been involved with multicultural recruiting,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘I really feel like the hunted. It’s a hard time to be a white man in America right now, because I feel like I’m being lumped in with all white males in America, and I’ve tried to do stuff, but it’s a tough time.’”

“I always tell the white men in the room, ‘We need you,’” Imada says. “We cannot talk about diversity and inclusion and engagement without you at the table. It’s okay to be white!

“But people are stressed out about it. ‘We used to be in control! We’re losing control!’”

If they’re right—if white America is indeed “losing control,” and if the future will belong to people who can successfully navigate a post-racial, multicultural landscape—then it’s no surprise that many white Americans are eager to divest themselves of their whiteness entirely.

For some, this renunciation can take a radical form. In 1994, a young graffiti artist and activist named William “Upski” Wimsatt, the son of a university professor, published Bomb the Suburbs, the spiritual heir to Norman Mailer’s celebratory 1957 essay, “The White Negro.” Wimsatt was deeply committed to hip-hop’s transformative powers, going so far as to embrace the status of the lowly “wigger,” a pejorative term popularized in the early 1990s to describe white kids who steep themselves in black culture. Wimsatt viewed the wigger’s immersion in two cultures as an engine for change. “If channeled in the right way,” he wrote, “the wigger can go a long way toward repairing the sickness of race in America.”

Wimsatt’s painfully earnest attempts to put his own relationship with whiteness under the microscope coincided with the emergence of an academic discipline known as “whiteness studies.” In colleges and universities across the country, scholars began examining the history of “whiteness” and unpacking its contradictions. Why, for example, had the Irish and the Italians fallen beyond the pale at different moments in our history? Were Jewish Americans white? And, as the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson asked, “Why is it that in the United States, a white woman can have black children but a black woman cannot have white children?”

Much like Wimsatt, the whiteness-studies academics—figures such as Jacobson, David Roediger, Eric Lott, and Noel Ignatiev—were attempting to come to terms with their own relationships with whiteness, in its past and present forms. In the early 1990s, Ignatiev, a former labor activist and the author of How the Irish Became White, set out to “abolish” the idea of the white race by starting the New Abolitionist Movement and founding a journal titled Race Traitor. “There is nothing positive about white identity,” he wrote in 1998. “As James Baldwin said, ‘As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.’”

Although most white Americans haven’t read Bomb the Suburbs or Race Traitor, this view of whiteness as something to be interrogated, if not shrugged off completely, has migrated to less academic spheres. The perspective of the whiteness-studies academics is commonplace now, even if the language used to express it is different.

“I get it: as a straight white male, I’m the worst thing on Earth,” Christian Lander says. Lander is a Canadian-born, Los Angeles–based satirist who in January 2008 started a blog called Stuff White People Like (stuffwhitepeoplelike.com), which pokes fun at the manners and mores of a specific species of young, hip, upwardly mobile whites. (He has written more than 100 entries about whites’ passion for things like bottled water, “the idea of soccer,” and “being the only white person around.”) At its best, Lander’s site—which formed the basis for a recently published book of the same name (reviewed in the October 2008 Atlantic)—is a cunningly precise distillation of the identity crisis plaguing well-meaning, well-off white kids in a post-white world.

“Like, I’m aware of all the horrible crimes that my demographic has done in the world,” Lander says. “And there’s a bunch of white people who are desperate—desperate—to say, ‘You know what? My skin’s white, but I’m not one of the white people who’s destroying the world.’”

For Lander, whiteness has become a vacuum. The “white identity” he limns on his blog is predicated on the quest for authenticity—usually other people’s authenticity. “As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab onto. You’re jealous! Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language. White culture is Family Ties and Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses—like, this is white culture. This is all we have.”

Lander’s “white people” are products of a very specific historical moment, raised by well-meaning Baby Boomers to reject the old ideal of white American gentility and to embrace diversity and fluidity instead. (“It’s strange that we are the kids of Baby Boomers, right? How the hell do you rebel against that? Like, your parents will march against the World Trade Organization next to you. They’ll have bigger white dreadlocks than you. What do you do?”) But his lighthearted anthropology suggests that the multicultural harmony they were raised to worship has bred a kind of self-denial.

Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University who is a fan of Lander’s humor, has observed that many of his white students are plagued by a racial-identity crisis: “They don’t care about socioeconomics; they care about culture. And to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, ‘I don’t have a culture.’ They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture … They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized. They don’t have a culture that’s cool or oppositional.” Wray says that this feeling of being culturally bereft often prevents students from recognizing what it means to be a child of privilege—a strange irony that the first wave of whiteness-studies scholars, in the 1990s, failed to anticipate.

Of course, the obvious material advantages that come with being born white—lower infant-mortality rates and easier-to-acquire bank loans, for example—tend to undercut any sympathy that this sense of marginalization might generate. And in the right context, cultural-identity crises can turn well-meaning whites into instant punch lines. Consider ego trip’s The (White) Rapper Show, a brilliant and critically acclaimed reality show that VH1 debuted in 2007. It depicted 10 (mostly hapless) white rappers living together in a dilapidated house—dubbed “Tha White House”—in the South Bronx. Despite the contestants’ best intentions, each one seemed like a profoundly confused caricature, whether it was the solemn graduate student committed to fighting racism or the ghetto-obsessed suburbanite who had, seemingly by accident, named himself after the abolitionist John Brown.

Similarly, Smirnoff struck marketing gold in 2006 with a viral music video titled “Tea Partay,” featuring a trio of strikingly bad, V-neck-sweater-clad white rappers called the Prep Unit. “Haters like to clown our Ivy League educations / But they’re just jealous ’cause our families run the nation,” the trio brayed, as a pair of bottle-blond women in spiffy tennis whites shimmied behind them. There was no nonironic way to enjoy the video; its entire appeal was in its self-aware lampooning of WASP culture: verdant country clubs, “old money,” croquet, popped collars, and the like.

“The best defense is to be constantly pulling the rug out from underneath yourself,” Wray remarks, describing the way self-aware whites contend with their complicated identity. “Beat people to the punch. You’re forced as a white person into a sense of ironic detachment. Irony is what fuels a lot of white subcultures. You also see things like Burning Man, when a lot of white people are going into the desert and trying to invent something that is entirely new and not a form of racial mimicry. That’s its own kind of flight from whiteness. We’re going through a period where whites are really trying to figure out: Who are we?”

The “flight from whiteness” of urban, college-educated, liberal whites isn’t the only attempt to answer this question. You can flee into whiteness as well. This can mean pursuing the authenticity of an imagined past: think of the deliberately white-bread world of Mormon America, where the ’50s never ended, or the anachronistic WASP entitlement flaunted in books like last year’s A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style, a handsome coffee-table book compiled by Susanna Salk, depicting a world of seersucker blazers, whale pants, and deck shoes. (What the book celebrates is the “inability to be outdone,” and the “self-confidence and security that comes with it,” Salk tells me. “That’s why I call it ‘privilege.’ It’s this privilege of time, of heritage, of being in a place longer than anybody else.”) But these enclaves of preserved-in-amber whiteness are likely to be less important to the American future than the construction of whiteness as a somewhat pissed-off minority culture.

This notion of a self-consciously white expression of minority empowerment will be familiar to anyone who has come across the comedian Larry the Cable Guy—he of “Farting Jingle Bells”—or witnessed the transformation of Detroit-born-and-bred Kid Rock from teenage rapper into “American Bad Ass” southern-style rocker. The 1990s may have been a decade when multiculturalism advanced dramatically—when American culture became “colorized,” as the critic Jeff Chang put it—but it was also an era when a very different form of identity politics crystallized. Hip-hop may have provided the decade’s soundtrack, but the highest-selling artist of the ’90s was Garth Brooks. Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods may have been the faces of athletic superstardom, but it was NASCAR that emerged as professional sports’ fastest-growing institution, with ratings second only to the NFL’s.

As with the unexpected success of the apocalyptic Left Behind novels, or the Jeff Foxworthy–organized Blue Collar Comedy Tour, the rise of country music and auto racing took place well off the American elite’s radar screen. (None of Christian Lander’s white people would be caught dead at a NASCAR race.) These phenomena reflected a growing sense of cultural solidarity among lower-middle-class whites—a solidarity defined by a yearning for American “authenticity,” a folksy realness that rejects the global, the urban, and the effete in favor of nostalgia for “the way things used to be.”

Like other forms of identity politics, white solidarity comes complete with its own folk heroes, conspiracy theories (Barack Obama is a secret Muslim! The U.S. is going to merge with Canada and Mexico!), and laundry lists of injustices. The targets and scapegoats vary—from multiculturalism and affirmative action to a loss of moral values, from immigration to an economy that no longer guarantees the American worker a fair chance—and so do the political programs they inspire. (Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan both tapped into this white identity politics in the 1990s; today, its tribunes run the ideological gamut, from Jim Webb to Ron Paul to Mike Huckabee to Sarah Palin.) But the core grievance, in each case, has to do with cultural and socioeconomic dislocation—the sense that the system that used to guarantee the white working class some stability has gone off-kilter.

Wray is one of the founders of what has been called “white-trash studies,” a field conceived as a response to the perceived elite-liberal marginalization of the white working class. He argues that the economic downturn of the 1970s was the precondition for the formation of an “oppositional” and “defiant” white-working-class sensibility—think of the rugged, anti-everything individualism of 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit. But those anxieties took their shape from the aftershocks of the identity-based movements of the 1960s. “I think that the political space that the civil-rights movement opens up in the mid-1950s and ’60s is the transformative thing,” Wray observes. “Following the black-power movement, all of the other minority groups that followed took up various forms of activism, including brown power and yellow power and red power. Of course the problem is, if you try and have a ‘white power’ movement, it doesn’t sound good.”

The result is a racial pride that dares not speak its name, and that defines itself through cultural cues instead—a suspicion of intellectual elites and city dwellers, a preference for folksiness and plainness of speech (whether real or feigned), and the association of a working-class white minority with “the real America.” (In the Scots-Irish belt that runs from Arkansas up through West Virginia, the most common ethnic label offered to census takers is “American.”) Arguably, this white identity politics helped swing the 2000 and 2004 elections, serving as the powerful counterpunch to urban white liberals, and the McCain-Palin campaign relied on it almost to the point of absurdity (as when a McCain surrogate dismissed Northern Virginia as somehow not part of “the real Virginia”) as a bulwark against the threatening multiculturalism of Barack Obama. Their strategy failed, of course, but it’s possible to imagine white identity politics growing more potent and more forthright in its racial identifications in the future, as “the real America” becomes an ever-smaller portion of, well, the real America, and as the soon-to-be white minority’s sense of being besieged and disdained by a multicultural majority grows apace.

This vision of the aggrieved white man lost in a world that no longer values him was given its most vivid expression in the 1993 film Falling Down. Michael Douglas plays Bill Foster, a downsized defense worker with a buzz cut and a pocket protector who rampages through a Los Angeles overrun by greedy Korean shop-owners and Hispanic gangsters, railing against the eclipse of the America he used to know. (The film came out just eight years before California became the nation’s first majority-minority state.) Falling Down ends with a soulful police officer apprehending Foster on the Santa Monica Pier, at which point the middle-class vigilante asks, almost innocently: “I’m the bad guy?”

But this is a nightmare vision. Of course most of America’s Bill Fosters aren’t the bad guys—just as civilization is not, in the words of Tom Buchanan, “going to pieces” and America is not, in the phrasing of Pat Buchanan, going “Third World.” The coming white minority does not mean that the racial hierarchy of American culture will suddenly become inverted, as in 1995’s White Man’s Burden, an awful thought experiment of a film, starring John Travolta, that envisions an upside-down world in which whites are subjugated to their high-class black oppressors. There will be dislocations and resentments along the way, but the demographic shifts of the next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone’s lives, producing a culture that’s more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.

Consider the world of advertising and marketing, industries that set out to mold our desires at a subconscious level. Advertising strategy once assumed a “general market”—“a code word for ‘white people,’” jokes one ad executive—and smaller, mutually exclusive, satellite “ethnic markets.” In recent years, though, advertisers have begun revising their assumptions and strategies in anticipation of profound demographic shifts. Instead of herding consumers toward a discrete center, the goal today is to create versatile images and campaigns that can be adapted to highly individualized tastes. (Think of the dancing silhouettes in Apple’s iPod campaign, which emphasizes individuality and diversity without privileging—or even representing—any specific group.)

At the moment, we can call this the triumph of multiculturalism, or post-racialism. But just as whiteness has no inherent meaning—it is a vessel we fill with our hopes and anxieties—these terms may prove equally empty in the long run. Does being post-racial mean that we are past race completely, or merely that race is no longer essential to how we identify ourselves? Karl Carter, of Atlanta’s youth-oriented GTM Inc. (Guerrilla Tactics Media), suggests that marketers and advertisers would be better off focusing on matrices like “lifestyle” or “culture” rather than race or ethnicity. “You’ll have crazy in-depth studies of the white consumer or the Latino consumer,” he complains. “But how do skaters feel? How do hip-hoppers feel?”

The logic of online social networking points in a similar direction. The New York University sociologist Dalton Conley has written of a “network nation,” in which applications like Facebook and MySpace create “crosscutting social groups” and new, flexible identities that only vaguely overlap with racial identities. Perhaps this is where the future of identity after whiteness lies—in a dramatic departure from the racial logic that has defined American culture from the very beginning. What Conley, Carter, and others are describing isn’t merely the displacement of whiteness from our cultural center; they’re describing a social structure that treats race as just one of a seemingly infinite number of possible self-identifications.

The problem of the 20th century, W. E. B. DuBois famously predicted, would be the problem of the color line. Will this continue to be the case in the 21st century, when a black president will govern a country whose social networks increasingly cut across every conceivable line of identification? The ruling of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind no longer holds weight, but its echoes have been inescapable: we aspire to be post-racial, but we still live within the structures of privilege, injustice, and racial categorization that we inherited from an older order. We can talk about defining ourselves by lifestyle rather than skin color, but our lifestyle choices are still racially coded. We know, more or less, that race is a fiction that often does more harm than good, and yet it is something we cling to without fully understanding why—as a social and legal fact, a vague sense of belonging and place that we make solid through culture and speech.

But maybe this is merely how it used to be—maybe this is already an outdated way of looking at things. “You have a lot of young adults going into a more diverse world,” Carter remarks. For the young Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s, culture is something to be taken apart and remade in their own image. “We came along in a generation that didn’t have to follow that path of race,” he goes on. “We saw something different.” This moment was not the end of white America; it was not the end of anything. It was a bridge, and we crossed it.

Labels: African Americans, Barack Obama, Racism

By ORLANDO PATTERSON

BARACK OBAMA’S victory marks the end of another magnificent chapter in America’s experience of democracy. But rather than being seen as a radical transition, it is best viewed as part of an ever-evolving process that began with the election of George Washington in 1789. To interpret it as a foundational change, ushering something new and unknown, is to diminish the past, to unduly singularize Mr. Obama’s achievement and to raise unrealistic expectations about his presidency.

Mr. Obama owes his victory, first, to his gift of leadership and personality: the hybrid cool of his charisma, his cathartic power to mine unity from difference. But his triumph depended on voters, first prone to see his candidacy as exotic, to recognize it as something that could (and would) only happen here. That they did stems in large part from the founding fathers’ clear vision of the ideal makeup of a democracy: an inclusive electorate, political participation and political power sharing.

This was a vision that terrified as much as it fascinated the conservative men who were often amazed at what they had signed on to in 1787: a revolutionary “charter of power granted by liberty,” in James Madison’s nervously triumphalist prose. So they promptly ensured that it would only very slowly threaten the political hegemony of older white men.

Three groups, in particular, were excluded from the process: blacks, women and the young. The history of American democracy can be read in good part as the struggle of all three to become fully included in the process. The 2008 campaign was remarkable in the way all three groups worked together to realize, finally and fully, the ambivalent vision of the founders.

Most important to the Obama victory was the long struggle of black Americans to be incorporated in the public sphere. That entailed not just the dismantlement of Jim Crow but the election of black officers at all levels of the political system. The sheer presence of significant numbers of blacks in positions of political authority was as much the cause as the consequence of the profound change in white political attitudes. Colin Powell’s flirtation with a presidential run was a critical point in this shift in white attitude, effectively priming the nation for the possibility of a black candidate. But so too were the appointments of blacks such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown.

And while disdained by most social scientists, the cultural dimension of black public incorporation also prepared the way: a white population that venerates Will Smith, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan, its youth steeped in hip-hop, has already gone a long way toward accepting a black leader in the highest office of the public sphere, even if whites are reluctant to do the same in their segregated private lives.

Of equal importance in explaining Senator Obama’s triumph, however, are American women. This campaign was, in a remarkable way, a condensed re-enactment of the entire intertwined struggle of blacks and women for political inclusion. White women first rejected their confinement to the role of virtuous motherhood in the private sphere of the early Republic by championing the very public struggle for the abolition of slavery. In much the same way, the modern second wave of feminism was facilitated by, and partly modeled on the black civil rights movement.

Black achievement has always presaged female advancement, not always from the noblest of motives: if blacks could vote, enjoy protection from discrimination and run for office, so should women. Hillary Clinton’s forceful campaign, however important, pales in comparison with this historic American tendency in explaining why a female president is now a near certainty and not long off.

But women have always repaid the debt. A quiet but momentous change took place in the 1980s that was just as important as the civil rights movement in explaining Barack Obama’s victory: the epochal shift in the voting behavior of women who, for the first time since enfranchisement, voted in greater numbers, and more progressively, than men. In raw demographic terms, the most important factor in explaining the Obama victory was women voting by a 13 percent margin in his favor, while men were almost evenly split. President Obama would neglect this base of support at his peril.

Finally, there is the much discussed resurgence in the youth vote. Here, again, change is best viewed as a critical moment in a pre-existing process. American youths have long voted at distressingly low levels, although the turnout of eligible voters between 18 and 29 surged moderately between 2000 and 2004, from 36 to 47 percent. While Tuesday’s exit polls are showing only an incremental change in this rate, Mr. Obama had a powerful impact on youth activism, deploying young Americans in voter mobilization ground operations and in the game-changing use of the Internet for voter outreach and campaign finance.

Young voters went 2-to-1 in Mr. Obama’s favor on Tuesday. Their advocacy in the Iowa caucuses was likely the decisive factor in his all-important victory there. The most lasting effect of all this may be a permanent shift of the youth vote toward the Democratic Party, although one can certainly expect the Republicans, who made successful efforts on campuses in the Ronald Reagan years, to mount a challenge.It appears, too, that the intense bonding of younger Americans with the youthful Mr. Obama initiates the transmission of power from baby boomers, who have for so long consumed the nation’s assets and attention, to a younger generation from whom so much has already been taken, in social security and resources.

To view the election of Barack Obama as notable only as an example of breaking through a racial barrier is to misunderstand the greater flow of our ever-more-inclusive democracy. America has, at last, delivered, in creating the most sublime example of democratic governance since its invention in Greece 25 centuries ago.

Orlando Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard and the author of “The Ordeal of Integration.”

Labels: African Americans, Barack Obama

Why should we care now?

By Raquel Cepeda

"Yo, my nigga, that nigga's crazy," declares a young Dominican guy in his late teens, early twenties. "Yeah, my nigga, that nigga was buggin' last night, my nigga," responds another hermano. Chatter like this floated in the air like the whiff of days-old garbage smoldering in the heat while I took my frequent summer jaunts along Vermilyea Avenue way uptown in Inwood, with my 11-year-old daughter in tow.

Initially, you'd find mostly Caribbean Latinos dropping n-bombs into rap lyrics—"Pigs," off Cypress Hill's classic self-titled 1991 debut, is just one example—but nearly two decades later, the profusion of the word into the New York City Latino vocabulary is reaching an almost caricaturist quality. In Spanish Harlem, el Bronx, and the Lower East Side, it's enthusiastically deployed in an almost faddish manner, as if it's going out of style literally tomorrow. With Nas threatening to name his latest album Nigga (he relented, eventually, but most fans still call it that anyway) a few months ago, and iconic Latino artists from the authentic urban native Fat Joe to one of my favorite internationalists, Immortal Technique, still flinging it about freely, the word, its meaning, and our sense of who can and cannot use it still dominates public conversation. The palpable racial tension that's been rearing its head this historic presidential election, the subject of race and who is truly considered black or white in this black-and-white race, is something Latinos need to pay attention to. For many of us, especially those of Caribbean descent who make up a sizable chunk of New York Latinos, race should matter, and so should that one particular word.

Personal feelings, premonitions, and politics aside, I took the two young boys' exchange as an interesting opportunity, an exercise in thinking about Afro-Latino identity in an unlikely way: through a hip-hop lens. Aside from the fact that we're in the thick of a predominantly Dominican enclave (for now) in our beloved Uptown Manhattan, and the first guy I'd overheard wore an oversized white T-shirt emblazoned with our motherland's flag, homeboy could've passed for an African-American man on any other stretch of blocks stateside. By comparison, his comrade looked more like Fat Joe's skinnier brother, with light eyes and pale skin. Was it OK, or more OK, for the darker-skinned kid to use the term?

As many times as I've heard it yelled across the streets and in playgrounds lately, it doesn't take away the sting. But it's naive to think Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban kids in New York City aren't calling each other and themselves the n-word, especially in 2008. (It's a global phenomenon, too: In West African cities like Freetown and Accra, heads that find out you're from the States and part of the hip-hop community will find creative ways to work the word into a conversation.) For us, the word usually surfaces in the same context that arises among young African-Americans: as a term of inclusion and solidarity. "It's just a code of communication to us, a 'hood word people throw around frequently," says half-African-American, half-Dominican rapper AZ, who released his "rap thesis" on the subject, titled N.4.L. (Niggaz 4 Life), last month. "I guess people want to use it now for press and all that; I don't understand what's all the big fuss about."

Somehow, the n-word has found its way back into hip-hop's critical zeitgeist: I'm interested in exploring, as a Dominican New Yorker, how we as a community have propagated it. Recently, due to the mounting criticism of Boricua rapper Fat Joe's use of the term eight albums deep into his career (including his latest, The Elephant in the Room), Latinos are being challenged to introspect. But I can see why an impulse to laser-focus on the issue now would bewilder a veteran rapper like Joe; he's used the word consistently since emerging in 1993, as have the Beatnuts, Hurricane G, and his late Puerto Rican cohort Big Pun, to name a few. In an interview with Chicago-based WGCI radio personality Leon Rogers, Joe said that while he didn't know exactly when Latinos started using the n-word, he felt that "somehow it became a way to embrace each other." He added: "Crazy shit is, my man Reverend Al Sharpton, whenever I see him, he'll be like, 'Wassup Joe, my nigga,' and he's the dude that protests 'my nigga.' He's my friend, so he says it to me as a term of endearment."

"It draws the racial differentiations into the Latino community, which I agree with," says New York University Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, Juan Flores, who regularly teaches courses on Afro-Latino identity here and abroad. "It's just an opportunity to check the power that Black Latinos reflect off each other and the Latino population." In other words, Latino artists use the n-word as a reminder that they too have been oppressed and are products of the transatlantic slave trade.

There may be a reason for the lack of attention: Many Caribbean Latinos are, to Americans at least, ethnically ambiguous products of miscegenation. Regardless of what we've learned in grade school, our history extends past Columbus and our Spanish conquistadores. "The European Spaniards have left a legacy of self-hatred and racism among the Latino population; without acknowledging that, we will not evolve past our own inequity," says Immortal Technique, an Afro-Peruvian hip-hop artist who also uses the n-word. "Racism in America, as horrible and ugly as it may be, still isn't as bad as what it is in Latin America, and the sad part is that we are being racist against ourselves."

Maybe, in a way, that's the statement Dania Ramirez intended to make when, as part of Nas's Grammy-night entourage earlier this year, the dark-brown Dominican actress sported a black T-shirt emblazoned with the n-word. Many folks in our parents' generation have rejected their blackness—I have older Latino neighbors who won't vote for Barack Obama simply because he's black—but those generations more informed by hip-hop are embracing their Afro-Latino identity and evolving past our own self-hatred. Perhaps. "One fallacy is that [the n-word is] blasé, like, 'Ah well, everyone can use it now that it has a different meaning,' because it's not completely meaningless," says Professor Flores. "The other extreme, though, is the absolutist who thinks no one can use it because it's taboo, under any circumstances. That's a problem, too, because every expression has the potential for ulterior meanings, depending on the circumstances of the person."

Crystal, a 13-year-old fair-skinned Dominican girl attending eighth grade in an Inwood public school, remembers first hearing the n-word in a song while hanging out with her aunt. "So then, we got on the computer and we looked it up, and it had the meaning and everything," she recalls. "I was like, 'Why would you say it in a song?' From there, you started hearing everybody on the street saying it, and then everybody started getting used to it." To be fair, parents aren't always able to interfere because they speak little to no English; those reared by hip-hop culture in the last two decades often use it themselves.

The similar term cocolo—most popularly used as an insult against Haitians by Dominicans, and by Puerto-Ricans against Dominican immigrants who look Haitian—is another word gradually being assigned a new meaning here among Latinos. Other words that translate to mean "black" among Caribbean Latinos are moreno/a and negrito/a, almost always used as terms of endearment. However, because none of these words have had the fraternal stamp of hip-hop approval, they have yet to receive their proverbial ghetto passes; speaking of which, Jennifer Lopez might've surrendered hers when she left the Bronx eons ago. While it's a fact that men in the hip-hop industry can get away with murder, women are held to impossibly high standards, and the question of authenticity played a role in how negatively the public reacted to J. Lo's use of the n-word on the remix for her 2001 single "I'm Real."

"I think with that, it was really based more upon class than anything else," Immortal Technique says. "Many people saw Fat Joe as technically black even though he was a light-skinned Puerto Rican, and he had affiliations with the streets that Jennifer Lopez probably lost on the way to Hollywood."

With few exceptions within our community—Raquel Rivera's 2003 book New York Ricans From the Hip Hop Zone devoted prime real estate to the discussion of Latino identity in hip-hop—this is a conversation we've failed to have, whatever our personal feelings. "It really don't matter if you're white, you're black, you're brown, or from the Boogie Down—it irks me to death," says Alain "KET" Maridueña, 37, an entrepreneur and artist. "Latinos in our neighborhood use it a lot—like every other word—and I'm trying to check people because I find that we're suffering, we're going through our thing, times are hard, there aren't enough opportunities out there, and I want us to rise up." But we won't rise up if we can't talk about the reasons why we haven't quite gotten there yet, and the words that've risen in prominence as a result.

Labels: African Americans, Hip Hop, Latinos

By JON CARAMANICA
DURING a show at the Knitting Factory in TriBeCa this summer, the Cool Kids took the stage dressed like extras in “Do the Right Thing.” Mikey Rocks, 20, and the duo’s main rapper, wore a baggy, bright red tank top with silver lettering, and Chuck Inglish, 23, sported a striped Polo shirt; both wore fitted baseball caps with brims flying high. Midshow, the two slid into the signature song “88,” a carefully constructed burst of reminiscence with spare, crisp drums backing a fusillade of era-appropriate references: Cuban-link gold chains, Cazal eyeglass frames, stone-washed Guess jeans. In the crowd, some fans waved gold ropes and vintage sneakers, and a young woman in a floral-print dress did the high-stepping Kid ’n Play dance from the 1990 film “House Party.”

Released in May, the Cool Kids’ debut EP, “The Bake Sale” (C.A.K.E./Chocolate Industries), is a vivid and unusually potent revisiting of what is commonly referred to as hip-hop’s golden age (spanning the late 1980s and early ’90s), both in its spare, drum-heavy production values and in its neatly structured rhyme patterns. Never mind that the two performers aren’t old enough to have experienced the scene firsthand.

“That’s what we sound like; I can’t help it,” said Chuck Inglish, who produces the Cool Kids’ music with a meticulous ear. “But I’m into emulation, not imitation.”

Increasingly, the Cool Kids are not alone. They are part of a small but newly influential hip-hop subculture — call it meta-rap — created by a generation of artists raised wholly within hip-hop culture, making music that is a commentary on what came before it. In hip-hop, which can be ruthlessly forward-looking, this is a novel development, and it has made for compelling and diverse music from acts like the Cool Kids, Pacific Division, the Knux, Kidz in the Hall and Plastic Little.

Not all these artists are as committed to a specific sound as the Cool Kids are, but they express their nostalgia in other ways: in lyrical references and rhyme patterns, in the selection of drum sounds, in their choice of clothes. While much current mainstream rap tends toward street-life fantasias and thug-love odes, these meta-rap artists are far less ostentatious, preoccupied with authenticity and topically narrow. As a result most of their music exists at the margins, little acknowledged by radio or television but extremely popular on the Internet.

Musically, this may be the most promising underground hip-hop movement in a decade, feted by old-school loyalists and genre outsiders entranced by its obsessive commitment to style. But even as the movement creeps toward broader recognition, it has already generated its share of backlash. These artists are often dismissed as “hipster rap,” as if they’re wearing their old-school references as nothing more than fashion. The result is a hip-hop generation gap.

“It’s the instant gratification aspect,” said Eskay, proprietor of the hip-hop blog NahRight.com, which has prominently featured many of these artists. “You can be an expert in anything in about a week now. The backlash is, these kids are young; why are they trying to recreate something they didn’t experience?”

Rap has had its countercultures before, of course. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, New York’s Native Tongues crew, which included De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, presented a bohemian alternative to the growing gangster rap scene. In the ’90s, Los Angeles and the Bay Area were home to independent scenes interested in rewriting the rules of lyricism.

But while intragenre nostalgia figures regularly in other styles of pop — rock has a long history of sifting through its past for new inspiration — it has never had a place in hip-hop. It’s not that rap never looks backward. Thanks to its innovations in sampling, it has helped keep various other styles prominent in the collective pop memory. But borrowing from other rappers has traditionally been considered taboo. And largely it still is, so many of these artists use elements of the past as building blocks, which they then reconfigure to their own ends. Though the music shares many characteristics with hip-hop from decades past, “in the climate of the industry right now, it’s considered experimental,” said Be Young, 22, of Southern California’s Pacific Division.

“People are students of the game,” said Double O of the Chicago duo Kidz in the Hall. “The late ’80s and early ’90s was hip-hop’s Harlem Renaissance. You can find traces of that in all of these new artists.”

With two full-length albums to their credit, Kidz in the Hall, who met while students at the University of Pennsylvania, qualify as veterans of the new movement. On their latest album, “The In Crowd” (Duck Down), they even enlist golden-age artists like Camp Lo, Buckshot and Masta Ace for cameos. “I’m an academic at heart,” Double O said. “Even when it comes to music, I’m going to take pieces out and reinject them on an academically creative level.”

The New Orleans-via-Los Angeles duo the Knux also takes its bona fides seriously. “I am very schooled on what happened in the ’80s,” said Krispy Kream, 25, half of the duo. “Some of these cats wasn’t even born till the ’90s.”

How they translate those influences is unique, though. The duo’s debut, “Remind Me in 3 Days,” to be released in October on Interscope, is self-produced — the Knux has performed often at songwriters’ nights at Largo, the Los Angeles club spearheaded by the producer Jon Brion, who has worked with Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann — and recalls in places early OutKast, the Clash and the Police. The texture, though, is unmistakably from the golden age, with fast-rap cadences and raw, almost haphazard-sounding drums.

“We recorded songs in the worst way possible,” Krispy Kream said, “so you get a certain feel from it, like an old hip-hop record from 1990 or whenever.”

His brother and band mate, Rah Almillio, 23, considers it “a punk approach, hip-hop as it used to be — not perfected, not overpolished.”

In a sense these meta-rappers have become keepers of the flame for the genre’s old guard: neo-traditionalists in eccentrics’ clothing. “There’s always nostalgia; it’s a byproduct of capitalism,” said Jayson Musson, 30, the frontman for the Philadelphia rap satirists Plastic Little. “Especially for the kids who weren’t really there, that era becomes hypercool, like the ’50s and the Beats.”

Mr. Musson described his music as “rap, but almost an investigation of rap, very aware of the genre and its structural elements.” Plastic Little has released two albums, the self-released “Thug Paradise” and “She’s Mature” (Tonearm), both packed with hip-hop in-jokes. This inquisitiveness also comes out in Mr. Musson’s writing and art. For a time last year, he was a columnist for Philadelphia Weekly, and in 2002 he put out “Too Black for BET,” a collection of posters that poked vicious fun at hip-hop orthodoxies (the most memorable of which speculated on the sexuality of Jay-Z).

“The music is like the writing,” Mr. Musson said. “It’s got to be funny or deconstructive.”

In recent years there has been no shortage of deconstructionists in rap’s mainstream, the most noteworthy being Kanye West, André 3000 of OutKast and Lupe Fiasco. And this is a particularly fertile moment for alternative hip-hop styles: the electro-influenced club-rap of Spank Rock and Kid Sister, the liberal-minded college raps of Asher Roth, the surf-rock hip-hop of Shwayze, Wale’s hybrid of go-go and rap, and the stream-of-consciousness fantasies of Charles Hamilton.

These so-called hipster rappers have been successful at carving out their own niches, finding audiences in unexpected places. The Knux had a song featured on an episode of the HBO series “Entourage” last season. Plastic Little recently toured Europe with Mark Ronson. And the Cool Kids have been prominently featured in a national television ad for Rhapsody, Microsoft’s online music service.

There may well be a ceiling for this movement, though. “The music is just not mass appeal,” said Cipha Sounds, a mixshow D.J. on New York’s Hot 97 (WQHT-FM) and a host on MTV. “I enjoy some of it very much, but it’s nothing I can really play on the radio or in the club.”

And sales of these artists have been modest, though none have yet released an album with a major-label push like the Knux will receive, according to Steve Berman, president of sales and marketing at Interscope Geffen A&M. But he warned that “their success may not be measured in the old-school commercial ways we used in the past.”

Apart from Kidz in the Hall and Plastic Little, none of these groups have even released proper full-length albums; blog hype has gotten ahead of them, forcing them to hone, and perhaps calcify, a sound very early in their careers. “Everyone’s looking at them before they’re ready,” said Kidz in the Hall’s Double O of his peers. “They’re going to have to put out a product before their time.”

Or, perhaps, to suffer the indignity of having their style copied before they get a chance to truly capitalize on it. “We’ve got a lot of friends at record labels that got inside scoop on what’s happening,” said the Cool Kids’ Mikey Rocks. “It’s been said they’re trying to create their own Cool Kids. There’s going to be clones and Cool Kids Juniors all over the place.”

If the Cool Kids have their way, though, they will have evolved by then. In between tour dates, the group has been working on its debut album, tentatively titled “When Fish Ride Bicycles.” And there is always more history to mine.

“After this LP,” Chuck Inglish said, “I’m thinking about recording everything to tape like it’s 1991 and seeing how that sounds.”

Labels: African Americans, Music

Man Who Beat Coke and NFL Starts to Study Diversity in Ad Agencies

By Ken Wheaton

Cyrus Mehri, one of the nation's top civil-rights attorneys and a man who has been dubbed one of Washington's most feared lawyers, has turned his attention to the ad industry's woeful diversity record.

Mr. Mehri declined to discuss whether a lawsuit was in the works but said his firm was behind the preliminary results of a study obtained by Ad Age. Any way you look at it, the fact that a top civil-rights attorney has commissioned a survey of diversity in ad agencies does not bode well for the agencies whose ranks are still overwhelmingly white.

The study, which isn't complete yet, is being conducted by economist Marc Bendick Jr. on behalf of the firm. According to the summary, Mr. Bendick looked at census data and figures for similar "persuasion" industries (media, law, philanthropy, high-end sales) and came up with benchmark percentages of minorities one could expect in an industry such as advertising. Whereas, according to the benchmarks, African-Americans would be expected to make up 9.5% of the professionals in advertising (a number even lower than the 13% in the general population), it turns out they make up only 5.8%. On the executive and managerial side, African-Americans make up only 3.2% compared with an expected 7.2%.

That amounts to a 39% shortfall in African-American representation among the industry's staff and a 56% shortfall among managerial employees. Unlike previous efforts, this study takes into account the entire ad industry, not just a handful of agencies operating out of New York. The figures include employees and managers at African-American-owned shops; Mr. Mehri said he expects the numbers to be even worse when those agencies are not factored in.



'Purposeful discrimination'

"If this was 1970 and they had this shortfall, I could be sympathetic," he said. But, he added, "the preliminary results [of this study] are showing shortfalls that are rare to have in this magnitude in this modern day and indicate purposeful discrimination." He went on to say that the industry won't resolve this issue until it stops focusing on a false "supply" argument (not enough African-American candidates) and starts focusing on the people in charge.

Nancy Hill, president-CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, declined to comment on the matter.

Mr. Mehri, a partner at Mehri and Skalet, wouldn't disclose the firm's long-term plans in relation to the ad industry, but he made it clear he is not working with the New York City Commission on Human Rights. He did attend a forum held by the commission earlier this year on behalf of ad-industry employees who'd contacted him.

A look at Mr. Mehri's case history should worry the industry. His firm was behind suits against Texaco and Coca-Cola Co. that resulted in the largest discrimination settlements in history -- $176 million in the Texaco case and $192.5 million in the Coke case -- as well as dramatic reforms in both companies' employment practices. His firm was also behind recent gender-discrimination suits in the financial-services sector. The so-called Women on Wall Street Project has resulted in, among other things, a $46 million settlement against Morgan Stanley and a $33 million settlement from Smith Barney. Even when lawsuits aren't filed, Mr. Mehri leaves his mark. He, along with Johnnie Cochran, released the report "Black Coaches in the National Football League: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities." That report, backed up with the threat of a major lawsuit, led to the hiring of numerous African-American coaches.

"We're serious players," Mr. Mehri said. "We're going to do our homework. We're going to interview everybody who contacts us. We're going to build this up step by step. This is a world of difference compared to anything [the industry has] faced before."

Economist's perspective

Mr. Bendick, who's conducting the study, is an economist who specializes in employment and human-resource management at Bendick and Eagan Economic Consultants. He's done work for both employers and employees, the departments of Justice and Labor, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Most of his work doesn't involve litigation.

Mr. Bendick wouldn't comment for this story, but in previous studies -- such as "Changing Workplace Cultures to Reduce Employment Discrimination" -- he's touched on types of discrimination that may sound familiar to those toiling in the ad world. "They often derive from social relationships that informally limit access to information about job opportunities. They may reflect issues of 'social comfort' and personal style that affect whose comments get listened to, who is perceived as competent and who gets credit for accomplishments."

On the other hand, he told The Washington Post in January of this year, "If you ask what is the impact of diversity training today, you have to say 75% is junk and will have little impact or no impact or negative impact."

According to Mr. Mehri, the study won't be ready for several weeks. "I want to be clear that our firm has commissioned this study because we do our homework before we come in with guns blazing," he said. The study is meant to offer raw data, a look at causes behind the lack of diversity and, hopefully, remedies.

Leadership problem?

While Mr. Mehri wouldn't disclose what shapes those remedies might take, he was clear that the answer isn't more internships, scholarship programs and diversity initiatives -- which he sees as "rope-a-dope" schemes designed mostly to make it look like the industry is doing something about the problem.




"It's not a matter of forming affinity groups among the excluded," he said. "What needs fixing isn't the African-Americans; it's the white guy running the agency. We want to relentlessly focus on not the excluded groups but the excluding groups, the people who control the power and make the decisions. That's where people are running into barriers. The leadership has to come from the top."

He went on: "We know the industry has had various diversity efforts over the years. However, these efforts are going to continue to fall short until they understand they're operating under a false premise -- that the problem is the supply of African-American talent -- when the real problem is the lack of leadership at the top and their exclusionary policies and practices."

Mr. Mehri countered the argument that the problem is a lack of interest in the industry among African-Americans or a simple lack of candidates. "Supply is important. But you also have to shift the focus to a level playing field. So you can applaud the work that they're doing, but there's still going to be this revolving door unless there's this tenacious focus on a level playing field."

Labels: advertisement, African Americans, Music

(September 2, 2008) UPTOWN Magazine, the luxury lifestyle company targeting the growing Affluent African American market, and Diversity Affluence, a marketing research and consulting company specializing in affluent ethnic markets, have released groundbreaking research on the behaviors, attitudes, opinions and spending patterns of Affluent African Americans. This demo is defined as individual consumers earning a minimum annual income of $75,000.

"Affluent African Americans are an educated, sizeable and often untapped opportunity for luxury brands, said Leonard Burnett, Co-CEO, Group Publisher of Uptown Media. "This unprecedented study aims to arm marketers with data and insights to help them more effectively target this growing audience."

The study comprised a national online survey and a series of regional focus groups in Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington DC from March-July 2008. The respondent mix was 35% male and 65% female; 68% were single and 32% were married or committed.

Some key results from the study:

- Purchasing Power of AAAs in the US (individual income of $100K), is estimated at $29.8 billion.

- AAAs conduct extensive research on luxury items prior to purchase.

- Decisions influencing purchase include tailored advertising, personalized service and event marketing at the retail level.

- AAAs are aspirational and focused on trading up to more luxurious brands.

- Fashion is an expected luxury and is equally important to both men and women.

- Men's fashion spending was focused on career wear, casual wear and shoes; while women spent on purses and shoes.

"The comprehensive study took five months to complete," said Andrea Hoffman, CEO of Diversity Affluence. "What was once considered luxury has now become necessity."

Founded in 2004, Uptown Media is the only luxury lifestyle company that targets the Affluent African American (AAA) Market. UPTOWN Magazine affords luxury purveyors the broadest access to this highly sought-after male and female demographic.

Labels: African Americans, Music

Has pop culture paved the way for Barack Obama to become our next president?

By David Walker

No matter the final outcome of the general election in November, Sen. Barack Obama has already made history. The historical discussion of Obama's success on the campaign trail would not be complete without mentioning the trailblazers who came before him, men and women like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Mary McLeod Bethune and Shirley Chisholm, the first black major-party candidate for president of the United States.

But while everyone is quick to point out the civil rights leaders and political movers and shakers that have paved the way for Obama, not nearly enough attention has been paid to a film about a killer comet on a collision course with Earth, a popular television series on a network owned by notorious conservative Rupert Murdoch, or how Darth Vader was once commander in chief.

Entertainment in all of its forms -- sports, literature, popular music, television and film -- has always been a crucial component of American culture, serving as a historical marker of where society has been as well as an indicator of where it is headed. Historically, popular entertainment has always played an especially pivotal role in shaping the perception of black Americans. From Jackie Robinson becoming the first black player in Major League Baseball to Will Smith repeatedly saving the world in films like "Men in Black" and "I Am Legend," pop culture has, for better and for worse, been a primary source of information that determines how mainstream America perceives black people. And for Obama, pop culture, especially film and television, may just help him win the election in November.

"America is ready for a black president because we've seen them before. Black presidents, in fact, have been our most awesome presidents ever: Morgan Freeman in 'Deep Impact' and Dennis Haysbert in '24,'" wrote Joel Stein in a Los Angeles Times editorial. "And their approval ratings -- box office grosses and Nielsen ratings, the only approval that matters in the U.S. -- have been huge."

The fictional presidents portrayed by Freeman and Haysbert have gone a long way to popularizing the concept of a black American in the Oval Office, but it was actor James Earl Jones who played the first black president in 1972's "The Man," based on Irving Wallace's novel and adapted for the screen by "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling. When the president of the United States and the speaker of the House are killed in a freak accident, and the terminally ill vice president abdicates power, the role of commander in chief falls unexpectedly on the shoulders of the Senate president pro tempore, Douglass Dilman (Jones). Faced with a choice of being his own man or serving as the puppet president others want him to be, Dilman wrestles with a series of complex racial issues that include a black American student accused of assassinating the defense minister of South Africa.

"The Man" deals specifically with the issues of race and racism as it relates to the presidency. Produced in the wake of the civil rights movement, when black power had manifested itself cinematically in the blaxploitation films of the era, "The Man" is very much a product of the 1970s. It is a byproduct of the politically charged films of the late 1950s and '60s (many of which starred Sidney Poitier), which helped to change the way blacks were portrayed in mass media.

In the world of film, Poitier did more to clear the way for Obama than any other actor. Poitier was the first black actor to be successfully cast as a hero in mainstream American cinema. The Bahamian Poitier's career began in the 1950s with films like "No Way Out," "Edge of the City" and "The Defiant Ones," all of which dealt head-on with race relations in America. In 1964 he won an Oscar for his leading role in "Lilies of the Field," and, by 1967, the year he starred in "In the Heat of the Night," "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "To Sir, With Love" -- all racially charged films -- Poitier was the No. 1 box office actor in the country.

The issues of race and racism that fueled most of Poitier's films and also informed "The Man" became minor points in the following decades. When Freeman co-starred in 1998's "Deep Impact" as President Tom Beck, no mention of his race was ever made in the film. With a comet on a collision course with Earth threatening all life on the planet, matters of race and politics took a back seat to special effects. In a performance that was calm, cool and compassionate in the face impending doom, Freeman came to embody everything that America looks for in a leader. Film critic Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review of "Deep Impact," "Morgan Freeman makes a fine president of the United States, with a thoughtful manner and just the right reassuring television presence."

With "The Man" never having been released on home video, Freeman's President Beck has enjoyed a high approval rating among fictional presidents, making him one of the most beloved and effective leaders of the United States of Cinema. But for all of President Beck's popularity, he is outshined by another fictional leader, President David Palmer.

Named the No. 1 pick for fictional president in an Entertainment Weekly reader's poll earlier this year, President Palmer (Haysbert) from the FOX television series "24" has enjoyed far more favorable ratings than the current leader of the free world. Serving as president for two seasons on "24," Palmer became a crucial pop culture icon that helped make the concept of a black president a bit more realistic. "If anything, my portrayal of David Palmer, I think, may have helped open the eyes of the American people," Haysbert said in an Associated Press article. "And I mean the American people from across the board -- from the poorest to the richest, every color and creed, every religious base -- to prove the possibility there could be an African-American president, a female president, any type of president that puts the people first."

While Haysbert, Freeman and, to a lesser extent, Jones have all helped in creating a public perception of a black president, they have not been the only actors to tackle the role. On "24," actor D.B. Woodside's Wayne Palmer, the brother of David Palmer, would go on to become president, but his character has not proven to be as popular as his sibling.

Other black actors have played the president in more comedic roles, most notably Chris Rock as Mays Gilliam in "Head of State," an uneven comedy that's silly at best and not nearly as funny as Dave Chappelle's performances as the president on his television series "Chappelle's Show." Ernie Hudson, best known for his work in "Ghostbusters," stepped into the role of President Westwood in the unintentionally funny B-movie thriller "Stealth Fighter." Tommy "Tiny" Lister played the futuristic President Lindberg in the science fiction film "The Fifth Element." The pinnacle of the comedic commanders in chief would have to be former professional wrestler and porn star President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews) in "Idiocracy," the stupidest president -- at least stupidest fictional president -- of all time.

The comedic portrayal of black presidents recalls a time when the most acceptable roles for black Americans were those of jesters and buffoons. As entertaining as Crews' President Camacho may be, he ultimately conjures a negative image of blacks that recalls the performances of actors like Stepin Fetchit, whose entire career was built around comical stereotypes. These performances, amusing though some of them may be, have done little to help Obama's cause.

Whether or not Obama is elected president of the United States in November remains to be seen. But the one thing that is clear is that the image of black Americans in pop culture has changed considerably since D.W. Griffith's racially inflammatory 1915 film "Birth of a Nation." Those changes can be tracked and measured with a line that leads from Paul Robeson to Smith, twisting and turning along the way to include everyone from Robinson to Poitier to Muhammad Ali to Richard Pryor, and perhaps leading to the first black president of the United States.

Labels: African Americans, Music

by Julia M. Klein

The first African American presidential campaign is drawing vast sums; meanwhile, museums dedicated to black history are struggling.

In July 2007, Vonita Foster traveled to New York at the invitation of the American Express Foundation to make the case for the United States National Slavery Museum. Her goal: a major gift for the $200 million project, which is hurting for funds and has yet to break ground at its scenic Fredericksburg, Virginia, site.

After the meeting, "we really felt positive," recalls Foster, the museum's executive director. "I think they were very excited about it. I don't know what happened after that."

In a letter last August, Leslie Schiftic, the foundation's manager of philanthropy, praised the museum as "a wonderful project that should generate much interest." But, she continued, "unfortunately, our plate is very full and we are unable to provide sponsorship for this year." Foster's request for clarification went unanswered.

While Foster says that the recession and competition from the presidential campaigns have certainly hurt fundraising efforts, the underlying problem may be the museum's subject matter. "People think of slavery and they think of guilt," she says. "When we try to raise funds, we have found that people are very uncomfortable, corporations are uncomfortable."

The slavery institution is not the only African American museum to face challenges ( view slideshow), even as the country may be on the cusp of having its first black president. When you discuss slavery and civil rights, "it's a tough conversation," says Lawrence Pijeaux Jr., president and C.E.O. of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and former president of the Association of African American Museums. The problem is magnified, says Pijeaux, when "you have an emerging number of cultural institutions looking for financial support from this shrinking pool of resources." Among the museums vying for cash are the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture, slated to open in 2015, and the four-year-old National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

Meanwhile, "African Americans don't have a history of giving to museums," Pijeaux says.

"It takes generations to establish giving patterns," says Vernon Courtney, president of the A.A.A.M. and director of the museum and archive at Hampton University, a historically black school. "The black community is very, very generous in giving, but it gives its money to the church. This African American museum movement is relatively young. Those patterns have not yet developed."

The amount of discretionary income in the African American community remains limited, Courtney adds. "Whenever you start a project," he says, people inevitably ask, "'Have you tried Bill Cosby? Have you tried Oprah?' as if 999,000 other folks aren't trying to get their attention at the same time."

Cosby has given about $1.2 million to the U.S. National Slavery Museum. Oprah Winfrey sits on the council of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a $500 million behemoth that will open on the National Mall. Winfrey donated $1 million to Cincinnati's National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in 2004 to mark its launch.

Even so, the $110 million, 158,000-square-foot Freedom Center has been cash-strapped and has fallen short of its ambition to serve as an engine for tourism and economic development in the region. According to Freedom Center C.E.O. Donald Murphy, the museum is too large for its mission, and its annual attendance projections—which began at 1 million and have slipped steadily downward—were wildly optimistic. Visitation has leveled off at about 170,000, he says.

In response, Murphy slashed the annual budget from $12 million to $7 million and reduced staffing by 30 percent. To boost income, he wants to lease out space in the building and develop temporary exhibitions with box office clout. Instead of being pigeonholed as an African American museum, he wants the Freedom Center positioned as "an institution of conscience that has a broad appeal to anyone who is interested in freedom in the world."

Sometimes the issue isn't dreaming big, but starting too small. Romona Riscoe Benson, president and C.E.O. of the null since 2005, says that many "ethnically specific" museums, with grass-roots origins in the 1960s and '70s, lacked endowment funds. "Folks are just looking to have a museum and don't always think about long-term support strategies," she says.

The Philadelphia museum, founded for the 1976 Bicentennial with city funding and without an endowment, foundered for years, temporarily laying off its staff and reporting nearly $600,000 in debt before Benson took over. By negotiating with creditors, reconstituting the board, raising visitation, and appealing to Philadelphia's corporate and foundation communities, Benson achieved a balanced budget. A new core exhibition will open next year, she says, and the museum is planning a move from its cramped quarters at the edge of the historic district to a larger, more centrally located building.

Juanita Moore, president and C.E.O. of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, took charge last year under better circumstances—near the completion of the museum's $43.5 million capital campaign, launched in 2002 as a last-ditch attempt to save it from bankruptcy. But the 43-year-old museum, like the Freedom Center, is still looking for ways to boost its earned income in what Moore calls "a very tough economic climate for all museums."

"Everybody's trying to raise money. Everyone has their own turf to take care of," says Richmond, Virginia, mayor L. Douglas Wilder, founder of the U.S. National Slavery Museum. "I don't know that it's a problem of competition…It's a problem of having access to funding, having doors open."

Wilder and Foster would like to begin construction of a $10 million visitor center this year, but that prospect appears to be receding. The museum has raised about $50 million, including pledges and in-kind donations, but Foster says that all but about $3 million to $5 million has been spent for architectural plans, exhibit design, site preparation, and other preliminary work.

Slavery museum supporter Amaré Stoudemire, a star power forward and center for the Phoenix Suns, says that he is trying to organize an event that would raise at least $200,000 to $400,000 from black athletes and entertainers. But those plans have yet to crystallize.

"No, I'm not discouraged," insists Wilder, the grandson of slaves, as well as a former governor of Virginia who declared himself a presidential candidate for the 1992 election. "We're going to build a museum. The only question is when."

Labels: African Americans, Music

Profile: Steve Stoute
Helping the beat go on for brands
Aug 25, 2008

-By Eleftheria Parpis

NEW YORK Steve Stoute, the 38-year-old CCO of Translation Consultation & Brand Imaging, launched in 2004, has been building brands since he was barely out of high school. But the former record executive -- who once managed artists such as Mary J. Blige and Nas -- still considers himself an advertising neophyte.

"I really am a novice," says Stoute, who despite his modest characterization has built a lucrative career connecting brands to the much sought-after hip-hop-inspired youth market. In fact, he's being honored by the American Advertising Federation in November with an induction into the organization's Advertising Hall of Achievement.

"It's something that took me by surprise," says Stoute of the honor. It shouldn't have. Stoute, who earlier this year launched Translation Advertising with Jay-Z -- as a division of Translation Consultation & Brand Imaging -- has leveraged the increasingly smitten relationship between Madison Avenue and the entertainment business into a lucrative career. His matchmaking efforts over the years have paired Jay-Z with Reebok, Justin Timberlake with McDonald's and Gwen Stefani with Hewlett-Packard.

Most recently, Stoute paired Wrigley's with artists including Chris Brown to help rebrand its chewing gum products. He commissioned the singer to revamp the brand's classic Doublemint jingle, which was released first as a four-minute single, "Forever." (The blogsphere subsequently lit up with fans angry they hadn't been told about the Wrigley's connection.) Wrigley's new campaign also includes revamped jingles for Big Red by Ne-Yo and for Juicy Fruit by Dancing With the Stars contestant and country singer Julianne Hough.

Brown's "Forever" was recently nominated for MTV Video Music Awards' Music Video of the Year. "It's incredible that an artist was nominated for a Video of the Year with a Wrigley's jingle," says Stoute.

With no formal business training, Stoute relies on instinct. He says he developed his insight into consumer behavior by watching people window-shop. "I've always paid attention to what people pick up and put down," says Stoute, whose client roster includes State Farm, Samsung and General Motors.

It was Peter Arnell, founder of the Arnell Group, who believed Stoute could give traditional advertising a nontraditional spin. In 2000, Stoute left the music business and became a partner at the agency. It was there he started working with Reebok, which he helped relaunch in 2003 with a new product line and an ad campaign with Jay-Z, whose S. Carter Collection by Rbk helped reconnect the brand with urban culture.

"The client results, selling product, means much more to me than awards and things of that nature," says Stoute. He credits his relationship with his Translation partners, Charles Wright, chief strategy officer, and John McBride, group strategy director, for his success. "They shape my vision tremendously," he says. "It all starts with strategy."

Currently, Stoute is working on a State Farm campaign with LeBron James and what he calls a "groundbreaking" effort for Samsung, which will debut during New York Fashion Week in September. It pairs the brand with Valentino and Conde Nast.

Celebrity endorsements, says Stoute, have changed since the time that smiling while holding the product and then receiving a check were the extent of the deal. Now, he says, "product endorsements are about product development and new-product creation all the way to a traditional endorsement model and everything in between."

And "selling out" today, he adds, means creating inauthentic relationships between pop culture and product. The most successful relationships, he says, come from brands and artists viewing themselves as true business partners. "Artists want to be more responsible for the final outcome," he says.

Pondering his November advertising honor, Stoute says, "The advertising business is saying, 'Steve, we're accepting you.' And I never knocked on the door. I just put out work. ... It makes me feel good. It makes me feel like we're building a strong agency here."

BIOGRAPHY

Education: Stoute, who grew up in Queens, New York, attended five colleges in two years, searching for "something that made sense," he says.

Career: At 19, Stoute began working in real estate and invested in the music business, putting artists like Kid 'N Play in the studio and on the road. He became a road manager, artist manager and A&R executive, and has worked with stars including Mariah Carey, Eminem, Jay-Z, Nas, Enrique Iglesias and U2. "In working with these artists, you learn a lot about branding, but in the record business we never called it branding," says Stoute. He worked at Sony Music and Interscope Records before partnering with Peter Arnell of The Arnell Group in 2000. In 2004 he launched Translation Consultation & Brand Imaging, which was acquired by Interpublic Group in 2007.

Extra curricular: This year, Stoute co-founded the Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now with Mary J. Blige.

Labels: advertisement, African Americans, Music

By LIBBY QUAID

WASHINGTON - Paddlings, swats, licks. A quarter of a million schoolchildren got them last year — and blacks, American Indians and kids with disabilities got a disproportionate share of the punishment, according to a study by a human rights group.

Even little kids can be paddled. Heather Porter, who lives in Crockett, Texas, was startled to hear her little boy, then 3, say he'd been spanked at school. Porter was never told, despite a policy at the public preschool that parents be notified.

"We were pretty ticked off, to say the least. The reason he got paddled was because he was untying his shoes and playing with the air conditioner thermostat," Porter said. "He was being a 3-year-old."

For the study, which was being released Wednesday, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union used Education Department data to show that, while paddling has been declining, racial disparity persists. Researchers also interviewed students, parents and school personnel in Texas and Mississippi, states that account for 40 percent of the 223,190 kids who were paddled at least once in the 2006-2007 school year.

Porter could have filled out a form telling the school not to paddle her son, if only she had realized he might be paddled.

Yet many parents find that such forms are ignored, the study said.

Widespread paddling can make it unlikely that forms will be checked. A teacher interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Tiffany Bartlett, said that when she taught in the Mississippi Delta, the policy was to lock the classroom doors when the bell rang, leaving stragglers to be paddled by an administrator patrolling the hallways. Bartlett now is a school teacher in Austin, Texas.

And even if schools make a mistake, they are unlikely to face lawsuits. In places where corporal punishment is allowed, teachers and principals generally have legal immunity from assault laws, the study said.

"One of the things we've seen over and over again is that parents have difficulty getting redress, if a child is paddled and severely injured, or paddled in violation of parents' wishes," said Alice Farmer, the study's author.

A majority of states have outlawed it, but corporal punishment remains widespread across the South. Behind Texas and Mississippi were Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Florida and Missouri.

African American students are more than twice as likely to be paddled. The disparity persists even in places with large black populations, the study found. Similarly, Native Americans were more than twice as likely to be paddled, the study found.

The study also found:

_In states where paddling is most common, black girls were paddled more than twice as often as white girls.

_Boys are three times as likely to be paddled as girls.

_Special education kids were more likely to be paddled.

More than 100 countries worldwide have banned paddling in schools, including all of Europe, Farmer said. "International human rights law puts a pretty strong prohibition on corporal punishment," she said.

In rural Drew, Miss., Nickolaus Luckett still remembers the paddlings he got in fifth and seventh grades. One happened when he called a teacher by her first name, the other when a classmate said, wrongly, that he threw a spitball.

"I didn't get any bruises, but they still hurt, and from that point on, I told myself and my parents I wasn't going to take any more paddlings," said Luckett, who is about to be a sophomore at the University of Mississippi.

It's not an easy choice. In many schools, kids can avoid a paddling if they accept suspension or detention, or for younger kids, if they skip recess. But often, a child opts for the short-term sting of the paddle.

And sometimes teachers don't have the option of after-school detention, because there are no buses to take kids home later.

During the three years Evan Couzo taught in the Mississippi Delta, he refused to paddle kids, offering detention instead. But others — teachers, parents, even kids — were accustomed to paddling.

"Just about everyone at the beginning of the year said, `If he or she gives you any trouble, you can paddle them. You can send them home, and I'll paddle them. Or you can have me come out to the school, and we can both paddle them.'

"It's really just a part of the culture of the school environment there," Couzo said.

There is scant research on whether paddling is effective in the classroom. But many studies have shown it doesn't work at home, said Elizabeth Gershoff, a University of Michigan assistant professor of social work.

"The use of corporal punishment is associated almost overwhelmingly with negative effects, and that it increases children's problem behavior over time," Gershoff said.

Children may learn to solve problems using aggression, and a sense of resentment might make them act out more, Gershoff said.

The practice is banned in 29 states, most recently in Delaware and Pennsylvania. While some education groups haven't taken a position on the issue, the national PTA believes paddling should be banned everywhere.

"We teach our children that violence is wrong, yet corporal punishment teaches children that violence is a way to solve problems," said Jan Harp Domene, the group's president. "It perpetuates a cycle of child abuse. It teaches children to hit someone smaller and weaker when angry."

Labels: African Americans, Sociology