Smart Asian Girl…check! Black Basketball Player…check! Hispanic slut in mini-skirt and heels…check! White/blonde cheerleader…check! I was talking to someone earlier this week about the intersection of anthropology and marketing…how to market to people of different backgrounds without perpetuating stereotypes. “How do you do that?” he asked. While marketing should always start with your objective in…
DetailsI was reading a bedtime story to my 8 year old son Dillon and his 8 year old cousin Noah last night. It was a benign story, geared to a younger audience, but the boys had asked me to read it as a simple ploy to stay up later. We got to the page where…
DetailsHere are two resources that go well beyond the two-dimensional, US construct of diversity: Global Voices–which “aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online,” and the book “A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection,” edited by Stacy Bierlein (the book I picked up at a recent event at ThinkArt Salon, an…
DetailsIn evaluating multicultural marketing, it’s good to look at who’s doing what (is the black kid the basketball player? The older adult technologically illiterate? The Latina dancing?), or to keep an eye on ‘agency’ (who has the power–is one group making fun of another, is the group represented the way it would represent…
DetailsI seem to be on a “Latino” theme today, with this article by Elianne Ramos on the ‘new’ “Wise Latina” (new as in it doesn’t exist until marketing acknowledges or coins a term for it…tell that to Sonia Sotomayor and Elianne’s grandma Mama Clara) as well as this Call for Artists from the Belas-Artes gallery in…
DetailsHe doesn’t seem to hear me when I tell him to pick up his socks, but on the bigger issues… My child asked another if she was Korean or Chinese, because, as he said “I didn’t want to assume.” He asked if you could tell someone’s race from their bones. (Specifically, would people be racist if…
DetailsThere are two concepts I always remember from Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: The Left-Hand Column and The Ladder of Inference. The Left-Hand Column asks you to compare on a piece of paper “what was said” in the right-hand column with “what you were thinking and feeling, but not saying” in the left-hand…
DetailsThe Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Henry Louis-Gate – Race Card www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance I’m nervous about the “Beer Summit” tonight. It actually could be a great opportunity to have a meaningful conversation about how stereotypes and bias play out in the…
Details“Now that’s what I’m talking about with Intercultural Communications,” I thought when I read this story about acceptance of bomb sniffing dogs in Iraq. The good is clear and measurable–it’s a known, effective defense against bomb attacks. The cultural implications are readily definable: dogs are considered unclean, getting in the way of the important bond…
DetailsThere’s an exercise that I’ve seen used in diversity trainings that has to do with labeling or cultural identification. On a piece of paper, create two columns. On the left, list the groups you would use to describe yourself, that you might identify with. For example I’m white, Jewish, Female, mother, social justice, close affinity…
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