Inside from the Inside

One of the challenges for me personally about writing on the subject of racism is that I am driven to bring new ideas to the discussion, to look at things from unique points of view. Given that,  I sometimes see connections that aren’t obvious to anyone else, but are perfectly obvious to me. But making those connections clear to others is not easy and I have tremendous admiration for people that are able to do that well.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: I am part of a LinkedIn group for advertising and marketing professionals and someone posed this question to the group: Do you think corporations invest in creativity or do they consider creative talent to be disposable? Well, I say that given that corporations tend to consider every resource disposable, why should creative talent be any different? But I promise you, that idea was a real show-stopper because it was not the discussion the poster had intended.

No one wants to have a discussion about the misuse of resources in a professional forum, even though, as the designers of catalogs and direct mail, we contribute to the problem of generating disposable resources in our work daily (all that ink and paper) and we also generate the demand for stuff people don’t need as the way we make a living. Then we wonder why we are disposable? From my point of view, it is obvious that the question of valuing talent exists inside a conversation about values, including the value of resources, not one on how to make your talents more marketable.

Yes, but what does this have to do with racism?

For me, the subject of racism exists inside a larger context, in fact a number of them. But opening the conversations to those greater contexts almost always proves unpopular. For example, when I suggest that racism is a global problem, that in order to profoundly impact the experience of African Americans you have to view things in a global context, it somehow seems like I am discounting the importance of homegrown issues in favor of those in other countries.

But then I consider what might have happened in South Africa had the issue of racism there not become global?

In fact, racism is both a local issue and a global one, but I personally am more able to see, and with any luck at all, to articulate the more global perspective and therefore it is very likely I will continue to do that.

Given all of that as background, I’d like to introduce you to key contextual idea that I feel is related to racism. I’ll admit that I’m only beginning to explore this connection, so if you want a complete thesis from me this early, you may be disappointed. But the basic premise is this: we can’t empower many of the activities that would make a difference to ending racism because in our culture we view those quests (education, health care, social and legal justice, political action, etc.) as charitable endeavors and anything remotely related to charity is automatically dis-empowered.

Our whole economic and legal system keeps charitable endeavors in a second, less powerful class. Put another way, if it isn’t about making money in our country, any effort will be hobbled by a different set of rules. Those rules—the ones we have for non-business-related endeavors—are treated categorically differently now and have been since the founding of our country. The roots go to our Calvanistic origins.

If you want to profoundly impact education, social activism, and indeed “racism,” you have to deal with this underlying duality. You have to put the solutions to social problems on the same level playing field as business.

I gained this insight when I was reading the book Uncharitable by Dan Pollata, which I consider to be a transformational book. I highly recommend that you read it. Although Dan never discusses racism, it was clear to me that many of the things that would end racial inequities fall within the categories he does discuss (education, health care, social and legal justice, political action, etc.).

Consider a world, for a moment, in which the best and the brightest minds, the most motivated and inspired people could be allowed to make a high-paid living working to eradicate racism? Or where efforts to end racism were given the same tools, on the same terms as any business in our country. Impossible? Not really. We just accept the limitations we’ve been handed, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Just listen.