Comin’ Straight Outta LoCash!

Comin’ Straight Outta LoCash!

In an arena where culture is currency, commodity, and industry, fighting to make it anything else can be career suicide. When confronted by the machine, you either roll with it or get rolled on. You can defy clients and bosses and argue with consumers and coworkers, but in the end it’s like bringing a garden hose to a forest blaze. Plus, no company will tolerate that behavior for very long. And beyond standing on corners with a bullhorn screaming about culture vultures, Willie Lynch-isms, etc. you won’t have much of a social life, either.

Then again, you could just accept the game and get paid. I think that’s why I stayed as long as I did. I know marketing. I can sell any product or service to any consumer. I can sell clouds to the sun, if need be. And like most every black professional that came before me I told myself, “Why not do what I’m good at? If I don’t someone else will.”

And to be honest, having clients and coworkers come to me for insights into my heritage and culture was sort of an ego trip. No matter how much research they did, no matter how many “black friends” they had I always knew more than them. I lived what they focus grouped. I brought added value. It made me feel important and respected. After a while, I even felt, ick, validated.

See, America makes you an opportunist and at
 the same time they institutionalize you.
So the fact that niggas get big record deals,
big money and then go to jail shouldn’t surprise you—
that’s what lies do.
—Black Ice, 410 Days in The Life

My struggles often got me thinking about the marketing pioneers that inspired me, folks like: Madame CJ Walker, Oprah Winfrey, and Russell Simmons. In the 1920s Walker became America’s first black female millionaire. But she built much of her cosmetics empire by reinforcing Anglo-European standards of beauty and sophistication to market hair-straightening products and bleaching creams to black women. (Yet despite her millions, her race left her with few if any, protected civil rights.)

Then there’s the godfather of hip-hop. “Hustle” Simmons (as he’s known to some) has flipped the “urban lifestyle” into a gazillion dollar global empire encompassing everything from music and fashion (Def Jam, Baby Phat/Phat Farm) to Broadway and movies (Def Poetry, SLMG) to credit cards (UniRush Financial). But as much as I admire Russell and other hip-hop moguls (i.e., Shawn Carter, Sean Combs, etc.) I often ask myself, “Just what have we sold?”

Oprah Winfrey is of course our first black female billionaire and the only American female to achieve such without inheritance or marriage. She made hers thru hard work, innovation, and dedication. But she’s become one of the most powerful brands in the world, by catering to the largest consumer group possible: white women. I’m not saying she sold out, but as thousands upon thousands of women of color have noted over the years, “Oprah doesn’t talk to us (black women); she’s for white women.”

I’ve met countless black women who feel so disconnected from and more importantly alienated by Oprah. They talk about her show’s focus on “soccermoms,” desperate housewives, etc. They talk about how out of touch she seems to be with average black women but seems so “at home” with average white women… As a male, her show isn’t really marketed towards me, so I’m no authority on this one way or the other; but after watching my fair share of Oprah over the years, I can see their point.

Maybe it’s progress. Then again Oprah could just be a hustler who sees the game so well that she’s simply pimping soccermom narcissism and white liberal myopia/boredom, etc. to create a branded, mass-marketable illusion of postmodern Americana paradise. But whatever the case, Oprah’s a grown woman; she be what she be. Besides, she has over a billion more opportunities to leave the world better than she found it.

Conversely, black power-hitters like Tom Burrell (founder Burrell Communications) Carol H. Williams (founder CHW Advertising), Stanley O’Neal (Merrill Lynch CEO), Dick Parsons (Time Warner CEO), Ann Fudge (one-time Young & Rubicam CEO), Ken Chenault (American Express CEO), Renetta McCann (Starcom North America CEO), Earl G. Graves, Sr. (Black Enterprise, Inc. Chairman/CEO), John Thompson (Symantec CEO), et al., have climbed their respective mountains without compromising a thing. So it would be foolish to say that the only way minorities can succeed in business is to sacrifice their soul.

Still, much of my career had me asking some admittedly stupid but plausible questions: Should minorities only work for minority companies? Should minority companies only cater to minority consumers? Should black consumers “buy black” no matter what? After all, if you have a dollar and lose 12 or 15 cents, you’re not ruined; but if you lose 87 cents (the equivalent of non-Black America) you might as well get a whole new dollar. And who’s to say you won’t get clowned by your own folk? (God knows we’ve been as trifling as any.) Or do you just suck it up and work for whoever’ll hire you and sell whatever’s in demand to whoever wants it?

I dunno. Again, I know those are stupid questions, but what we’ve done so far hasn’t been smart, either. If Debra Dickerson was right when she wrote about the mind being the last plantation, the marketing world has taught me one thing: As it relates to culture and entertainment black folks still haven’t risen much above sharecropping.

I’m just trying to make a dollar out of what makes sense.
—Mos Def