Black Identities Inside Advertising: Race Inequality, Code Switching, and Stereotype Threat

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This article explores Black identities within the U.S. advertising industry—an atmosphere charged by a history of discrimination against, and continuing underrepresentation of, African American practitioners. Drawing on theories of code switching and stereotype threat, the author interprets data from a set of focus groups with Black interns working at agencies in New York City and argues that their supposed race-based affiliations conceal deeper anxieties of cultural belonging marked by fissures of class and language that trigger self-monitoring and thus undermine retention and advancement in the advertising field. Furthermore, the author contends that the added psychological burden of stereotype threat makes Black interns wary of seeking out help from other more established Black employees—for fear of being seen as preferring their own race—thus placing them at a career development disadvantage vis-à-vis Whites, who have no qualms about affiliating with and mentoring other Whites. The author then offers some strategies for closing the White–Black labor gap in advertising ranging from agency reform from within to clients exerting structural pressure from without and concludes with a call for communication scholars to move beyond the text and critique race representation at the point of production.

KEYTERMS:

• race
• African American Studies
• identity
• grounded theory
• focus groups

Notes

1. Boulton (2013) has analyzed how the interactions of race and gender inequalities inside advertising tend to reproduce White male leadership through informal hiring practices based on personal referrals and team-based chemistry/fit. For more on gendered labor in advertising, see Broyles and Grow (2008), Gregory (2009), and Mallia (2009).

2. Founded in 1973 by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4A's), MAIP recruits and screens around 140 students of color every year from all over the country, then places them in agencies willing to pay 70% of their travel and rent (in addition to the standard stipend) during their own internal summer internship programs (4A's, 2010).

3. This commitment to maintain her own, authentic way of speaking would have inhibited Darshelle's career prospects in advertising. According to the supervisor of her internship program, Darshelle had “a very different background, you know, a different sense of polish, you know, then the rest of the interns” such that her agency would not want her on the phone with a client.

4. This dynamic also surfaced between Shirley and Lamar during one of the focus groups. It began with Shirley describing how “I felt like I had to do more making people feel comfortable going into Black communities rather than going into White communities. White people are going to feel fine around me, but Black people might get nervous: ‘Why are you talking like that? What's the deal here, where are you from?’” Lamar then responded, “And I'm gonna' be honest, cause when I first met you, I knew like [snaps] as soon as you started talking—you've grown up around White people … cause I could hear it in your dialect. Nothing's wrong with it; I can just hear it.”

5. Some notable exceptions include: Lamar, who had two Black employees take him out to lunch and “put me under their wing;” Millicent, whose supervisor's supervisor, a Black man, reached out to her, saying it was good to “have someone in my corner,” and that she should call him by his first name because “I know I'm old, but I still listen to Drake;” and Shirley, who reported a clumsy, if well-meaning, effort by an older Black women at her agency who “adopted” her like an “Auntie” and gave her non-work-related advice like where to find the $.99 store.