Colorization | lifestyling, social and capital realism

This is one of several posts where I share quotes and food-for-thought from Chang’s book – Who We Be: The Colorization of America.*
(earlier posts: on Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2)

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This quote is from Chapter 3 of Who We Be, for which Chang describes the first airing (July 8, 1971) of the Coca-Cola commercial, Buy the World. The commercial, if you are not familiar with it, includes the song “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” (on YouTube).

Not familiar with it? Yes, you are.

Of course, this reminded me of Mad Men. Spoiler: “Mad Men” Finale Renews Spotlight on Creator of ’71 Coke Jingle, from a New York Times (NYT) article about Bill Backer, the writer of the jingle. From the NYT article –

“That was the basic idea: to see Coke not as it was originally designed to be — a liquid refresher — but as a tiny bit of commonality between all peoples, a universally liked formula that would help to keep them company for a few minutes,” Mr. Backer wrote, according to Coca-Cola’s website.

In the third part of this chapter, Chang walks through Backer’s inspiration and Coke’s creation of this commercial. And Chang’s closing paragraph of this chapter begins with this sentence –

“Here was a plausible capitalist realist narrative of multiculturalism.”

About this post. I share some excerpts from Chang’s work in his Chapter 3 – The Real Thing: Lifestyling and Its Discontents, which is one of five chapters in Part One, A New Culture, 1963-1979 of this book. The subsections of Chapter 3 are titled as follows –

– The Lifestyling of America
– The Real (American) Thing
– Yo, What Happened to Peace?

Recognizing many of the advertising slogans of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, it was very interesting to learn about the historical context of several of the slogans. I began to wonder about how, and in response to what, the contemporary slogans have been designed to target audiences.

The Lifestyling of America

Chang provides the landscape of positioning, marketing, branding, and advertising of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, second to Coke, as part of the telling of The Lifestyling of America.

:: In Coca-Cola’s early years, over seven thousand imitation brands tried to cut away slices of its massive market share. There was an Afri-Cola brand marketed to Blacks. And there was also a Klu-Ko Kola brand marketed not just to whites, but the apparently underserved hooded supremacist niche. Advertising helped maintain Coke’s status as “the universal drink,” the market leader for racists, antiracists, and everyone in between.::

:: The history of consumerism in communities of color is surprisingly tied to the history of aggressive second-place competitors. Like other future upstarts – Nike, Apple, Fox TV – Pepsi concentrated on the market leader’s underserved segments. If at their peaks Reebok, Microsoft, and Coke advertised with broad appeals, challengers needed a different kind of approach. They experimented with the content of their ads and the structure of their staffing.::

:: A paradigm shift in the consumer economy had begun. Pepsi had staked its future on youth, women, and African Americans –  vanguard buyers who embodied postwar optimism and the largest reserves of unmobilized demand. Meanwhile, Coke was still aiming for the median American – the white, middle-aged suburban professional, the mirror image of the image-makers themselves.::

The Real (American) Thing

In this chapter’s The Real (American) Thing, Chang introduces and discusses social realism and capital realism.

:: Where Social Realism conveyed heroic struggle, capitalist realism traded in sentimental acquiescence. Here was what the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo had called “imperialist nostalgia,” that condition “where the people mourn for the passing of what they themselves have destroyed.” Capitalist realism seemed to say, “Things have always been good. We have always been good.:: 

(more on-line about Renato Rosaldo – on Wikipedia, professor at NYU)

:: Walt Disney introduced his last great amusement at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. With funding from Pepsi and using his latest “audio-animatronic” technology, he unveiled an exhibit featuring the children of the nations of the world. … he insisted that each animatronic child be synched to a single jingle – born in America, sung first in English. So the songwriters came up with a melody and line that stood: “Though the mountains divide and the oceans are wide, it’s a small world after all.”:: 

Yo, What Happened to Peace?

In the chapter’s last section, Yo, What Happened to Peace?, Chang paces through Bill Backer’s inspiration, colleagues, collaborators, creation, and emergence – albeit with interim (and disaster) versions of the filming of the Coca-Cola commercial, Buy the World.

:: The next day [Haskell] Wexler, still angry he had nearly been toppled from the sky to certain death over a stupid Coke commercial, fled the set, never to return. With a different crew and production company, a much smaller cast, and a different Italian location, the spot was finally completed. The “Buy the Word” commercial was released in Europe, mostly to indifference. But in the United States the TV spot found huge success.::

:: Each smiling young person on the Italian hill – marked by their race, nation, and culture – held a market in their hand. It was a primitive picture, to be sure, a couple hundred smiling stereotypes, a stock sheet of misrepresentations. But it was not dishonest. In the eyes of capital, nonwhites and non-Americans represented the last to be brought inside, organized, harmonized. What else did it care for representation?::

* This is sparking ideas in me for colorized improv, environmental communications, and knowledge/ignorance discussions.

 

Colorization | black artists, politics, museums

This is one of several posts where I share quotes and food-for-thought from Chang’s book – Who We Be: The Colorization of America.*
(earlier posts: on Introduction, Chapter 1)

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This quote is from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Desegregation and the Future given at the December 1956 annual luncheon of the National Committee for Rural Schools.

About this post. I share some excerpts from Chang’s work in his Chapter 2 – After Jericho: The Struggle Against Invisibility, which is one of five chapters in Part One, A New Culture, 1963-1979 of this book. The subsections of Chapter 2 are titled as follows –

– In the White Gallery
– The Spiral
– Picturing the Struggle
– The Rise of The Southern Strategy
– What Remained Unseen
– Saving America’s Soul

I also share reference to a recent New York Times article, Black Artists and the March Into the Museum  – After decades of spotty acquisitions and token exhibitions, American
museums are rewriting the history of 20th-century art to include black artists, which Chang shared on Facebook.

Chapter 2 provides a historical overview around the Civil Rights Movement era – Black artists, politics, (e.g., presidential campaigns throughout the 1960s), racism, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s teachings, and the growing tension among artists and the museum/gallery entities.

In the Year 1963

Chapter 2 begins with Chang sharing several events from 1963, which included:

• The Birmingham Campaign (summary on KQED PBS)
• introduction of the Civil Rights Act
• the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (summary on KQED PBS)
• George Wallace Inaugural Address and declaration about segregation (about Wallace on NPR’s All Things Considered)
• James Baldwin, a spokesperson for civil rights, authors The Fire Next Time (about book on Amazon, perspective in a New York Times article)
• Faith Ringgold, artist, goes to see gallerist Ruth White (about Ringgold on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday)
• Ralph Ellison, artist, writes of Romare Bearden’s post-Spiral collages (and author of the 1952 novel The Invisible Man, about book on Amazon, about Ellison on NPR’s All Things Considered)

Art, Politics

Throughout Chapter 2, Chang weaves between and among presidential campaigns, black artists’ pursuits, the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachings and perspectives, and museums and galleries excluding Black artists’ works.

:: The American Spectrum … Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger … These works finally secured [Faith Ringgold] the serious attention from critics, peers, and elders that she had sought. Yet the paintings did not sell. “We want to see something that’s restful and nice to the eyes,” one man told her.  “I don’t want your painting screaming at me from the wall.”  But for Ringgold the history of art, the history of generations, indeed the history of America, was the history of lines drawn by color.” ::

:: Nixon understood that in the long run he needed to change the entire civil discourse. The civil rights movement had reshaped the national conversation about race. It had begun to build a new cultural consensus that supported the exercise of federal power for racial and economic justice with a capacious morality. The Southern strategy was, by no means, a fait accompli. ::

:: As the sixties roared to a close, Black artists were debating form, content, and social responsibility with increasing urgency. But no matter their politics or their aesthetics, they all shared the condition of invisibility and they were increasingly unwilling to tolerate this condition. They would no longer be unseen. They would demand recognition. ::

NYT Article, November 2015

This morning, I was getting ready to post this above overview. However, I saw from my Facebook feed that Chang posted a link to this New York Times article, Black Artists and the March Into the Museum, so I read the article, given my finishing up this post. Chang posted his reaction to the NYT article, which included (excerpt) –

FIRST REACTION: Surprised and happy to see this on the front page of the NYT.

BUT ON SECOND THOUGHT: The more I think about this piece the less happy I am with it.

The piece makes exactly zero note of any of the organizing that Black artists did to try to force museums and institutions to de-invisibilize Black art from the early 20th century to the 1969 Harlem On My Mind pickets (of which Norman Lewis was a co-organizer) to the Yams Collective withdrawal from the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

And there is exactly less than zero note of the relationship between the artists and the activists—many of whom were one and the same—who were living and acting within larger justice and equity movements in their time.

After reading the NYT article and Chang’s comment, I revisited this Chapter 2 to pull one other reference Chang shared in Who We Be –

:: While the [Metropolitan Musuem of Art’s Harlem on My Mind: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968] featured Black photographers, musicians, poets, and performers, it excluded Black visual artists. Instead the Met only allowed them a panel discussion. The politics of protest had only enabled this absurd arrangement: the artists’ art could not be seen, but the artists could be seen talking about not being seen. ::

* This is sparking ideas in me for colorized improv, environmental communications, and knowledge/ignorance discussions.

Colorization | comics, morrie turner

This is one of several posts where I share quotes and food-for-thought from Chang’s book – Who We Be: The Colorization of America.*
(earlier post: on Introduction)

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From San Francisco Chronicle article, Wee Pals retrospective at S.F. Library

There are five chapters in Part One, A New Culture, 1963-1979, of Jeff Chang’s Who We Be –

• CHAPTER 1, Rainbow Power: Morrie Turner and the Kids
• CHAPTER 2, After Jericho: The Struggle Against Invisibility
• CHAPTER 3, “The Real Thing”: Lifestyling and Its Discontents
• CHAPTER 4, Every Man an Artist, Every artist a Priest: The Invention of Multiculturalism
• CHAPTER 5, Color Theory: Race Trouble in the Avant-Garde

Photo credit: Brant Ward, SF Chronicle (2009)

As someone born in 1963, who enjoyed the comic strip Wee Pals and its Kid Power cartoon, I greatly appreciate Chang’s first chapter. I certainly did not know of (or understand) the meaningfulness of Wee Pals. I was a kid who read the comics and watched television with my little brother.

From a quick web search, here are a few other tidbits about Turner –

• The History Makers, Morrie Turner (2004)
• Visual Art Exhibit: MORRIE TURNER, Creator of Wee Pals Cartoon: A 45-Year Retrospective (2009)
• NPR’s Code Switch**, Morrie Turner, 1923-2014: Drawing Gentle Lessons In Tolerance (2014)

About this post. I share some excerpts (of which makes me ponder) from Chang’s work from Chapter 1 – Rainbow Power: Morrie Turner and the Kids. The subsections of Chapter 1 are titled as follows –

– The Animals and The Kids
– Confederate Flags and Rainbows
– The Value of Humor
– How It Feels to Be American
– The Kids Get Colorized
– The Price of Crossing Over

One of the joys of reading the Chang’s book is the occasional Wee Pals comic strip sprinkled throughout the book. In Chapter 1, there are two pages with 11 characters from the comic strip, as well as a few comic strips and one panels. Chapter 1 provides the historical backdrop while sharing Turner’s journey, experiences, and perspectives, as well referencing a few other cartoonists.

:: Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid became the first broadly popular cartoon character. … The Ting-Lings were “Chinese” only in the way blackface minstrelsy was “Negro.” … Cartoon Blacks and Chinese were not representations of blackness and yellowness. They were representations of whiteness – the laughs were found in what whites were not. … Outcault drew his boy with huge ears, buck teeth, and a big yellow nightie. ::

:: But in Wee Pals, Turner’s vision of multiculturalism aspired to be patient, innocent, unhardened. He knew that casting kids allowed him some freedom. If a Black kid was saying it, it was funny,” Turner said. “But if a Black man was saying it, it would be fighting time.”::

:: Most of Wee Pals‘s punch lines hinged on cultural misunderstandings and mistranslations. But conflict could be defused by common sense and collective action. ::

:: During the eighties, with the rise of multiculturalism, Black cartoonists made breakthroughs, including Ray Billingsley (Curtis), Robb Armstrong (Jump Start), and Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From). All three had substantial success by Wee Pals Standards. ::

:: In April 1999, Aaron McGruder, a prodigy from Maryland’s Black suburbs, launched The Boondocks. In that uniquely hip-hop-generation kind of way, he seemed to want to impress people and piss the off at the same time. The Boondocks had one of the most successful syndicated comic strip launches ever, opening in 160 newspapers. But soon enough, some readers began complaining the strip was “racist,” “angry,” “gangsta-ariented garbage.” ::

:: In a time of turmoil, Turner’s kids had been earnest and lighthearted. Their message was that everyone wanted equality, they could work it out, and no one need be uncivil in the process. McGruder’s Kids were products of the hypocrisies of a post-civil rights America, armed and armored with irony and attitude. Toward the failed promises of the civil rights generation and multiculturalism, the shuck-n-jive of hip-hop capitalists, the fake racial innocence of the nation, they declared their right to be hostile. ::

* This is sparking ideas in me for colorized improv, environmental communications, and knowledge/ignorance discussions.

** Listen to Code Switch, Morrie Turner, 1923-2014: Drawing Gentle Lessons In Tolerance (2014)