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Pop Culture, Big Business, and the End of White America
Crown
August 2002
On Sale: August 6, 2002
304 pages
ISBN: 0609604899
EAN: 9780609604892
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Race has always been America’s first standard and central
paradox. From the start, America based its politics on the
principle of white supremacy, but it has always lived and
dreamed of itself in color. The truth beneath the
contradiction has finally emerged and led us to the
threshold of a transformation of American identity as
profound as slavery was defining. We live in a country where the “King of Pop” was born black
and a leading rap M.C. is white, where salsa outsells
ketchup and cosmetics firms advertise blond hair dye with
black models. Whiteness is in steep decline as the primary
measure of Americanness. The new, true American identity
rising in its place is transracial, defined by shared
cultural and consumer habits, not skin color or ethnicity.
And this unprecedented redefinition of what “American”
sounds, looks, and feels like is not being driven by the
politics of protest or liberal multiculturalism but by a
more basic American instinct: the profit motive. Smart marketers discovered that the inherent, subversive
appeal of transracial American culture was the perfect
boombox for breaking through the noise of a crowded
marketplace: Nike and the NBA used unambiguous black style
to create modern sports marketing; Pepsi validated Michael
Jackson as a superstar while adding millions to its own
bottom line; Hollywood turned a taboo into a lucrative
cliché with black-white buddy films; Oprah Winfrey created
the model for the ultimate individual corporate brand; and
Budweiser created a signature series of commercials built
around four ordinary black men signaling something ineffably
American with one word—“Wassup?” In the end, this is a hopeful but clear-eyed argument that
while we fall short of true equality, we are opting to carry
on that struggle together within a common American cultural
skin.
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