Time to listen
Part 3 of the "How to Build an Anti-racist Brand" series
Doing the work is a reader-supported newsletter for anyone who is serious about doing the work of anti-racism. It’s a space for learning, accountability, and honest and open reflections on anti-racism, anti-oppression and what it means for brands and communications.
It’s brought to you by Collette Philip, a multi-award-winning founder, writer, coach and facilitator.
What does it mean to truly listen as a brand? This is the third post in my series “How to build an anti-racist brand”. You can read the previous post here.
As with every chapter of the book, I start with my lived experience of racism (trigger warning). This specific excerpt features an archaic racial slur. It’s not my practice to repeat slurs, (even to “reclaim” their power) but it felt important to this specific story.
This is a longer read. You may find it easier to read on the Substack website or app, than in your inbox.
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It was early Spring 2003. I was working in advertising and had been assigned to the agency’s biggest account, a global fast-food brand, when I’d joined the agency the year before.
I was sitting in a conference room in Central London listening to the brand’s point-of-sale agency as they presented their new revamped in store imagery, to accompany the brand’s exciting new range launch - a major project I’d been working on for months.
I listened as they talked about the bold new look, the “exciting” move to feature people, not just food, in the imagery for the first time - and a more “diverse” range of people at that.
I listened as their sales pitch continued. I listened as their senior account director, a middle-aged white woman, started presenting individual pieces of point of sale in a PowerPoint presentation, needlessly describing exactly what we could see on the slide, which was a collage of smiling faces, posing with food. “Here we see an elderly gentleman, smiling and eating an ice-cream. Here we see a young woman eating a yoghurt. Here we see a young, umm, Asian man eating chicken”.
As she continued, I listened and noticed that her voice seemed to be getting higher and she was looking at me and appeared to be becoming uncomfortable. I looked back at her slide and spotted the reason for her apparent discomfort. There was an image of a Black woman on the slide. I inwardly sighed and steeled myself for the inappropriate words I was about to hear.
Because it was obvious to me that this lady had no idea how to refer to a Black person. Especially when there was a Black person in the room. Even if I was the only one.
I listened as she came to the Black woman on the slide and faltered, then stammered “And here’s, er, a, er, ah, a negress eating a salad”.
I listened as blood thundered in my ears, because although I had been preparing myself to hear something inappropriate, nothing could have prepared me for the violence of hearing a racial slur. A racial slur so hideous yet archaic, that I had never heard the word before - though I immediately got the context from it’s similarity to negro.
I listened as the white, male creative director jumped up and took over the presentation, looking at me with deep embarrassment, but offering no apology. I listened as the white, male Account Director from our agency kicked me under the table, presumably to stop me saying anything in response. Not that I could have spoken up over the ringing of the blood thundering in my ears and my pounding heartbeat.
I listened until the presentation finally ended and it felt like forever. At which point, the client, a white Canadian woman said, “Before I respond to this, I would like to apologise to Collette who should never ever have to hear that word, much less in a business meeting’.
Lived experiences of racism are traumatic. The memories are pushed down or suppressed, deep within, sometimes for years so when they are finally shared, as brands we must listen.
“Listen to the sound from deep within
It’s only beginning to find release”
- Beyoncé
Because if someone shares an experience of racism with us, there is a massive responsibility that comes with its release. In fact, if a person from a racialised community tells us that what we are doing is racist, we need to listen.
Sounds obvious, right? Except that doesn’t always happen. In the previous chapter,
I shared examples of companies that had used racist imagery for decades to promote their brands.
Racist imagery that had otherwise disappeared from our TV screens and from films decades before, yet these brands still proudly (and stubbornly) clung to this imagery. Racist imagery that had received complaints for decades and that activists campaigned to get removed.
Yet it took the resurgence of a global movement before the companies listened.
I refer to resurgence because (obviously) the Black Lives Matter movement did not begin in 2020.
It dates back to 2013, a call for justice by three Black community organisers, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the murderer of Trayvon Martin. So it would not have been the first time these brands would have heard that they were perpetuating racist stereotypes and white supremacy.
Why did the brands not listen? Why did it take so many years for brands like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben’s to be removed from the shelves? Well the answer (unsurprisingly) is white supremacy.
Where companies and brands are run and managed by a majority white leadership team, they get to decide whose voices count. Whose opinions matter. It’s not that the brand teams don’t value consumer opinion. These companies spend millions of [pounds/dollars/insert currency here] on research and data trying to understand customer wants, needs, habits, behaviours, even their desires in order to market to them and create products and evolve the brands so they are more relevant to consumers. It’s not that they can’t access their consumers.
Remember that old chestnut ‘Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room?’. For these companies, they are ALWAYS in the room - social media, technology and our 24/7 digital lives allow this. It’s not any of these things.
It’s that Black Opinions Don’t Matter.
How Brands Defend Their Racism
To defend these brands, people would talk about the importance of history authenticity, heritage and nostalgia. On hearing this, we must ask, ‘Whose history?
Authentic to whom? Nostalgic for whom?”. A female minstrel or elderly farm labourer do not represent a positive history or evoke warm feelings of nostalgia for
Black people.
A reminder of a legacy and history of oppression that has left its mark in the very structure and hierarchy of society to this day? Absolutely. Authentic in its racism? 100%. But there is nothing positive about this.
In the case of Aunt Jemima, the brand said it had listened over the years. The brand had changed the handkerchief on her head to a headband. And given her pearl earrings and a lace collar. Let’s pause for a second here. You know that your brand name is based on a song which was sung by minstrels and expressing longing for the good old days of slavery in the South. You’ve known this for years, decades even.
And your answer is to give the character a bit of a makeover. Well done on that ‘listening’. Yikes. Even when a rebrand was discussed in 2016, it was deprioritised.
Again we should ask, why wasn’t it a priority? And the answer seems obvious.
It took a viral Tik Tok video in the wake of a global movement around racial justice
to force the brand to act. To listen to the opinions they had been hearing, but not acting on for decades.
The importance of listening in this work
To be an anti-racist brand, it is essential to listen to people from racialised communities. It is vital to listen to and for lived experiences of racism.
It is not for white people to decide what is and isn’t racism.
It is not for white people to determine that something racist is harmless, no matter how well intentioned. That is white supremacy.
White supremacy ignores and actively silences the voices of people from racialised communities. It determines that the opinions of people from racialised communities are not worth listening to, or acting on. It views the world through a lens that places white people at the top of the hierarchy, the ‘majority’ or dominant voice, even in spaces and situations where racialised people are the majority.
And globally we (and I say we, as a Black woman) are the global majority.
It’s time to listen. Listen, not to defend, or respond. Listen so that you understand.
So that you have empathy. So that your action is meaningful, not tokenistic and shallow.
And so that you gain true insight, not just the response you want to hear.
Thank you for being here.
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