MORSE'S CODE

Racist America?

Is America still racist? It’s a question we’ve asked countless times of focus group respondents or during our man in the street interviews. The responses vary, depending on who you ask, where they live, what their ethnicity is and how old they are. The most common response is “yes, but things are getting way better.”

Today’s headline is that Elton John decried “American Idol” as racist. Not the judges but the American viewing public since they’re the ones that voted off three African American singers who got great scores with the judges. In his words:

“The three people I was really impressed with — and they just happened to be black, young female singers — all seem to be landing in the bottom three. They have great voices. The fact that they’re constantly in the bottom three — and I don’t want to set myself up here — but I find it incredibly racist.”

Also in the news today -- the Southern Poverty Law Center, issued its annual report on hate groups. The conclusion: there were 751 hate group chapters in the United States in 2003, 43 more than the previous year. The number of racist skinhead groups in the United States doubled over the past year, and the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations has 11 new chapters. Click here to get the report. Click here to read this article in the Christian Science Monitor about hate crimes in the Pacific Northwest.:

While more-populous states and the South generally have more such groups, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon (three of the least ethnically diverse states in the US) have significant numbers of neo-Nazi, Christian Identity, and racist skinhead followers. Volksfront, a white supremacist group based in Portland, Ore., grew from five to eight chapters in 2003, according to the SPLC.

Going back to the first days of the Oregon Trail more than 150 years ago, the region has always attracted independent spirits. "Unfortunately, some of these independent spirits also happened to have been bigots," says Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Elected officials in Oregon were openly members of the Ku Klux Klan up into the 1920s, and it wasn't until just two years ago that Oregonians finally voted to remove all racist language from the 1857 state constitution.

The Aryan Nations organization was headquartered in northern Idaho until several years ago when the SPLC sued it - literally for all it was worth - on behalf of a woman and her son who had been assaulted by members of the neo-Nazi group.

Still, there is some hope. A just released AP poll found that four in five parents of school-age children prefer schools with black, white and Hispanic students over ones with students of the same race or mostly from another race. "People like the idea of racially mixed schools," said Charles Clotfelter, author of "After Brown," a new book about the historic court decision that desegregated schools.”

What to make of all this? The Nazis concern me, but they are clearly just the nut case fringe. What troubles me more is the American Idol case and the idea that race might have influenced the voting decisions of so many Americans. I’ll agree with our focus group respondents. No, America has not quite kicked the racist habit, but things are definitely getting better.

Break Two Eggs and Call Me in the Morning

If you’ve ever had someone break an egg over your head, as I did several times in Mexico, you’ll appreciate this story in the Boston Globe about immigrants and traditional medicine. It’s the focus of the Boston Healing Landscape Project, a Boston University initiative that examines the cultural and religious beliefs of new immigrants, and how those practices are changing the medical landscape in the Boston area.

So far, the project has studied the spiritual beliefs of Sudanese immigrants, the cultural attitudes toward "sadness" among Brazilian women, and the role of botanicas in Latino communities. The goal is not only to learn about immigrant health practices but to give mainstream medical practitioners a better grasp of their patients' cultural prism.

The article describes one such botanica, the “Walgreens of the barrio,” where “statues of saints line the shelves, glass cases are filled with amulets and charms, and racks are stocked with packets of herbs and oils.”

The botanica is where Latin American and Caribbean immigrants go in search of herbal remedies used by their mothers and grandmothers back home. It is doctor's office, pharmacy, and therapist's couch rolled into one. Here you can find anything that has to do with religion or healing.According to Linda Barnes, a medical anthropologist and professor of pediatrics at the BU School of Medicine, many immigrants seek the help of folk healers, herbal medicine and other traditional brands of treatment long before turning to mainstream doctors and health-care settings. Language barriers, fear of cultural misunderstanding or lack of knowledge about the health-care system often discourages newcomers who speak no English, or who are in the country illegally. The ceremonies that are done have been done for ages.

According to Linda Barnes, a medical anthropologist and professor of pediatrics at the BU School of Medicine, many immigrants seek the help of folk healers, herbal medicine and other traditional brands of treatment long before turning to mainstream doctors and health-care settings. Language barriers, fear of cultural misunderstanding or lack of knowledge about the health-care system often discourages newcomers who speak no English, or who are in the country illegally.

A few years ago, beliefs such as those central to Santeria or voodoo might have been dismissed by Western health care providers, waved away as folk traditions with no place in modern medicine. But, an increasing number of health care providers are learning the value -- and necessity -- of integrating an understanding of immigrant practices into routine patient care.

By the way, the egg breaking ritual is a traditional Mexican “limpieza” or cleansing. Guaranteed to keep the evil spirits and bad karma at bay, I was told.

Remember the Alamo

Remember the Alamo? No, not the battle. The movie. According to this article in the NY Times, not too many people do remember it. They couldn’t. They didn’t see it. Neither Anglos nor Hispanics.

But it’s not for lack of trying, at least with Latinos. The article tells the story of how Disney went out of its way to market the movie in just the right way for Hispanics that might be a little bit, well, sensitive about the whole affair.

"The Alamo," by almost any measure, is a difficult movie to market to Latino audiences. Though the Mexican army won the Battle of the Alamo, it ultimately lost both the war and Texas, which became a bastion of Anglo power in the Southwest and a place where Tejanos, or Texans of Hispanic descent, were relegated to second-class status.

Disney marketed the film differently to Spanish-speaking audiences. Instead of the slogan, "The Movie Event You'll Never Forget,'' the Spanish-language ads referred to "The Battle That Divided Mexico," reflecting the view of historians who consider the Alamo an episode in a civil war in what was once Mexico's northeastern frontier.

Disney's marketing, however, appears to have performed poorly in two languages in the United States. The movie, which cost nearly $100 million to make, brought in just $12.3 million in its first week. And
Disney's attempts to cater to a Latino audience on a subject that serves as the center of Texas's creation myth have surprised experts on marketing to Latinos.

The newest version has actors speaking in Spanish and attempts to balance the dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna, played by the Mexican actor Emilio Echevarría, with noble Tejanos like Seguin, played by Jordi Mollà of Spain.

Somehow all this political correctness didn’t quite work. And there were lots of different takes to be had on Disney’s debacle including one from Isabel Valdes, founder of Cultural Access Group. "The Alamo is such an open wound among American Hispanics and comes at a time of growing resentment against immigrants that one has to wonder what they were thinking. Is it really the right time to have movie screens showing Anglos battling against Mexicans?" she said.

Still, the article goes on to say, the battle goes on. Battling not against the Mexicans, but for them. For their viewership, that is.

The release of "The Alamo'' comes as studios seek to find the winning formula of films like the "Spy Kids'' series from the director Robert Rodriguez, which have made $300 million and crossed over effortlessly between Latino and non-Latino audiences. And like other studios, Disney is seeking to expand offerings directed at Latinos, in recognition of the fact that their numbers climbed 10 percent in the first two years of the decade, to 38.8 million, making Latinos the nation's largest minority group, according to the United States Census Bureau.

Numerous movie and television projects are in the works. For example, ABC, a network of Disney, has a pilot about a Latina immigrant, played by Sofia Vergara, who marries an Anglo to remain legally in the United States, and is developing a series about a Mexican man and a Chinese woman who operate a Mexican restaurant. Latin World Entertainment of Miami, meanwhile, is working on an English-language movie with Televisa scheduled for release next month, called "A Day Without Mexicans,'' which explores how the United States would function without laborers from that country.

We’re left with the aching question: “Did the movie really offend Mexican sensibilities or was it just bad?” I’ll let you know my view once I’ve seen it. On DVD.

Read My Lips Mind

For some, it evokes Orwellian images of Big Brother-like intrusions of Government and Corporate America. Others will be reminded of 1950’s era market research, with respondents wired up to EKG’s and Galvanic Skin Response meters that measure their reactions to subliminal popcorn ads. Nightmarish perhaps, but Corporate America – and Government – is peering into our innards once again, though this time the object of study is our most intimate organ. Our brain.

When used in a marketing context it’s called neuromarketing and involves functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), a technique that identifies patterns of brain activity that reveal how a consumer is actually evaluating a product, object or advertisement.

It’s the subject of a New York Times article today, but the product is not a soft drink or a laundry detergent. It’s a presidential candidate.

He lay inside an M.R.I. machine, watching commercials playing on the inside of his goggles as neuroscientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, measured the blood flow in his brain. Instead of asking the subject, John Graham, a Democratic voter, what he thought of the use of Sept. 11 images in a Bush campaign commercial, the researchers noted which parts of Mr. Graham's brain were active as he watched. The active parts, they also noted, were different from the parts that had lighted up in earlier tests with Republican brains.

The researchers do not claim to have figured out either party's brain yet, since they have not finished this experiment. But they have already noticed intriguing patterns in how Democrats and Republicans look at candidates. They have tested 11 subjects and say they need to test twice that many to confirm the trend.

"These new tools could help us someday be less reliant on clichés and unproven adages," said Tom Freedman, a strategist in the 1996 Clinton campaign, later a White House aide and now a sponsor of the research. "They'll help put a bit more science in political science."

In the experiment with Mr. Graham, researchers exposed him to photographs of the presidential candidates, commercials for President Bush and John Kerry, and other video images, including the "Daisy" commercial from 1964. In that advertisement, promoting Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater, images of a girl picking petals from a daisy were replaced by images of a nuclear explosion.

Though the science is flawless, the real challenge seems to be in interpreting what things mean. For example, the research showed that there was significantly more brain activity in the amygdale of Democrats after being exposed to violent images.

"The first interpretation that occurred to me," Professor Iacoboni said, "is that the Democrats see the 9/11 issue as a good way for Bush to get re-elected, and they experience that as a threat."

But then the researchers noted that same spike in amygdala activity when the Democrats watched the nuclear explosion in the "Daisy" spot, which promoted a Democrat.

Mr. Freedman suggested another interpretation based on his political experience: the theory that Democrats are generally more alarmed by any use of force than Republicans are.

Shanto Iyengar, director of the Political Communication Lab at Stanford, said there were so many kinds of images and other stimuli in a political commercial that it was notoriously difficult for any kind of research to pinpoint effects. But Professor Iyengar said the M.R.I. technology offered a promising tool.

"Academic research in political science into the effects of campaign advertising is 90 percent bogus, relying as it does on self-reported exposure to a multitude of disparate messages and images," he said. "Any efforts to isolate viewers' actual responses to ads — be they neurological, verbal or behavioral — is a step in the right direction."

I’m not sure I’d agree that self-reported research – political or otherwise – is “bogus.” But I do find very intriguing the prospect of being more effective at reading the minds of consumers.

Thanks to George Scribner, the Brand Guru, for spotting this one!

We’re Wired

Check out the new Multicultural Marketplace at Retailwire.com featuring…..us! That’s Thomas and I, plus Bill Bishop of Willard-Bishop Consulting.

Bill worked with Thomas and I on the study “Grow With America: Best Practices in Ethnic Marketing and Merchandising" for the Coca Cola Retailing Research Council when we were at …………Oh, never mind!

Check out the site. We’re hoping for lots of provocative discussions. Jump in. Take your shoes off. Set a spell.

Mariachi Nation

Hispanic music is becoming mainstream, you say? Are you talking about Cristina? Or J-Lo? Or perhaps Thalía? Well, check out this article in the Washington Post

In the Southwest, mariachi school programs have exploded over the past 30 years, and they are popping up in other parts of the nation. And nowhere has the mariachi arts craze caught on more than in South Texas, and especially San Antonio, where more than 40 percent of the population is of Mexican origin. At least 50 schools in San Antonio and 250 others in Texas offer mariachi programs, said Cynthia Muñoz, a public relations executive whose firm organizes the Mariachi Vargas Extravaganza.

Mariachi is so big in Texas that from San Antonio south to the border, schools with mariachi ensembles outnumber those with jazz bands, music educators say. Drawn to mariachi for its festive rhythms and melodic songs about homeland, liquor and love, the students learn music theory and can become accomplished singers and instrumentalists.

Most mariachi students are Mexican Americans or other Hispanics, although mariachi educators say the music attracts students of all kinds. Some think mariachi may be on the verge of a breakthrough to the mainstream, much as jazz once transcended its southern black roots to seize the imagination of the nation.

For now, students and directors say, mariachi connects many Mexican American and other Hispanic students to a heritage, and even a language, that is often only dimly familiar.

Teaching mariachi in schools is a purely American concept. South of the border, mariachi is rooted in folk music of rural western Mexico and passed from generation to generation, its notes and lyrics rarely written down or studied formally.

San Antonio's mariachi mania began in the 1960s, boosted by a handful of Catholic churches that began showcasing mariachi ensembles during Mass, and early Spanish-language radio stations. A decade later, San Antonio's school district started one of the nation's first school mariachi programs.

Several Texas colleges and universities, among them the University of Texas-Pan American in Laredo and the University of Texas at Austin, now lure high school mariachi players with courses, ensembles and scholarships. At Texas State University in San Marcos, north of San Antonio, administrators are designing what they say will be the nation's first four-year music education degree with a certification in mariachi.

By the way, for any of you Thalía fans that are old enough to remember the original band to record her hit song “A Quien Le Importa?” - Alaska Y Dinarama – remind me sometime to tell you the story about when I met the lead singer in a bar in Madrid. As my colleague Gil Bugarin just reminded me, it’s a story I have told a million times with various levels of detail.

The Shrinking Digital Divide?

AOL Latino has just announced the results of its second annual U.S. Hispanic Cyberstudy. No real surprises here, but the results are consistent with and support a lot of the research that we’ve seen and conducted over the last few years. Though I would have preferred to have seen more interviews with off-line Hispanics to get a better read on usage rates, the study is to be commended for using bilingual interviewers and avoiding a bias in favor of English speakers as some studies have done.

The most striking insight for me was the huge number of on-line interviewees that are recent Internet users – 20% connected their home computers to the Internet within the last six months. The number is 6% for the General Market. Perhaps we are seeing the Digital Divide beginning to close.

Some of the key findings:

Hispanics are relatively new to the Internet

-- 42% of Hispanic online consumers have had Internet access at home for less than two years vs. 15% of the general online population.

Discovering entertainment online

-- More than half of online Hispanics (54%) regularly or occasionally listen to music online, compared with less than a third (30%) of the general online population.

-- More than a third of online Hispanics regularly or occasionally download music files (39%), while 27% of the general online population says they use the Internet to do this.

-- A third of online Hispanic consumers (34%) regularly or occasionally watch video clips online, while fewer than one in four (23%) of the general online population does so.

-- Almost half (43%) say they go online and watch TV at the same time. More than a third (36%) view the Internet as an alternative to TV, reporting that they watch TV less since they've started going online.

Using the Internet to communicate

-- Hispanic online consumers have embraced the Internet's ability to keep them connected with their friends and family, and are using several advanced features far more than the general online population.

-- For example, nearly two-thirds of online Hispanics (64%) regularly or occasionally use the Internet to instant message, compared with less than half of the general online population (48%).

Discovering and buying products and services online

-- Nearly two-thirds (63%) consider the Internet the best information source to start learning about products and services they want to buy, and more than half (59%) say it's the best place to learn about available brands.

-- More than half (59%) now view the Internet as the best source for comparing prices (vs. 50% in 2002), and half (51%) say it's the best place to get information for making a final brand decision (vs. 40% in 2002).

-- Among online Hispanic households that bought a car in the past three years, nearly two in three (60%) researched different vehicle types online. Nearly six in ten (58%) compared new car prices.

Language preferences

-- About half of offline Hispanics who speak at least some Spanish (49%) say there aren't sites and things to do online that would be of interest to Hispanics.

-- More than half of all offline Hispanics (56%) say that one reason they aren't online is because they've heard there is too little Spanish content online.

Zen and the Art of Hip Hop

Ganguro. They’re Japanese kids who sun darken their skin to look black. They act like b-girls or b-boys and hang out at hip-hop clubs. They were the subject of an article in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago on Iona Rozeal Brown an African America artist with a fascination with the Ganguro, and their unique merging of two cultures that are near to her heart: hip-hop and Japan. The article's archived so you have to pay a couple of dollars to get it. But here’s a big sample:

Iona Rozeal Brown is obsessed with hip-hop. When she is not home spinning discs, out haunting music stores or cruising clubs, she makes paintings about fashion-conscious Japanese teenagers who want to look cool, black and American, much like their hip-hop idols. Known as the ganguro, these teenagers dress in funky clothes, dye and weave their hair into cornrows and darken their skin at tanning salons or with makeup.

Ganguro, literally ''black face,'' has its roots in the mid-1990's, starting with a desire among Japanese girls to emulate the popular, sun-tanned Okinawan singer Amuro Namie and the black British fashion model Naomi Campbell. Thanks to the rising popularity of hip-hop in Japan, their idolization has since expanded to include Lil' Kim, Run-DMC, Mary J. Blige, the Big Tymers and others.

Ms. Brown, 37, first learned about the ganguro while studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1990's. Later she traveled in Japan, where she met members of the ganguro tribe and was shocked to discover the depth of their fascination with black youth culture. The experience left her with many unresolved questions and inspired a new body of work.

''Sure, I'd seen white youth in the U.S. hang out with black youth, adapt the pimp stroll or gait, the slang and go the whole nine yards,'' Ms. Brown said while installing 15 of her paintings about the ganguro at the Wadsworth Atheneum here. ''But the Japanese youth were trying to be as black as they could. This was something different and new.''

Ms. Brown has mixed feelings about the ganguro phenomenon. ''Being African-American, I'm flattered that our music and style is so influential,'' she said. ''But I have to say that I find the ganguro obsession with blackness pretty weird, and a little offensive. My paintings come out of trying to make sense of this appropriation.''

Ms. Brown's paintings do a little cultural sampling of their own. She takes 17th- and 18th-century Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints of geishas, bathhouse girls, samurai and Kabuki theater actors and gives them a radical makeover. The results are zany hybrids, from kimono-clad M.C.'s and gun-wielding gangsta rappers to sassy courtesans with darkened faces, dreadlocks and long painted nails. She calls them ''Afro Asiatic allegories.''

In today's art jungle, the hybrid is a fairly familiar animal. So what makes these paintings different? For one thing, the unexpected combination of period Japanese imagery and hip-hop attitude is more than just a catchy aesthetic tool. Ms. Brown sees parallels between the art of ukiyo-e and hip-hop: their storytelling quality, broad popular appeal and celebration of material pleasures. ''There are also parallels,'' she said, ''between the glamorous, fashionable clothes and decadent excess portrayed in ukiyo-e, and the high fashion, celebration of material success and love of bling-bling that you get in hip-hop.''

Images of women are dominant in Ms. Brown's paintings and prints. This is no surprise, for they are the main devotees of the ganguro style, and prominent subjects in ukiyo-e. In ''Untitled I (Female)'' (2003), a silkscreen, Ms. Brown depicts a hip-hop diva coyly exposing her dark skin. She wears a revealing robe, like the geishas in ukiyo-e, her posture intended to arouse. But unlike geishas, she has peroxide-tipped dreadlocks into which the artist has painted both an Afro comb and a traditional Japanese hairpin.

''At the base of it, I'm intrigued by the global influence of hip-hop,'' she said. ''I want to return to Japan to look for ganguro, but also check out China and Korea, where I am told that hip-hop is big. The ganguro is just one idea, and I don't want to, you know, pimp it.''

For further reading click here. If you’re in the Hartford area, check out Ms. Brown's exhibit at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art through June 13. Thanks to Patricia Raspberry for spotting this one!

Doonsebury Gets Dissed

Posted from doonesbury.com

Today’s Lead at Diversityinc.com “Condoleezza Dissed by 'Doonesbury'”

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who testified Thursday before a special commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, has been nicknamed "Brown Sugar" in the "Doonesbury" comic strip, which has prompted one women's group to demand an apology.

The nickname caused the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), a Washington, D.C. think-tank, to ask "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau to apologize. Trudeau is syndicated nationwide through Universal Press, which did not return calls for comment.

"As a black woman, I'm particularly offended and believe this is old-fashioned plantation racism," Michelle Bernard, IWF senior fellow said in a statement. "Garry Trudeau shows us that a tragic race- and gender-based antebellum view of black women continues to haunt American culture."

The strip sketches a White House dialogue between President Bush and Rice and casts the president as a frat-boy backslapper who never has read a book. When Rice makes a snide comment, Bush responds "Be careful, Brown Sugar."

Perhaps Trudeau went a bit overboard. Personally, if I were a frat-boy backslapper, I’d be offended by DiversityInc.’s comparison. I wonder if Mick Jagger got this kind of guff.

Just Say No!

The votes came in and Wal-Mart lost out. Voters in Inglewood, California – a largely African American community blocks from our office – opted out of a proposal from the retailer to build a 60 acre supercenter in the area. It’s part of the ongoing battle in California. Wal-Mart sued the County of Alameda over a ban and in Contra Costa County, they compelled voters to overturn a referendum.

But for now, the people of Inglewood are thumbing their nose at the Bentonville giant. In fact, listening to some folks talking at the nearby Starbuck’s, it sounds like the whole thing has taken on biblical proportions -- as in David and Goliath. Or perhaps the Civil Rights days are more a propos – African American folks taking control of their own destinies, saying they’ve had enough of broken promises.

Said Jesse Jackson, “People are now beginning to see Wal-Mart as a kind of confederate economic Trojan horse: Profits up, wages down, benefits down. You have cheap products and cheap wages and cheap benefits and fewer small business and less self-determination, less ability to affect zoning laws.''

Click here and here to read more.

Also, whether you see Wal-Mart as an evil empire or a provider of jobs and good stuff cheap, check out the discussion at retailwire.com. It’s a great venue to discuss what’s going on in the retail arena, and to see what some of the pundits are saying. Stay tuned for an announcement on that score – next week.