We Get Taco Bell. Why Can't We Get Critical Race Theory?

Photo by Victor Garcia on Unsplash.

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve done stupid stuff. I almost got kicked out of school for pretending to be the dean of students, I spent a year on double-secret probation at work, and I’ve been sued – twice. I even tried to change a windshield wiper with a hammer. 

So because I’ve done stupid stuff, does that make me stupid?

This is a question for someone at a higher philosophical level, like maybe Matt Gaetz, but when the roll is called up yonder, I'd like to think the decision is not stupid, by a nose.

Maybe that’s why it’s so galling when I look around at what some people are saying and doing. It makes me want to throw up my hands and say, “Forrest Gump’s momma was right – stupid is as stupid does.”

Case in point … well, there are hundreds of thousands of cases in point these days. Just go to any hospital ICU and see the COVID patients who chose not to get vaccinated, thinking they were getting shot with surveillance cameras or magnets or 5G or god knows what else.

Then there’s this whole hoohah about critical race theory and bans on diversity training.

Listen: I’m an Old White Guy. I am 100 times more part of the problem than part of the solution. I am leaving my kids a world that is dirtier, hotter, and not appreciably smarter or more caring than the world I inherited, and I carry around that guilt every day.

But even I know that you can’t make this country less racist by making it illegal to teach people how to be less racist.

The county board

Here’s what I’m talking about.

I live in a white-collar, progressive college town, yet last week I had to go to a county board meeting where a committee was scheduled to debate a ban on diversity training. 

The proposed ordinance was pretty much the Trump Administration’s diversity-training gag in sheep’s clothing, and among other things, it banned teaching that “America is not a racist country.”

America not a racist country? You might want to ask Jackie Robinson about that. Or Duke Ellington. Or John Lewis. Or George Taliaferro. Or, closer to now, George Floyd or Ahmaud Arbery.

Photo by Lucie Hošová on Unsplash.

America has never not been a racist country. My ancestor, Jonathan Fairbank, sailed to this country in 1633 and was “granted” 12 acres of land, because it’s easy to grant things that aren’t yours. You want a few acres of sod, maybe with a babbling brook and a little meadow? Here you go! It’s like Donald Trump throwing paper towels to Puerto Ricans.

Another ancestor, Charles W. Fairbanks, was elected vice president at a time when only white men had unfettered access to the vote.

Much of my family’s history is built on the backs of people of different races and genders, so saying America is not racist is like saying the Olympics aren’t just another exercise in flag-wrapped boorishness.

Seems clear as the space between Ted Cruz’s ears, yet I still had to troop down to the county board meeting with a statement reminding certain parties that covering up your tracks, and then making it illegal to uncover them, is wrong.

I never had to deliver the statement, thankfully, because the committee shunted the proposal to the same deep, dark resting place occupied by Ron Johnson’s soul, but here’s what it said in part:

I teach my marketing research students how important it is to know your customer from all angles, and to view your product through their eyes and their lived experience.

I also teach them that no market is unimportant, and no customer’s voice should be unheard.

That’s why I make sure one of my class periods every semester is a seminar on diversity, equity, and inclusion in business featuring my friend Sherry Wallace, executive director for diversity and engagement at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina.

In case you haven’t followed the headlines, Sherry works on a campus that’s at the epicenter of much of this discussion, thanks to UNC’s treatment of Nikole Hannah-Jones. And she was hit with a cease-and-desist letter from the Trump Administration for holding her own diversity seminar on the North Carolina campus, so she has been down this road.

What’s the value of diversity training? As an Old White Guy standing on this side of the chasm, I can only assume what matters to a customer who’s profoundly unlike me on the other side of the chasm. Diversity training helps close that gap.

With the gap closed and my understanding enhanced, I can market more effectively to those customers on behalf of my clients – and their success drives economic growth across this region, state, and country.

In addition, diversity training helps me improve communication with other members of my team, my clients’ teams, vendors, and prospective customers – because, as Sherry says, “When you know better, you do better” …

In two years of working with Sherry I have not had a single person say they feel ashamed of who they are, or less of a person, or more of a racist, for having been exposed to her and her message. In fact, the opposite is overwhelmingly true.

I’ll let others speak on the social aspects of what is being proposed today. But speaking solely on the business aspects, I advocate and teach that the only reasonable business decisions are truly informed decisions, and anything that arbitrarily stands in the way of building understanding, as this does, is dumb, bad, and dangerous.

For that reason, and many others, I stand in opposition to this proposal.

If you were wondering where the marketing was going to come into this blog, well, it’s in there.

As a marketer, I want to market my product to any group that I can legally market to that’s within the scope of my marketing plan. And if I'm going to market to those groups, I'm going to do it right. And if I can’t market to someone because I don’t understand where they’re at, I either need to get schooled or I need to bring in someone who does understand.

I'm no genius, but golly, this is just common sense.

If you think your audiences are monolithic, you’re wrong. They’re all the colors of the rainbow. And if you don’t comprehend the need to understand them and their lived experiences, you need to go out and get some diversity training.

And seeing as you already get trained up to your eyeballs on Microsoft Office, HIPAA, and about a billion different platforms, what’s the big deal about adding diversity training to that pile?

Critical race theory

As for the furor over critical race theory, that’s pure Momma Gump stuff. Let me show you why.

Think of history as a product, like Sprite or GEICO.

Teachers and Old White Guys and historians are the manufacturers and marketers. We look at history from our side and maybe we say, “Oh, yeah, slaves benefitted from humane treatment by their beneficent owners,” and, “After the Civil War, black people assumed their rightful place in society.”

The people on the other side, the consumers, look at the back side of this product called history and say, “Well then, why were runaway slaves beaten and killed?”, and, “Why were there Jim Crow laws?”, and, “Why was Brown v. Board of Education necessary?”, and “What about Tulsa and Emmitt Till and the Tuskegee Syphilis Project?”

At which point the babbling starts and everything breaks down, well short of an understanding of what critical race theory really is.

Photo by Dan Meyers via Unsplash.

An alternate explanation

Because so many people get to this point and stop, maybe we need to reframe this discussion in terms of something that everyone can understand, if not enjoy without gastrointestinal issues: Taco Bell.

Suppose the product wasn’t history but a Cheesy Gordita Crunch. When biting into one of these delectable concoctions, some consumers might be prompted to ask, “Why do they call this stuff ‘beef’?”, based on their lived experience with beef.

That’s a real belief based on real experience, and it doesn’t matter if you’re sitting over on the other side saying, “Of course it’s beef – for the most part.” To these people, what’s real is that it’s nothing like any beef they’ve ever made, or their family has ever made, or they’ve ever encountered elsewhere.

In a situation like that, it would be entirely logical for a marketer to look at people’s reactions, say, “Wow, we need to address this now,” and totally come clean to these people on the beef-like substance T-Bell puts in its food. 

However, a good marketer wouldn’t stop there. They’d broadcast this message to a wide audience, because news spreads, and if they can't steer the conversation at least they can be part of the conversation.

Critical race theory is simply people asking “why” to a narrative that’s nothing like what they or their family or their demographic group has experienced over time. 

Or stripped down to the absolute studs, it’s about understanding and explaining how a certain segment of your audience comprehends and feels about the product (a/k/a history), and then making sure that their understanding is baked into your broader narrative.

This is piece-of-cake Marketing 101 when the product is a Cheesy Gordita Crunch, but we fall all over ourselves when the product is our past, and what we’ve lived through individually and collectively. 

Making it right

We are capable of doing better by this product. We are capable of teaching better. And the way to start is to acknowledge that we did a bad job in the past and we need to improve from here on out.

It’s not that difficult, and no one has to be called “stupid” in the process. Yet the pushback is staggering.

All this performative buffoonery – the proposed bans, UNC’s shabby treatment of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the handwringing over CRT – is beating against the tide of history and truth, and it’s doomed to fail. America is becoming more diverse every day, and no sort of “right-thinking” legislation (like the garbage Florida law that would survey all university personnel and students on their political beliefs) is going to change that.

“You can’t stop us on the road to freedom,” Van Morrison sang a long time ago. “You can’t stop us ‘cause our eyes can see.” People do see; they see the truth through the lenses of their race, gender, and lived experience, and they are on a road to freedom, liberated by a version of history that cleaves ever closer to the uncomfortable, unvarnished, inconvenient way things were.

Despite this, people who feel their power and position threatened will try and try again, futilely, to rewrite the story of the past and postpone a future that’s already upon them.

And to those misguided souls will come the revelation that comes to all who try to perpetuate a lie at the cost of the truth: Momma Gump was right. Life is like a box of chocolates, and if you get cherry nougat instead of fudge cream but call it fudge cream anyway, you’re gonna get your comeuppance.

Such is marketing, and such is history.