Word of Mouth and Racism

Tonight in my Graphic Design class my professor was talking about a book he had been reading lately that related by tangent to design. The main point of the book was how small things can cause exponential change. It didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense at first, but he shared a few examples from the book where something small caused a huge change.

The best example he gave was how New York City’s crime rate was dramatically reduced thanks to simple subway turnstile enforcement and painting over graffiti in the subway system. Those two minor improvements caused massive change.


It’s an interesting idea and I began to mull it over in my mind. What’s the best kind of advertising? Invariably, it’s word of mouth. Why? For one it’s personal, two it’s exponential. Compared to national campaigns, billboards, commercials, sponsorships and what not, it’s a pretty small thing. But the affect can be astronomical. Have you heard of the Hunger Site? They feed the hungry simply through web hits. In its first month the site got 170,000 hits. Now it gets nearly 300,000 hits in a single day. Why? Word of mouth (or in this case email) advertising.

Another unrelated topic crossed my mind today; racism. It’s an issue I struggle with immensely because I just don’t know what to do with it. It’s ingrained in the American mind and is very difficult to address. My film class began addressing the issue today, and we started reading a book by Cornel West called Race Matters. He has some pretty insightful stuff to stay. I find it such a bothersome issue because it’s so hard to know what’s right. Is it racist that ReALMagazine.com is primarily written by Caucasians? Or would it be racist to go out of my way to find ethnically diverse writers? Should I even be struggling with a question like that?

I’m reminded of the words I wrote in these thoughts more than a year ago: “When you look at me you don’t see a man, you see a black man,” (A Time To Kill). That’s what I find at the heart of racism–and it even goes deeper than racism. What do you see when you look at another person? Do you see black? White? Asian? Indian? Do you see gender? Do you see an object? Do you see an intelligence, or lack thereof? Do you see an athlete? A scholar? A musician? An artist? A business person? Some of this is simple human recognition. Of course I look at a person and identify them. Someone will look at me and identify me as a skinny white kid. But if you’re honest, that’s not all that’s going on. Judgements, stereotypes, prejudices. They all flood our minds. And it’s not just race, although race is probably one of the bigger issues.

What really strikes me is what happens when you know a person, when you no longer identify them by certain categories. You know them as a person, and you identify them as such. Leon was a man I met on the streets of Chicago. He happens to be black (some might say it isn’t a coincidence). But his race is usually one of the last things I mention when I describe him to someone else. Why? Because I’m his friend. I don’t see him as a black man, I see him as a friend. The sad question is, however, is that what it will take to see every person of another race, sex, or creed as a person and not a category?

This is a troubling issue, one we too often let brew underneath the surface. It’s been brewing and occasionally boiling over for a long time. I can’t help but wonder if it’ll ever be finished.

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