Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  “But I kept adding people and then I started getting through to those fifth and sixth degrees of separation, and I was like, ‘Oh, wait. There’s a lot of black people on LinkedIn.’ It was just that their professional networks were all several degrees away from mine.”

  Vann Graves and Geoff Edwards work in advertising. Most black people don’t work in advertising. They work in black advertising. Or “multicultural marketing,” as it’s now often called, lumped in with Hispanic advertising and Asian advertising. Advertising and multicultural marketing are not the same thing. They’re two separate industries built on separate business networks—and separate social networks, because in a relationship business there’s no difference between the two. Nowhere is this more apparent than on LinkedIn and on Facebook. LinkedIn is strictly for business, and Facebook is allegedly social, but to look at them side by side proves what everyone knows to be true. Your friends are often your business contacts, and your best business contacts generally become friends, because you like doing business together. That was true in 1955 when Roy Eaton and Charlie Feldman bonded over being ethnic outsiders in a world of WASPs. It was true in 1971, when Byron Lewis and his friend Al Bell collaborated on the hit marketing campaign for Shaft. And it’s true for Vann Graves and Geoff Edwards today.

  “My AT&T client?” Geoff says. “We’ll close a deal over Facebook. It’s basically a business tool in that way. I just joined LinkedIn recently, and I actually think that Facebook is a better business tool because it’s social. People see you. They see what you’re up to. They see your status updates. They comment on them. What’s interesting about Facebook and LinkedIn is that, given the two, people want to see who you are. If there’s a choice of looking at someone’s résumé and seeing how they interact and how they live and what they’re about? You’d be surprised how much that factors in.”

  Advertising is making friends. Not contacts, friends. Which, for the most part, means making white friends. Vann has 395 LinkedIn connections and 587 Facebook friends. Having just joined LinkedIn, Geoff’s only up to 162 connections there, but his business partner calls him “the Mayor of Facebook”; with 783 friends, he’s on it all the time. Roughly speaking, Vann’s Facebook network is about 30 percent black, 60 percent white, and 10 percent other. Geoff’s network is closer to 20 percent black, 65 percent white, and 15 percent other. (And I say “roughly speaking” because not everyone’s ethnicity is readily apparent from his or her profile photo, and also because I’m using a pretty broad definition of “white.” Is the Turkish guy white? How about the half-Brazilian/half-Moroccan girl who totally looks Jewish? The boundary between “white” and “other” is pretty hard to nail down. For that matter, the boundary between “black” and “other” is getting pretty hazy, too.)

  Today, Vann and Geoff lead lives that are wholly integrated, not just with white people but with everyone. Not surprisingly, I found the exact same thing to be the case for every black person working successfully in advertising that I’ve met in the last three years. They’re not black Anglo-Saxons. It’s not 1969 anymore. You can be authentically black and still be assimilated; these things aren’t mutually exclusive, as Vann discovered. If you take an online stroll through the social universe of blacks on Madison Avenue, the numbers may vary this way or that, but it’s always a broad mix of blacks, whites, Jews, Iranians, Koreans, Panamanians, Croatians—whatever. They’re a part of the general, Middle-American population. They’re in the melting pot. And while I can’t say that this is universally true, I can say I’ve yet to encounter anyone in the business for whom it is not true.

  So, do these people have a lot of white friends because they work in advertising, or do they work in advertising because they have a lot of white friends? Are ad agencies unfairly biased in favor of whites and assimilated minorities, or is assimilation just a prerequisite for the job, like knowing Microsoft Word? To judge by the letter of current civil rights law, it’s possible to pick apart the numbers and say that, yes, these agencies are unfairly biased and are therefore engaged in illegal hiring practices. But to judge from Facebook and LinkedIn, the laws of social interaction carry far more weight than anything coming out of Washington, D.C.

  You can take any of a number of entry points into the black advertising network. You can start at the profile pages of the larger black agencies, like UniWorld and Burrell Communications. There’s also a host of networking groups for black media professionals, like Black Creatives or the National Association of Multicultural Media Executives. And once you start clicking and scrolling through the profiles of black people in those networks, you’ve effectively left the white working world behind. You’ve entered the world of diversity suppliers and minority-targeted media and urban radio and black PR firms. It’s a separate system. To eyeball it, it’s 80 to 90 to 99 percent black most every page you click. Not always, but generally. And a lot of the white faces you do see belong to human resources people and supply-chain managers and “inclusion specialists” (i.e., the intermediaries appointed to manage the color line and show that companies Care About Diversity). And once you’re two or three degrees into the black advertising and media networks, you then find yourself moving out into the social ecosystem that feeds it: the alumni networks for HBCUs, black fraternities and sororities, and other affinity groups. You can click and scroll for days and days, seeing only the odd white face here and there. This is among four-year college graduates. In a country that’s only 13 percent black.

  Ever since the Madison Avenue Project launched, every industry convention has been packed with diversity seminars and multicultural mixers and even a new multicultural awards show, AdColor. But when you look at the Facebook photo albums posted up from these events and see who’s commenting on them and who’s commenting back, it’s the same black people going to the same events over and over again. Follow the daisy chain of job recommendations black people are posting for each other on LinkedIn, and the vast majority of the activity is black people recommending black people to other black people. It’s a closed loop.

  White people’s social networks are no better. They’re just as lopsided. But then so is corporate America. We’re out there looking for jobs, too, and the people we need to be networking with look a lot like us; that’s the unfair advantage we have. The rationale behind all the diversity mixers, allegedly, is to help close that gap. But the atmosphere at those things—having attended a couple dozen of them—is artificial, transactional. The events are 90 percent black, and, again, most of the white people you’ll meet there are the intermediaries, the appointed diversity outreach specialists. You don’t get anywhere networking with those people. You build a career by networking with your peers, the people who are going to move up and take you with them. But rank-and-file white people don’t come to diversity events, because white people don’t work in diversity. White people work in advertising. They go to advertising events.

  “One of the mantras they taught us at Howard was ‘networking,’” Vann Graves says. “But networking alone gets you where? You’ve got to have leverage. In this business, only networking with other African Americans is like me networking with myself. The problem is, we’re paying that forward. The younger folks come in and get into the system, and they’re pissed off because ‘I’m black, and I can’t get a break.’ So they keep going to these multicultural mixers, not realizing that part of it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s the same people rolling around in the same circles. It all feeds on itself.”

  “I’ve lost friends to black agencies,” Geoff Edwards says with a heavy sigh. Leaving the black cafeteria table always comes at a cost. For a very brief spell in the 1990s, Geoff did a turn at a black agency in New York, the Mingo Group, and very quickly realized he had to get out. “There are people that I went to college with at Pratt,” he says, “people who are extremely talented and could be in no different a position than I am, but the difference is they felt that calling to go and be in the black agencies. It hurt their careers.
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  “In this business, you are what you eat. If you have a great reel, you’re going to go to a great place and you’re going to continue to go to great places. That’s how the fraternity works, right? People at my level, you look at their records and you see the great agencies. You see Weiden + Kennedy, Chiat/Day, Goodby. But once you go to one of the multicultural agencies, it’s very hard to make the jump back. Some people do it, but it’s difficult. People get trapped. Maybe you have a career that’s lucrative in terms of financial success, but in terms of just being a part of the cultural vernacular of advertising or being around the people who are associated with award-winning work? You’re done. You’re cooked.”

  When you’re stuck on the outside of a social network, it seems impenetrable, like an exclusive country club that won’t grant you membership. But once you break in, however you break in, what you learn is that the network doesn’t really run on exclusivity. It runs on reciprocity. Do your boss’s dog’s Christmas card and get a part-time job. Put your boss in a meeting with Spike Lee and get your own agency—with Spike Lee. You spend years building up personal credits, large and small, and then you cash in those IOUs to move up. That’s what Vann calls street cred. And over the last four decades, black advertising and media professionals have been coming out of college and investing their time and talent and street cred in a parallel pipeline, one with almost no money and very few jobs, leaving them with precious little social currency to spend in the larger economy and very little leverage to help the generation behind. So everybody’s still back at square one, scrambling and inviting ALL BRIGHT YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN TO CONSIDER ADVERTISING AS A CAREER. In the meantime, how many mid- to senior-level black creatives will you find on Madison Avenue? There are seven of them. Maybe eight. It’s a problem.

  In 1999, the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University published a now landmark report titled “Resegregation in American Schools.” It showed that the country made steady progress toward a healthy racial balance up until the late 1980s. Since then, due to a number of factors, primarily the hostility of conservative federal courts opposed to race-based desegregation, the trend toward diversity and racial balance has reversed precipitously. In the 1996–1997 school year, ratios of black to white students in public schools fell below the levels achieved in 1972. As of 2006–2007, 73 percent of America’s black children attended schools with at least 50 percent minority enrollment, and 38.5 percent attended schools with at least a 90 percent minority enrollment.

  In the decade since, left-leaning activists and academics have been increasingly up in arms about the dangers of “resegregation,” which is the latest buzzword people use in policymaking circles when discussing the problems of race. Resegregation is a “perilous” trend, they say. Except, like most trends, it isn’t actually a trend. To say that America’s schools are resegregating is to misstate the facts. They can’t resegregate. They’ve never integrated. The absence of artificial transfer programs to shuffle kids around just means we’re seeing the country for what it has been all along, what it never stopped being.

  Starting in the late 1960s, America hurled its public schools headlong into a hugely disruptive, shot-in-the-dark experiment. We spent billions of dollars, all of it just to corral the Children of White Flight and the Children of the Dream and put them under the same roof. Given that historic opportunity, we all came together and… we sat on opposite sides of the cafeteria. Then we went and hung out at different clubs and fraternities at opposite ends of college campuses, or at completely separate colleges altogether. Ever since Brown v. Board, there’s been a steady chorus of academics and politicians pronouncing all the wonderful things that integration is supposed to do for America. Integrated schools will produce better educational outcomes. Diversity programs will give us integrated workplaces that offer competitive advantages in a multicultural world. Etc. It’s all a lot of crap. Integration doesn’t do anything. It’s something that is done, by people, and only by mutual choice. It’s certainly true that too many avenues of integration were impeded by socioeconomic inequality or shut down entirely by racist and discriminatory actions. But it is equally true that among those who were given the opportunity to integrate, most of us chose not to.

  When people say “It’s all who you know,” strictly with regard to the workplace, it connotes some buddy-buddy, scratch-my-back system that won’t give the outside guy a break. Sometimes it is that. At its worst, it really is a restricted country club of cronyism where high-end real estate developers collude with the federal government to line their pockets with millions in taxpayer subsidies. But down here on the ground, down here where the normal people live, “It’s all who you know” is simply a statement of fact. You are the sum total of the people you meet and interact with in the world. Whether it’s your family, peers, or coworkers, the opportunities you have and the things that you learn all come through doors that other people open for you.

  “It’s all who you know” is, in fact, the whole reason we had to have a civil rights movement in the first place. “I cannot reach fulfillment without thou,” Martin Luther King said. “All life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” After a century of Jim Crow, we hated and feared each other because we didn’t know each other. Knowing each other—“sustained intergroup, interpersonal doing,” King called it—was the only way to undo the damage of not knowing each other. When cast against the harsh reality of racism at the time, what King was saying seemed impossible. It might still seem impossible. But that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.

  Even in the 1960s, King saw where Facebook and LinkedIn would take the inescapable network. “Through our scientific genius we have made of this world a neighborhood,” he said, “now through our moral and spiritual development we must make of it a brotherhood.” We didn’t. We gave up on King. Quite famously, by the time he got to Memphis in April of 1968, King himself had almost given up on seeing the dream fulfilled. The final, undelivered sermon he was supposed to give that next Sunday was simply titled “Why America May Still Go to Hell.” White hostility was fueling black anger and frustration, destroying what remaining hope the country had for reconciliation. After King was murdered, for a while, everything really did go to hell. But some people, some black parents, didn’t give up on King. They didn’t give up on white people, really, despite all the available evidence that they should.

  When the post–civil rights era began, certain types of affirmative action were absolutely critical. Those programs provided access to jobs and education, allowing blacks to move up at a time when, socially, they couldn’t move in. But however you do it, you still have to move in. Which is why some parents made the deliberate choice to push their kids away from the black cafeteria table. They took the modest gains that affirmative action offered, and they invested it. Not in education, but in integration. Whether it was Vann Graves’s father carrying two working class jobs just to get him across Richmond’s color line, or Geoff Edwards’s father sending him to the finest prep school in Michigan, the idea was the same. Those families bought white social capital for their children, because they had a hunch that, in America, white social capital would be the thing that paid dividends. It did.

  In the 1990s, my friends and I had the dumb luck to walk out of college right into the biggest economic revolution since the invention of the steam engine, and the Children of the Dream were nowhere in sight. The Internet boom took off, and it was all who you knew because it was moving too fast to be anything else. Whether you were in interactive advertising in New York or at some dot-com start-up in San Francisco, it was lily white and Asian as far as the eye could see; you could count all the black faces on one hand. It wasn’t just that we had better access to computers. It’s that we had access to the people who knew what computers were going to do.

  Whatever the next big thing is, whether it’s environmental technology or farming hydroponic tomatoes on the moon, right now that thing i
s just two guys in a garage with an idea. And if you don’t know the guys who know those guys, then you just don’t know them. By the time their idea is big enough for the lawyers to show up and build the diversity pipeline, the real money and the real opportunities will be gone. So if we’re not talking about why black people and white people don’t hang out and play Scrabble together, we’re not talking about the problem.

  [5]

  What’s Black About It?

  On September 11, 2001, two planes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Less than an hour after the second tower fell, Vann Graves walked down to the U.S. Army Recruiting office on 125th Street in Harlem and enlisted in the Army Reserves. You hear about people doing that, but you never actually meet them. Not in advertising, anyway.

  “My colleagues at BBDO thought I’d gone mad,” he says. “But I was a creative director at a major advertising agency, a little soft around the middle, living the American Dream, and the only reason I could do that was because someone else fought for my rights. At a certain point, you have to give something back.”

  Vann deployed to Iraq in 2005 and served as a public affairs officer with the 101st Airborne and the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, escorting embedded reporters into forward combat zones. During his tour, he was promoted to captain, received a Combat Action Badge, and was inducted into the Order of the Spur for outstanding efforts while being actively engaged by anti-U.S. forces. After his Striker ran aground on one of Iraq’s roadside IEDs, he was awarded a Purple Heart. It was a little disorienting to come home and start writing Snickers commercials again. “I went back to work,” he says, “and they had basically sealed off my office. Everything was right where I’d left it, and nothing had changed. But I had changed. Nothing seemed the same to me anymore.