Or perhaps it is not that difficult. Yes, the cool hunters reduce vibrant cultural ideas to the status of archeological artifacts, and drain away whatever meaning they once held for the people who lived with them-but this has always been the case. It's a cinch to co-opt a style; and it has been done many times before, on a much grander scale than the minor takeover of drag and grunge. Bauhaus modernism, for example, had its roots in the imaginings of a socialist utopia free of garish adornment, but it was almost immediately appropriated as the relatively inexpensive architecture of choice for the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of corporate America.
On the other hand, though style-based movements are stripped of their original meanings time and time again, the effect of this culture vulturing on more politically grounded movements is often so ludicrous that the most sensible reaction is just to laugh it off. The spring 1998 Prada collection, for instance, borrowed heavily from the struggle of the labor movement. As "supershopper" Karen von Hahn reported from Milan, "The collection, a sort of Maoist/Soviet-worker chic full of witty period references, was shown in a Prada-blue room in the Prada family palazzo to an exclusive few." She adds, "After the show, the small yet ardent group of devotees tossed back champagne cocktails and canapes while urbane jazz played in the background."37 Mao and Lenin also make an appearance on a Spring 1999 handbag from Red or Dead. Yet despite these clear co-optations of the class struggle, one hardly expects the labor movements of the world to toss in the towel in a huff, give up on their demands for decent working conditions and labor standards worldwide because Mao is suddenly the It Boy in Milan. Neither are union members everywhere accepting wage rollbacks because Pizza Hut aired a commercial in which the boss delivers pizzas to a picket line and all anti-management animosity is abandoned in favor of free food. Mao and Lenin also make an appearance on a Spring 1999 handbag from Red or Dead. Yet despite these clear co-optations of the class struggle, one hardly expects the labor movements of the world to toss in the towel in a huff, give up on their demands for decent working conditions and labor standards worldwide because Mao is suddenly the It Boy in Milan. Neither are union members everywhere accepting wage rollbacks because Pizza Hut aired a commercial in which the boss delivers pizzas to a picket line and all anti-management animosity is abandoned in favor of free food.
The Tibetan people in the West seem similarly nonplussed by their continued popularity with the Beastie Boys, Brad Pitt and designer Anna Sui, who was so moved by their struggle that she made an entire line of banana-print bikini tops and surfer shorts inspired by the Chinese occupation (Women's Wear Daily dubbed the Tibet line "techno beach blanket bingo" dubbed the Tibet line "techno beach blanket bingo"38). More indifference has met Apple computers' appropriation of Gandhi for their "Think Different" campaign, and Che Guevara's reincarnation as the logo for Revolution Soda (slogan: "Join the Revolution" see image image) and as the mascot of the upscale London cigar lounge, Che. Why? Because not one of the movements being "co-opted" expressed itself primarily through style or attitude. And so style co-optation-and indeed any outside-the-box brainstorming on Madison Avenue-does not have the power to undo them either.
It may seem cold comfort, but now that we know advertising is an extreme sport and CEOs are the new rock stars, it's worth remembering that extreme sports are not political movements and rock, despite its historic claims to the contrary, is not revolution. In fact, to determine whether a movement genuinely challenges the structures of economic and political power, one need only measure how affected it is by the goings-on in the fashion and advertising industries. If, even after being singled out as the latest fad, it continues as if nothing had happened, it's a good bet it is a real movement. If it spawns an industry of speculation about whether movement X has lost its "edge," perhaps its adherents should be looking for a sharper utensil. And as we will soon see, that is exactly what many young activists are in the process of doing.
Image from 1984 Apple television campaign; Apple has been a major promoter of technology in classrooms. Channel One is broadcast in 12,000 U.S. schools.
Chapter Four.
The Branding of Learning Ads in Schools and Universities A democratic system of education...is one of the surest ways of creating and greatly extending markets for goods of all kinds and especially those goods in which fashion may play a part.
-Ex-adman James Rorty, Our Master's Voice Our Master's Voice, 1934 Although the brands seem to be everywhere-at kids' concerts, next to them on the couch, on stage with their heroes, in their on-line chat groups, and on their playing fields and basketball courts-for a long time one major unbranded youth frontier remained: a place where young people gathered, talked, sneaked smokes, made out, formed opinions and, most maddeningly of all, stood around looking cool for hours on end. That place is called school. And clearly, the brands had to get into the schools.
"You'll agree that the youth market is an untapped wellspring of new revenue. You'll also agree that the youth market spends the majority of each day inside the schoolhouse. Now the problem is, how do you reach that market?" asks a typically tantalizing brochure from the Fourth Annual Kid Power Marketing Conference.
As we have just seen, marketers and cool hunters have spent the better part of the decade hustling the brands back to high school and pouring them into the template of the teenage outlaw. Several of the most successful brands had even cast their corporate headquarters as private schools, referring to them as "campuses" and, at the Nike World Campus, nicknaming one edifice "the student union building." Even the cool hunters are going highbrow; by the late nineties, the rage in the industry was to recast oneself less as a trendy club-hopper than as a bookish grad student. In fact, some insist they aren't cool hunters at all but rather "urban anthropologists."
And yet despite their up-to-the-minute outfits and intellectual pretensions, the brands and their keepers still found themselves on the wrong side of the school gate, a truly intolerable state of affairs and one that would not last long. American marketing consultant Jack Myers described the insufferable slight like this: "The choice we have in this country [the U.S.] is for our educational system to join the electronic age and communicate to students in ways they can understand and to which they can relate. Or our schools can continue to use outmoded forms of communications and become the daytime prisons for millions of young people, as they have become in our inner cities."1 This reasoning, which baldly equates corporate access to the schools with access to modern technology, and by extension to the future itself, is at the core of how the brands have managed, over the course of only one decade, to all but eliminate the barrier between ads and education. It was technology that lent a new urgency to nineties chronic underfunding: at the same time as schools were facing ever-deeper budget cuts, the costs of delivering a modern education were rising steeply, forcing many educators to look to alternative funding sources for help. Swept up by info-tech hype, schools that couldn't afford up-to-date textbooks were suddenly expected to provide students with audiovisual equipment, video cameras, classroom computers, desktop publishing capacity, the latest educational software programs, Internet access-even, at some schools, video-conferencing. This reasoning, which baldly equates corporate access to the schools with access to modern technology, and by extension to the future itself, is at the core of how the brands have managed, over the course of only one decade, to all but eliminate the barrier between ads and education. It was technology that lent a new urgency to nineties chronic underfunding: at the same time as schools were facing ever-deeper budget cuts, the costs of delivering a modern education were rising steeply, forcing many educators to look to alternative funding sources for help. Swept up by info-tech hype, schools that couldn't afford up-to-date textbooks were suddenly expected to provide students with audiovisual equipment, video cameras, classroom computers, desktop publishing capacity, the latest educational software programs, Internet access-even, at some schools, video-conferencing.
As many education experts have pointed out, the pedagogical benefits technology brings to the classroom are dubious at best, but the fact remains that employers are clamoring for tech-trained graduates and chances are the private school down the street or across town is equipped with all the latest gadgets and toys. In this context, corporate partnerships and sponsorship arrangements have seemed to many public schools, particularly those in poorer areas, to be the only possible way out of the high-tech bind. If the price of staying modern is opening the schools to ads, the thinking goes, then parents and teachers will have to grin and bear it.
The fact that more schools are turning to the private sector to finance technology purchases does not mean that governments are relinquishing any role in supplying public schools with computers. Quite the opposite. A growing number of politicians are making a computer on every desk a key plank in their election platforms, albeit in partnership with local businesses. But in the process school boards are draining money out of programs like music and physical education to finance this high-tech dream-and here too they are opening the door to corporate sponsorships and to direct forms of brand promotion in cash-strapped cafeterias and sports programs.
As fast-food, athletic gear and computer companies step in to fill the gap, they carry with them an educational agenda of their own. As with all branding projects, it is never enough to tag the schools with a few logos. Having gained a foothold, the brand managers are now doing what they have done in music, sports and journalism outside the schools: trying to overwhelm their host, to grab the spotlight. They are fighting for their brands to become not the add-on but the subject of education, not an elective but the core curriculum.
Of course the companies crashing the school gate have nothing against education. Students should by all means learn, they say, but why don't they read about our company, write about our brand, research their own brand preferences or come up with a drawing for our next ad campaign? Teaching students and building brand awareness, these corporations seem to believe, can be two aspects of the same project. Which is where Channel One, owned by K-III Communications, and its Canadian counterpart, the Youth News Network, come in, perhaps the best-known example of in-school branding.
At the beginning of the decade, these self-styled in-school broadcasters approached North American school boards with a proposition. They asked them to open their classrooms to two minutes of television advertising a day, sandwiched between twelve minutes of teenybopper current affairs programming. Many schools consented, and the broadcasts soon aired. Turning off the cheerful ad patter is not an option. Not only is the programming mandatory viewing for students, but teachers are unable to adjust the volume of the broadcast, especially during commercials. In exchange, the schools do not receive direct revenue from the stations but they can use the much-coveted audiovisual equipment for other lessons and, in some cases, receive "free" computers.
Channel One, meanwhile, charges advertisers top dollar for accessing its pipeline to classrooms-twice as much as regular TV stations because, with mandatory attendance and no channel-changing or volume control, it can boast something no other broadcaster can: "No audience erosion." The station now boasts a presence in 12,000 schools, reaching an estimated eight million students (see image image).
When those students aren't watching Channel One or surfing with ZapMe!, an in-school Internet browser first offered free to American schools in 1998, they may turn their attention to their textbooks-and those too may be sending out more messages to "Just Do It" or "CK Be." The Cover Concepts company sells slick ads that wrap around books to 30,000 U.S. schools, where teachers use them instead of plastic or tinfoil as protective jackets. And when lunchtime arrives, more ads are literally on the menu at many schools. In 1997, Twentieth Century-Fox managed to get cafeteria menu items named after characters from its film Anastasia Anastasia in forty U.S. elementary schools. Students could dine on "Rasputin Rib-B-Cue on Bartok Bun" and "Dimitri's Peanut Butter Fudge." Disney and Kellogg's have engaged in similar lunch-menu promotions through School Marketing, a company that describes itself as a "school-lunch ad agency." in forty U.S. elementary schools. Students could dine on "Rasputin Rib-B-Cue on Bartok Bun" and "Dimitri's Peanut Butter Fudge." Disney and Kellogg's have engaged in similar lunch-menu promotions through School Marketing, a company that describes itself as a "school-lunch ad agency."2 Competing with the menu sponsors are the fast-food chains themselves, chains that go head-to-head with cafeterias in 13 percent of U.S. schools. In an arrangement that was unheard of in the eighties, companies like McDonald's and Burger King now set up kiosks in lunchrooms, which they advertise around the school. Subway supplies 767 schools with sandwiches; Pizza Hut corners the market in approximately 4,000 schools; and a staggering 20,000 schools participate in Taco Bell's "frozen burrito product line." A Subway sandwich guide about how to access the in-school market advises franchisees to pitch their brand-name food to school boards as a way to keep students from sneaking out at lunch hour and getting into trouble. "Look for situations where the local school board has a closed campus policy for lunch. If they do, a strong case can be made for branded product to keep the students on campus."3 The argument works for administrators such as Bob Honson, the director of nutritional services for the Portland, Oregon, school district. "Kids come to us with brand preferences," he explains. The argument works for administrators such as Bob Honson, the director of nutritional services for the Portland, Oregon, school district. "Kids come to us with brand preferences," he explains.4 Not all students' brand preferences, however, are accommodated with equal enthusiasm. Since the fast-food outposts don't accept vouchers from kids on the federal lunch program and their food is usually twice as expensive as cafeteria fare, kids from poor families are stuck with mystery meat while their wealthier classmates lunch on Pizza Hut pizza and Big Macs. And they can't even look forward to days when the cafeteria serves pizza or cheeseburgers, since many schools have signed agreements with the chains that prohibit them from serving "generic versions" of fast-food items: no-name burgers, it seems, constitute "unfair competition."
Students may also find that brand wars are being waged over the pop machine outside the gym. In Canada and the U.S., many school boards have given exclusive vending rights to the Pepsi-Cola Company in exchange for generally undisclosed lump sums. What Pepsi negotiates in return varies from district to district. In Toronto, it gets to fill the 560 public schools with its vending machines, to block the sales of Coke and other competitors, and to distribute "Pepsi Achievement Awards" and other goodies emblazoned with its logo. In communities like Cayuga, a rural Ontario tobacco-farming town, Pepsi buys the right to brand entire schools. "Pepsi-Official Soft Drink of Cayuga Secondary School" reads the giant sign beside the road. At South Fork High School in Florida, there is a blunt, hard-sell arrangement: the school has a clause in its Pepsi contract committing the school to "make its best effort to maximize all sales opportunities for Pepsi-Cola products."5 Similarly bizarre and haphazard corporate promotions arrangements are thrown together on college and university campuses around the world. At almost every university in North America, advertising billboards appear on campus bicycle racks, on benches, in hallways linking lecture halls, in libraries and even in bathroom stalls. Credit-card companies and long-distance phone carriers solicit students from the moment they receive their orientation-week information kit to the instant after they receive their degree; at some schools, diplomas come with an envelope stuffed with coupons, credit offers and advertising flyers. In the U.S. Barnes & Noble is rapidly replacing campus-owned bookstores, and Chapters has similar plans in Canada. Taco Bells, KFCs, Starbucks and Pizza Huts are already fixtures on university campuses, where they are often clumped together in food courts inside on-campus malls. Not surprisingly, in the U.S and Canada the fiercest scholastic marketing battles are fought over high-school gym class and university athletics. The top high-school basketball teams have sponsorship deals with Nike and Adidas, which deck out teenagers in swoosh- and stripe-festooned shoes, warm-ups and gym bags. At the university level, Nike has sponsorship deals with more than two hundred campus athletics departments in the U.S. and twelve in Canada. As anyone familiar with college ball well knows, the standard arrangement gives the company the right to stamp the swoosh on uniforms, sports gear, official university merchandise and apparel, on stadium seats and, most important, on ad banners in full view of the cameras that televise high-profile games. Since student players can't get paid in amateur athletics, it is the coaches who receive the corporate money to dress their teams in the right logos, and the amounts at stake are huge. Nike pays individual coaches as much as $1.5 million in sponsorship fees at top sports universities like Duke and North Carolina, sums that make the coaches' salaries look like tokens of appreciation.
As educational institutions surrender to the manic march of branding, a new language is emerging. Nike high schools and universities square off against their Adidas rivals: the teams may well have their own "official drink," either Coke or Pepsi. In its daily broadcasts, Channel One makes frequent references to the goings-on at "Channel One schools." William Hoynes, a sociologist at Vassar College who conducted a study on the broadcaster, says the practice is "part of a broader marketing approach to develop a 'brand name' consciousness of the network, including the promotion of the 'Channel One school' identity."6 As several critics have pointed out, Channel One isn't just hawking its advertisers' sneakers and candy to school kids, it is also selling the idea that its own programming is an invaluable educational aid, one that modernizes such arid, outmoded educational resources as books and teachers. In the model advanced by these broadcasters, the process of learning is little more than the transferring of "stuff" to a student's brain. Whether that stuff happens to be about a new blockbuster from Disney or the Pythagorean theorem, the net effect, according to this theory, is the same: more stuff stuffed. So Fox's attempts to flog Anastasia Anastasia in schools didn't stop with lunch-menu ads; it also provided teachers with an " in schools didn't stop with lunch-menu ads; it also provided teachers with an "Anastasia study guide." Jeffrey Godsick, Fox senior vice president of publicity and promotion, explained that Fox was providing a service to the schools, not the other way around. "Public school teachers are desperate for materials that will excite the kids," he said. study guide." Jeffrey Godsick, Fox senior vice president of publicity and promotion, explained that Fox was providing a service to the schools, not the other way around. "Public school teachers are desperate for materials that will excite the kids," he said.7 It's impossible to know which teachers use these branded materials in class and which ones toss them away, but a report published by the U.S. Consumers Union in 1995 "found that thousands of corporations were targeting school children or their teachers with marketing activities ranging from teaching videos, to guidebooks, and posters to contests, product giveaways, and coupons."8 It will come as no surprise that it is the folks at the Nike World Campus who have devised the most advanced hybrid of in-class advertisement, public relations exercise and faux teaching aid: the "Air-to-Earth" lesson kit. During the 199798 academic year, elementary school students in more than eight hundred classrooms across the U.S. sat down at their desks to find that today's lesson was building a Nike sneaker, complete with a swoosh and an endorsement from an NBA star. Called a "despicable use of classroom time" by the National Education Association and "the warping of education" by the Consumers Union, the make-your-own-Nike exercise purports to raise awareness about the company's environmentally sensitive production process. Nike's claim to greenness relies heavily on the fact that the company recycles old sneakers to re-cover community center basketball courts, which, in a postmodern marketing spiral, it then brands with the Nike swoosh.9 Hey, Kids! Be a Self Self-Promoter!
In a corporate climate obsessed with finding the secret recipe for cool, there are still more in-school resources to tap. After all, if there is one thing the cool hunters have taught us, it's that groups of kids aren't just lowly consumers: they are also card-carrying representatives of their age demographic. In the eyes of the brand managers, every lunchroom and classroom is a focus group waiting to be focused. So getting access to schools means more than just hawking product-it's a bona fide, bargain-basement cool-hunting opportunity.
For this reason, the in-school computer network ZapMe! doesn't merely sell ad space to its sponsors; it also monitors students' paths as they surf the Net and provides this valuable market research, broken down by the students' sex, age and zip code, to its advertisers. Then, when students log on to ZapMe!, they are treated to ads that have been specially "micro-targeted" for them.10 This kind of detailed market research is exploding in North American schools: weekly focus groups, taste tests, brand-preference questionnaires, opinion polls, panel discussions on the Internet, all are currently being used inside classrooms. And in a feat of peer-on-peer cool hunting, some market researchers have been experimenting with sending kids home from school with disposable cameras to take pictures of their friends and family-returning with documented evidence, in one assignment conducted for Nike, "of their favorite place to hang out." Exercises like these are "educational" and "empowering" the market researchers argue, and some educators agree. In explaining the merits of a cereal taste test, the principal of Our Lady of Assumption elementary school in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, said: "It's a learning experience. They had to read, they had to look, they had to compare." This kind of detailed market research is exploding in North American schools: weekly focus groups, taste tests, brand-preference questionnaires, opinion polls, panel discussions on the Internet, all are currently being used inside classrooms. And in a feat of peer-on-peer cool hunting, some market researchers have been experimenting with sending kids home from school with disposable cameras to take pictures of their friends and family-returning with documented evidence, in one assignment conducted for Nike, "of their favorite place to hang out." Exercises like these are "educational" and "empowering" the market researchers argue, and some educators agree. In explaining the merits of a cereal taste test, the principal of Our Lady of Assumption elementary school in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, said: "It's a learning experience. They had to read, they had to look, they had to compare."11 Channel One is pushing the market-research model even further, frequently enlisting "partner" teachers to develop class lessons in which students are asked to create a new ad campaign for Snapple or to redesign Pepsi's vending machines. In New York and Los Angeles high-school students have created thirty-second animated spots for Starburst fruit candies, and students in Colorado Springs designed Burger King ads to hang in their school buses.12 Finished assignments are passed on to the companies and the best entries win prizes and may even be adopted by the companies-all subsidized by the taxpayer-funded school system. At Vancouver's Laurier Annex school, students in Grades 3 and 4 designed two new product lines for the British Columbia restaurant chain White Spot. For several months in 1997, the children worked on developing the concept and packaging for "Zippy" pizza burgers, a product that is now on the kids' menu at White Spot. The following year, they designed an entire concept for birthday parties to be held at the chain. The students' corporate presentation included "sample commercials, menu items, party games invented by the students and cake ideas," taking into account such issues as safety, possible food allergies, low costs "and allowing for flexibility." Finished assignments are passed on to the companies and the best entries win prizes and may even be adopted by the companies-all subsidized by the taxpayer-funded school system. At Vancouver's Laurier Annex school, students in Grades 3 and 4 designed two new product lines for the British Columbia restaurant chain White Spot. For several months in 1997, the children worked on developing the concept and packaging for "Zippy" pizza burgers, a product that is now on the kids' menu at White Spot. The following year, they designed an entire concept for birthday parties to be held at the chain. The students' corporate presentation included "sample commercials, menu items, party games invented by the students and cake ideas," taking into account such issues as safety, possible food allergies, low costs "and allowing for flexibility."13 According to nine-year-old Jeffrey Ye, "It was a lot of work." According to nine-year-old Jeffrey Ye, "It was a lot of work."14 Perhaps the most infamous of these experiments occurred in 1998, when Coca-Cola ran a competition asking several schools to come up with a strategy for distributing Coke coupons to students. The school that devised the best promotional strategy would win $500. Greenbriar High School in Evans, Georgia, took the contest extremely seriously, calling an official Coke Day in late March during which all students came to school in Coca-Cola T-shirts, posed for a photograph in a formation spelling Coke, attended lectures given by Coca-Cola executives and learned about all things black and bubbly in their classes. It was a little piece of branding heaven until it came to the principal's attention that in an act of hideous defiance, one Mike Cameron, a nineteen-year-old senior, had come to school wearing a T-shirt with a Pepsi logo. He was promptly suspended for the offense. "I know it sounds bad-'Child suspended for wearing Pepsi shirt on Coke Day,'" said principal Gloria Hamilton. "It really would have been acceptable...if it had just been in-house, but we had the regional president here and people flew in from Atlanta to do us the honor of being resource speakers. These students knew we had guests."15
Though all public institutions are starved for new sources of income, most schools and universities do try to set limits. When York University's Atkinson College sent out a call to donors in 1997 stating that "for a gift of $10,000...you or your corporation can become the official sponsor for the development and design of one of our new multimedia, high-tech courses," the college insisted that only the courses' names were for sale-not their content. Roger Trull, who brokers deals with corporations at Ontario's McMaster University, explains where he draws the line: "They have to be things that don't impact on academics," meaning only extracurricular sponsorship. Besides, many point out that before lunchrooms and letter-man sweaters went brand-name, schools weren't exactly corporate-free turf. Advertising historian Stuart Ewen writes that as early as the 1920s, teaching kids to consume was seen as just another way of promoting patriotism and economic well-being. Back then, toothbrush companies visited American schools to conduct "toothpaste drills" and cocoa producers made cameos in science class to demonstrate "the various stages in the production of cocoa."16 And in more recent history, commercialism had already become a major part of campus life before the brands even arrived. For instance, U.S. college sports is a big business in its own right with sales of merchandise generating $2.75 billion in 1997, a higher figure than the merchandising sales of the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League. And well before the fast-food invasion, many cafeterias had already been contracted out to companies like Marriott and Cara, which also specialize in providing airlines and hospitals with institutional glop.
For these catering giants, however, faceless and generic was their calling card-the very antithesis of branding. When the prima-donna brands arrived on campus, they brought their preening and posturing values with them, introducing to schools new concepts like corporate image control, logo visibility, brand-extension opportunities and the fierce protection of trade secrets. And this collision of the dictates of academia with the dictates of branding often proves uncomfortable. At the University of British Columbia, for instance, students have been unable to find out what is in the text of an agreement between their school and the Coca-Cola Company. Despite the fact that UBC is a publicly funded institution, the soft-drink company demanded that the amount it paid for the vending rights be kept secret for reasons of corporate competitiveness. (Coca-Cola also refused to cooperate with requests for information for this book, claiming that all of its campus activities-including the precise number of campuses with which it has agreements-are confidential "for competitive purposes.") In May 1996, students and faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison did find out what was in the text of a sponsorship deal their administration was about to sign with Reebok-and they didn't like what they discovered. The deal contained a "non-disparagement" clause that prohibited members of the university community from criticizing the athletic gear company. The clause stated: "During and for a reasonable time after the term, the University will not issue any official statement that disparages Reebok. Additionally, the University will promptly take all reasonable steps necessary to address any remark by any University employee, agent or representative, including a Coach, that disparages Reebok, Reebok's products or the advertising agency or others connected with Reebok."17 Reebok agreed to nix the demand after students and faculty members launched an educational campaign about the company's patchy record on labor rights in Southeast Asia. What was exceptional about the Wisconsin clause is that the university community found out about it before the deal was signed. This has not been the case at other universities where athletic departments have quietly entered into multimillion-dollar deals that contained similar gag orders. The University of Kentucky's deal with Nike, for instance, has a clause that states that the company has the right to terminate the five-year $25 million contract if the "University disparages the Nike brand...or takes any other action inconsistent with the endorsement of Nike products." Reebok agreed to nix the demand after students and faculty members launched an educational campaign about the company's patchy record on labor rights in Southeast Asia. What was exceptional about the Wisconsin clause is that the university community found out about it before the deal was signed. This has not been the case at other universities where athletic departments have quietly entered into multimillion-dollar deals that contained similar gag orders. The University of Kentucky's deal with Nike, for instance, has a clause that states that the company has the right to terminate the five-year $25 million contract if the "University disparages the Nike brand...or takes any other action inconsistent with the endorsement of Nike products."18 Nike denies that its motivation is to stifle campus critics. Nike denies that its motivation is to stifle campus critics.19 Regardless of the intentions when the deals are inked, the fact is that campus expression is often stifled when it conflicts with the interests of a corporate sponsor. For example, at Kent State University-one of the U.S. campuses at which Coca-Cola has exclusive vending rights-members of the Amnesty International chapter advocated a boycott of the soft drink because Coca-Cola did business with the since-ousted Nigerian dictatorship. In April 1998, the activists made a routine application to their student council for funding to bring in a human-rights speaker from the Free Nigeria Movement. "Is he going to speak negatively about Coca-Cola?" a council member asked. "Because Coca-Cola does a lot of positive things on our campus like helping organizations and sports." The representatives from Amnesty replied that the speaker would indeed have some negative comments to make about the company's involvement in Nigeria and funding for the event was denied.20 On some university campuses, protests critical of a corporate sponsor have been effectively blocked. In August 1996, Tennis Canada hosted the DuMaurier Tennis Open Tournament, sponsored by Imperial Tobacco, at York University. Concerned that neither a university nor a sporting event should be seen to be endorsing tobacco products, an anti-smoking group, the Grim Reaper Society, asked York for permission to pass out pamphlets to students and tournament goers near the university stadium. Susan Mann, the president of York University, refused the request, saying the school did not "normally" allow "interest groups" on campus "unless for University purposes." Activists handed out cards and leaflets to motorists at a traffic light just outside the entrance to York and, on the last day of the tournament, they staged a clever culture-jam: the leaflets they handed out were shaped like fans. Clearly amused, many of the tournament goers brought their fans inside the tennis stadium, cooling themselves off with anti-tobacco slogans. After a few hours, police officers hired by the tournament approached the peaceful, off-site protest and, citing traffic problems, ticketed two of the activists and seized all the remaining fans.
These are extreme examples of how corporate sponsorship deals re-engineer some of the fundamental values of public universities, including financial transparency and the right to open debate and peaceful protest on campus. But the subtle effects are equally disturbing. Many professors speak of the slow encroachment of the mall mentality, arguing that the more campuses act and look like malls, the more students behave like consumers. They tell stories of students filling out their course-evaluation forms with all the smug self-righteousness of a tourist responding to a customer-satisfaction form at a large hotel chain. "Most of all I dislike the attitude of calm consumer expertise that pervades the responses. I'm disturbed by the serene belief that my function-and more important, Freud's, or Shakespeare's, or Blake's-is to divert, entertain, and interest," writes University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson in Harper's Harper's magazine. magazine.21 A professor at Toronto's York University, where there is a full-fledged mall on campus, tells me that his students slip into class slurping grande lattes, chat in the back and slip out. They're cruising, shopping, disengaged. A professor at Toronto's York University, where there is a full-fledged mall on campus, tells me that his students slip into class slurping grande lattes, chat in the back and slip out. They're cruising, shopping, disengaged.
Branding U While brands slowly transform the experience of campus life for undergraduates, another kind of takeover is under way at the institutional research level. All over the world, university campuses are offering their research facilities, and priceless academic credibility, for the brands to use as they please. And in North America today, corporate research partnerships at universities are used for everything: designing new Nike skates, developing more efficient oil extraction techniques for Shell, assessing the Asian market's stability for Disney, testing the consumer demand for higher bandwidth for Bell or measuring the relative merits of a brand-name drug compared with a generic one, to name just a few examples.
Dr. Betty Dong, a medical researcher at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), had the misfortune of taking on that last assignment-testing a brand-name drug with brand-name money. Dong was the director of a study sponsored by the British pharmaceutical company Boots (now called Knoll) and UCSF. The fate of that partnership does much to illuminate precisely how the mandate of universities as sites for public-interest research is often squarely at odds with the interests of branded fact-finding missions.
Dr. Dong's study compared the effectiveness of Boots' thyroid drug, Synthroid, with a generic competitor. The company hoped that the research would prove that its much higher priced drug was better or at least substantially different from the generic one-a claim that, if legitimized by a study from a respected university, would increase Synthroid sales. Instead, Dr. Dong found that the opposite was true. The two drugs were bio-equivalent, a fact that represented a potential saving of $365 million a year for the eight million Americans who were taking the name-brand drug, and a potential loss to Boots of $600 million (the revenue from Synthroid). After the results were reviewed by her peers, Dr. Dong's findings were slated to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Journal of the American Medical Association on January 25, 1995. At the last minute, however, Boots successfully halted publication of the article, pointing to a clause in the partnership contract that gave the company veto rights over the publication of findings. The university, fearing a costly lawsuit, sided with the drug company and the article was yanked. After the whole ordeal was exposed in on January 25, 1995. At the last minute, however, Boots successfully halted publication of the article, pointing to a clause in the partnership contract that gave the company veto rights over the publication of findings. The university, fearing a costly lawsuit, sided with the drug company and the article was yanked. After the whole ordeal was exposed in The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal, Boots backed off and the paper was finally published in April 1997, two years behind schedule.22 "The victim is obvious: the university," wrote Dorothy S. Zinberg, a faculty member at Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs. "Each infringement on its unwritten contract with society to avoid secrecy whenever possible and maintain its independence from government or corporate pressure weakens its integrity." "The victim is obvious: the university," wrote Dorothy S. Zinberg, a faculty member at Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs. "Each infringement on its unwritten contract with society to avoid secrecy whenever possible and maintain its independence from government or corporate pressure weakens its integrity."23 In 1998, a similar case ripped through the University of Toronto and the affiliated Hospital for Sick Children-only this time, the researcher found that the drug being tested might actually be harmful to patients. Dr. Nancy Olivieri, a world-renowned scientist and expert on the blood disorder thalassemia, entered into a research contract with the drug-company giant Apotex. The company wanted Olivieri to test the effectiveness of the drug deferiprone on her young patients suffering from thalassemia major. When Olivieri found evidence that, in some cases, the drug might have life-threatening side effects, she wanted to warn the patients participating in the trial and to alert other doctors in her field. Apotex pulled the plug on the study and threatened to sue Olivieri if she went public, pointing to an overlooked clause in the research contract that gave it the right to suppress findings for one year after the trials ended. Olivieri went ahead and published in The New England Journal of Medicine The New England Journal of Medicine and, once again, the administration of both her university and her hospital failed to defend the sanctity of academic research conducted in the public interest. Adding further insult, in January 1999, they demoted Olivieri from her top-level research position at the hospital. and, once again, the administration of both her university and her hospital failed to defend the sanctity of academic research conducted in the public interest. Adding further insult, in January 1999, they demoted Olivieri from her top-level research position at the hospital.24 (After a long and public battle, the doctor eventually got her job back.) (After a long and public battle, the doctor eventually got her job back.) Perhaps the most chilling of these cases involves an associate professor at Brown University in Rhode Island, who worked as an occupational health physician at the university-affiliated Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island in Pawtucket. Dr. David Kern was commissioned by a local textile factory to investigate two cases of lung disease that he had treated at the hospital. He found six more cases of the disease in the 150-person plant, a startling occurrence since its incidence in the general population is one in 40,000. Like Dr. Dong and Dr. Olivieri, Dr. Kern was set to present a paper on his findings when the textile company threatened to sue, citing a clause in the agreement that prevented the publication of "trade secrets." Once again, the university and the hospital administration sided squarely with the company, forbidding Dr. Kern to publish his findings and shutting down the one-person clinic where he conducted his research.25 The only element out of the ordinary in these three cases of stifled research is that they involved academics with the personal integrity and the dogged tenacity to publicly challenge their corporate "partners" and their own employers-factors that eventually led to the truth coming out through the press. But relying on crusading individuals to protect the integrity of academic research does not provide a foolproof safeguard in every case. According to a 1994 study conducted on industry research partnerships at U.S. universities, most corporate interference occurs quietly and with no protest. The study found that companies maintained the right to block the publication of findings in 35 percent of cases, while 53 percent of the academics surveyed agreed that "publication can be delayed."26 Kmart's attitude always has been: What did we get from you this year?...Many people at Kmart thought I was employed by Kmart.-J. Patrick Kelly, Kmart Chair of Marketing at Wayne State University, The Chronicle of Higher Education The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 1998 There is also a more insidious level of interference that takes place at universities every day, interference that occurs before research even begins, prior, even, to proposals being committed to paper. As John V. Lombardi, president of the University of Florida at Gainesville, says: "We have taken the great leap forward and said: 'Let's pretend we're a corporation.'"27 What such a leap means back on the ground is that studies are designed to fit the mandate of corporate-endowed research chairs with such grand names as the Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of Hotel and Restaurant Administration at Washington State University, the Yahoo! Chair of Information-Systems Technology at Stanford University and the Lego Professorship of Learning Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. J. Patrick Kelly, the professor who holds the Kmart Chair of Marketing at Wayne State, estimates that his research has saved Kmart "many more times" the amount of the $2 million donation that created his position. What such a leap means back on the ground is that studies are designed to fit the mandate of corporate-endowed research chairs with such grand names as the Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of Hotel and Restaurant Administration at Washington State University, the Yahoo! Chair of Information-Systems Technology at Stanford University and the Lego Professorship of Learning Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. J. Patrick Kelly, the professor who holds the Kmart Chair of Marketing at Wayne State, estimates that his research has saved Kmart "many more times" the amount of the $2 million donation that created his position.28 The professor who holds the Kmart-endowed chair at West Virginia University, meanwhile, has such a hands-on relationship with the retailer that he or she is required by contract to spend a minimum of thirty days a year training assistant managers. The professor who holds the Kmart-endowed chair at West Virginia University, meanwhile, has such a hands-on relationship with the retailer that he or she is required by contract to spend a minimum of thirty days a year training assistant managers.
Where Was the Opposition?
Many people, upon learning of the advanced stage of branded education, want to know where the university faculty, teachers, school boards and parents were while this transformation was taking place. At the elementary and high-school level, this is a difficult question to answer-particularly since one is hard-pressed to find anyone but the advertisers who is actively in favor in favor of allowing ads into schools. Over the course of the decade, all the large teachers' unions in North America have been quite vocal about the threat to independent instruction posed by commercialization, and many concerned parents have formed groups like Ralph Nader's Commercial Alert to make their opposition heard. Despite this, however, there was never one big issue on which parents and educators could band together to fight-and possibly win-a major policy battle on classroom commercialization. of allowing ads into schools. Over the course of the decade, all the large teachers' unions in North America have been quite vocal about the threat to independent instruction posed by commercialization, and many concerned parents have formed groups like Ralph Nader's Commercial Alert to make their opposition heard. Despite this, however, there was never one big issue on which parents and educators could band together to fight-and possibly win-a major policy battle on classroom commercialization.
Unlike the very public standoffs over prayer in schools or over explicit sex education, the move to allow advertisements did not take the form of one sweeping decision but, rather, of thousands of little ones. Usually these were made on an ad hoc, school-by-school basis, frequently with no debate, no notice, no public scrutiny at all, because advertising agencies were careful to fashion school promotions that could slip between the cracks of standard school-board regulations.
However, when Channel One and the Youth News Network wanted to bring ads directly into classrooms, there was was some debate: genuine, heated discussions took place at the school-board level, and most boards across Canada decided to block YNN. Channel One, though far more successful, particularly in poorer districts, has also had to swallow its share of board refusals. some debate: genuine, heated discussions took place at the school-board level, and most boards across Canada decided to block YNN. Channel One, though far more successful, particularly in poorer districts, has also had to swallow its share of board refusals.
There is, however, another, more ingrained cultural factor that has helped the brands get inside the schools, and it has to do with the effectiveness of branding itself. Many parents and educators could not see anything to be gained by resistance; kids today are so bombarded by brand names that it seemed as if protecting educational spaces from commercialization was less important than the immediate benefits of finding new funding sources. And the hawkers of in-school advertising have not been at all shy about playing upon this sense of futility among parents and educators. As Frank Vigil, president of ZapMe! computer systems, says: "America's youth is exposed to advertising in many aspects of their lives. We believe students are savvy enough to discern between educational content and marketing materials."29 Thus it became possible for many parents and teachers to rationalize their failure to protect yet another previously public space by telling themselves that what ads students don't see in class or on campus, they will certainly catch on the subway, on the Net or on TV when they get home. What's one more ad in the life of these marked-up and marked-down kids? And then again...what's another? Thus it became possible for many parents and teachers to rationalize their failure to protect yet another previously public space by telling themselves that what ads students don't see in class or on campus, they will certainly catch on the subway, on the Net or on TV when they get home. What's one more ad in the life of these marked-up and marked-down kids? And then again...what's another?
But while this may explain the brands' inroads in high schools, it still doesn't explain how this process has been able to take such a firm hold on the university campuses. Why have university professors remained silent, passively allowing their corporate "partners" to trample the principles of freedom of inquiry and discourse that have been the avowed centerpieces of academic life? More to the point, aren't our campuses supposed to be overflowing with troublemaking tenured radicals? Isn't the institution of tenure, with its lifelong promise of job security, designed to make it safe for academics to take controversial positions without fear of repercussion? Aren't these people, to borrow a term more readily understood in the halls of academe, counter-hegemonic counter-hegemonic?
As Janice Newson, a York University sociology professor who has published widely on this issue, has noted: "On the surface, it is easier to account for the increasing realization of the corporate-linked university than it is to account for the lack of resistance to it." Newson, who has been sounding the alarm on the corporate threat to academic freedom for more than a decade, writes that she had (wrongly) assumed that members of the academic community would become actively concerned about, if not resistant to, this shift in direction. After all, a significant if not transformative pattern of institutional change has occurred over a relatively short period of time. And in many ways, these changes sharply contrast to both the idea and the practices of the university that preceded them, the university in which most current members of the academy began their careers.30 Newson's critique could well be expanded to include student activists, who until the mid-nineties were also mysteriously absent from the corporatization non-debate. Sadly, part of the explanation for the lack of campus mobilization is simple self-interest. Until the mid-nineties, the growing corporate influence in education and research seemed to be taking place almost exclusively in the engineering departments, management schools and science labs. Campus radicals had always been prone to dismiss these faculties as hopelessly compromised right-wing bastions: who cared what was happening on that side of campus, so long as the more traditionally progressive fields (literature, cultural studies, political science, history and fine arts) were left alone? And as long as professors and students in the arts and humanities remained indifferent to this radical shift in campus culture and priorities, they were free to pursue other interests-and there were many on offer. For instance, more than a few of those tenured radicals who were supposed to be corrupting young minds with socialist ideas were preoccupied with their own postmodernist realization that truth itself is a construct. This realization made it intellectually untenable for many academics to even participate in a political argument that would have "privileged" any one model of learning (public) over another (corporate). And since truth is relative, who is to say that Plato's dialogues are any more of an "authority" than Fox's Anastasia? Anastasia?
This academic trend only accounts for a few of the missing-in-actions, however. Many other campus radicals were still up for a good old political fight, but during the key years of the corporate campus invasion they were tied up in a different battle: the all-consuming gender and race debates of the so-called political correctness wars. As we will see in the next chapter, if the students allowed themselves to be turned into test markets, it was partly because they had other things on their minds. They were busy taking on their professors on the merits of the canon and the need for more stringent campus sexual-harassment policies. And if their professors failed to prevent the very principles of unfettered academic discourse from being traded in for a quick buck, this may also have been because they were too preoccupied with defending themselves against their own "McCarthyite" students. So there they all were, fighting about women's studies and the latest backlash book while their campuses were being sold out from under their feet. It wasn't until the politics of personal representation were themselves co-opted by branding that students and professors alike began to turn away from their quarrels with each other, realizing they had a more powerful foe.
But by then, much had already been lost. More fundamentally than somewhat antiquated notions of "pure" education and research, what is lost as schools "pretend they are corporations" (to borrow a phrase from the University of Florida) is the very idea of unbranded space. In many ways, schools and universities remain our culture's most tangible embodiment of public space and collective responsibility. University campuses in particular-with their residences, libraries, green spaces and common standards for open and respectful discourse-play a crucial, if now largely symbolic, role: they are the one place left where young people can see a genuine public life being lived. And however imperfectly we may have protected these institutions in the past, at this point in our history the argument against transforming education into a brand-extension exercise is much the same as the one for national parks and nature reserves: these quasi-sacred spaces remind us that unbranded space is still possible.
Scene from a "die-in" at a 1990 Act-Up rally. Diesel 1995 print campaign showing two sailors kissing.
Chapter Five.
Patriarchy Gets Funky The Triumph of Identity Marketing Let's face it, when you're a story line on Friends, Friends, it's hard to keep thinking you're radical it's hard to keep thinking you're radical.
-Jay Blotcher, AIDS activist, New York New York magazine, September 1996 magazine, September 1996 As an undergraduate in the late eighties and early nineties, I was one of those students who took a while to wake up to the slow branding of university life. And I can say from personal experience that it's not that we didn't notice the growing corporate presence on campus-we even complained about it sometimes. It's just that we couldn't get particularly worked up about it. We knew the fast-food chains were setting up their stalls in the library and that profs in the applied sciences were getting awfully cozy with pharmaceutical companies, but finding out exactly what was going on in the boardrooms and labs would have required a lot of legwork, and, frankly, we were busy. We were fighting about whether Jews would be allowed in the racial equality caucus at the campus women's center, and why the meeting to discuss it was scheduled at the same time as the lesbian and gay caucus-were the organizers implying that there were no Jewish lesbians? No black bisexuals?
In the outside world, the politics of race, gender and sexuality remained tied to more concrete, pressing issues, like pay equity, same-sex spousal rights and police violence, and these serious movements were-and continue to be-a genuine threat to the economic and social order. But somehow, they didn't seem terribly glamorous to students on many university campuses, for whom identity politics had evolved by the late eighties into something quite different. Many of the battles we fought were over issues of "representation"-a loosely defined set of grievances mostly lodged against the media, the curriculum and the English language. From campus feminists arguing over "representation" of women on the reading lists to gays wanting better "representation" on television, to rap stars bragging about "representing" the ghettos, to the question that ends in a riot in Spike Lee's 1989 film Do the Right Thing- Do the Right Thing-"Why are there no brothers on the wall?"-ours was a politics of mirrors and metaphors.
These issues have always been on the political agendas of both the civil-rights and the women's movements, and later, of the fight against AIDS. It was accepted from the start that part of what held back women and ethnic minorities was the absence of visible role models occupying powerful social positions, and that media-perpetuated stereotypes-embedded in the very fabric of the language-served to not so subtly reinforce the supremacy of white men. For real progress to take place, imaginations on both sides had to be decolonized.
But by the time my generation inherited these ideas, often two or three times removed, representation was no longer one tool among many, it was the key. In the absence of a clear legal or political strategy, we traced back almost all of society's problems to the media and the curriculum, either through their perpetuation of negative stereotypes or simply by omission. Asians and lesbians were made to feel "invisible," gays were stereotyped as deviants, blacks as criminals and women as weak and inferior: a self-fulfilling prophecy responsible for almost all real-world inequalities. And so our battlefields were sitcoms with gay neighbors who never got laid, newspapers filled with pictures of old white men, magazines that advanced what author Naomi Wolf termed "the beauty myth," reading lists that we expected to look like Benetton ads, Benetton ads that trivialized our reading-list demands. So outraged were we media children by the narrow and oppressive portrayals in magazines, in books and on television that we convinced ourselves that if the typecast images and loaded language changed, so too would the reality. We thought we would find salvation in the reformation of MTV, CNN and Calvin Klein. And why not? Since media seemed to be the source of so many of our problems, surely if we could only "subvert" them to better represent us, they could save us instead. With better collective mirrors, self-esteem would rise and prejudices would magically fall away, as society became suddenly inspired to live up to the beautiful and worthy reflection we had retouched in its image.
For a generation that grew up mediated, transforming the world through pop culture was second nature. The problem was that these fixations began to transform us in the process. Over time, campus identity politics became so consumed by personal politics that they all but eclipsed the rest of the world. The slogan "the personal is political" came to replace the economic as political and, in the end, the Political as political as well. The more importance we placed on representation issues, the more central a role they seemed to elbow for themselves in our lives-perhaps because, in the absence of more tangible political goals, any movement that is about fighting for better social mirrors is going to eventually fall victim to its own narcissism.
Soon "outing" wasn't about AIDS, but became a blanket demand for gay and lesbian "visibility"-all gays should be out, not just right-wing politicians but celebrities as well. By 1991, the radical group Queer Nation had broadened its media critique: it didn't just object to portrayals of homicidal madmen with AIDS, but any non-straight killer at all. The group's San Francisco and L.A. chapters held protests against The Silence of the Lambs The Silence of the Lambs, objecting to its transvestite serial-killer villain, and they disrupted filming on Basic Instinct Basic Instinct because it featured ice-pick-wielding killer lesbians. GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) had moved from lobbying the news media about its use of terms like "gay plague" to describe AIDS, and had begun actively pushing the networks for more gay and lesbian characters in TV shows. In 1993, Torie Osborn, a prominent U.S. lesbian rights activist, said that the single biggest political issue facing her constituency was not same-sex spousal benefits, the right to join the military or even the right of two women to marry and adopt children. It was, she told a reporter, "Invisibility. Period. End of sentence." because it featured ice-pick-wielding killer lesbians. GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) had moved from lobbying the news media about its use of terms like "gay plague" to describe AIDS, and had begun actively pushing the networks for more gay and lesbian characters in TV shows. In 1993, Torie Osborn, a prominent U.S. lesbian rights activist, said that the single biggest political issue facing her constituency was not same-sex spousal benefits, the right to join the military or even the right of two women to marry and adopt children. It was, she told a reporter, "Invisibility. Period. End of sentence."1 Much like a previous generation of anti-porn feminists who held their rallies outside peep shows, many of the political demonstrations of the early nineties had shifted from the steps of government buildings and courthouses to the steps of museums with African art exhibits that were deemed to celebrate the colonial mindset. They massed at the theater entrances showing megamusicals like Showboat Showboat and and Miss Saigon Miss Saigon, and they even crept right up to the edge of the red carpet at the 1992 Academy Awards.
These struggles may seem slight in retrospect, but you can hardly blame us media narcissists for believing that we were engaged in a crucial battle on behalf of oppressed people everywhere: every step we took sparked a new wave of apocalyptic panic from our conservative foes. If we were not revolutionaries, why, then, were our opponents saying that a revolution was under way, that we were in the midst of a "culture war"? "The transformation of American campuses is so sweeping that it is no exaggeration to call it a revolution," Dinesh D'Souza, author of Illiberal Education Illiberal Education, informed his readers. "Its distinctive insignia can be witnessed on any major campus in America today, and in all aspects of university life."2 Despite their claims of living under Stalinist regimes where dissent was not tolerated, our professors and administrators put up an impressively vociferous counteroffensive: they fought tooth and nail for the right to offend us thin-skinned radicals; they lay down on the tracks in front of every new harassment policy, and generally acted as if they were fighting for the very future of Western civilization. An avalanche of look-alike magazine features bolstered the claim that ID politics constituted an international emergency: "Illiberal Education" (Atlantic Monthly), "Visigoths in Tweed" (Fortune), "The Silences" (Maclean's), "The Academy's New Ayatollahs" (Outlook), "Taking Offense" (Newsweek). In New York New York magazine, writer John Taylor compared my generation of campus activists with cult members, Hitler Youth and Christian fundamentalists. magazine, writer John Taylor compared my generation of campus activists with cult members, Hitler Youth and Christian fundamentalists.3 So great was the threat we allegedly posed that George Bush even took time out to warn the world that political correctness "replaces old prejudices with new ones." So great was the threat we allegedly posed that George Bush even took time out to warn the world that political correctness "replaces old prejudices with new ones."
The Marketing of ID The backlash that identity politics inspired did a pretty good job of masking for us the fact that many of our demands for better representation were quickly accommodated by marketers, media makers and pop-culture producers alike-though perhaps not for the reasons we had hoped. If I had to name a precise moment for this shift in attitude, I would say August of 1992: the thick of the "brand crisis" that peaked with Marlboro Friday. That's when we found out that our sworn enemies in the "mainstream"-to us a giant monolithic blob outside of our known university-affiliated enclaves-didn't fear and loathe us but actually thought we were sort of interesting. Once we'd embarked on a search for new wells of cutting-edge imagery, our insistence on extreme sexual and racial identities made for great brand-content and niche-marketing strategies. If diversity is what we wanted, the brands seemed to be saying, then diversity was exactly what we would get. And with that, the marketers and media makers swooped down, airbrushes in hand, to touch up the colors and images in our culture.
The five years that followed were an orgy of red ribbons, Malcolm X baseball hats and Silence = Death T-shirts. By 1993, the stories of academic Armageddon were replaced with new ones about the sexy wave of "Do-Me Feminism" in Esquire Esquire and "Lesbian Chic" in and "Lesbian Chic" in New York New York and and Newsweek Newsweek. The shift in attitude was not the result of a mass political conversion but of some hard economic calculations. According to Rocking the Ages Rocking the Ages, a book produced in 1997 by leading U.S. consumer researchers Yankelovich Partners, "Diversity" was the "defining idea" for Gen-Xers, as opposed to "Individuality" for boomers and "Duty" for their parents.
Xers are starting out today with pluralistic attitudes that are the strongest we have ever measured. As we look towards the next twenty five years, it is clear that acceptance of alternative lifestyles will become even stronger and more widespread as Xers grow up and take over the reins of power, and become the dominant buying group in the consumer marketplace....Diversity is the key fact of life for Xers, the core of the perspective they bring to the marketplace. Diversity in all of its forms-cultural, political, sexual, racial, social-is a hallmark of this generation [italics theirs]...4 The Sputnik cool-hunting agency, meanwhile, explained that "youth today are one big sample of diversity" and encouraged its clients to dive into the psychedelic "United Streets of Diversity" and not be afraid to taste the local fare. Dee Dee Gordon, author of The L. Report The L. Report, urged her clients to get into Girl Power with a vengeance: "Teenage girls want to see someone who kicks butt back"5 and, sounding suspiciously like me and my university friends, brand man Tom Peters took to berating his corporate audiences for being "OWMs-Old White Males." and, sounding suspiciously like me and my university friends, brand man Tom Peters took to berating his corporate audiences for being "OWMs-Old White Males."
As we have seen, this information was coming hot on the heels of two other related revelations. The first was that consumer companies would only survive if they built corporate empires around "brand identities." The second was that the ballooning youth demographic held the key to market success. So, of course, if the market researchers and cool hunters all reported that diversity was the key character trait of this lucrative demographic, there was only one thing to be done: every forward-thinking corporation would have to adopt variations on the theme of diversity as their brand identities.
Which is exactly what most brand-driven corporations have attempted to do. In an effort to understand how Starbucks became an overnight household name in 1996 without a single national ad campaign, Advertising Age Advertising Age speculated that it had something to do with its tie-dyed, Third World aura. "For devotees, Starbucks' 'experience' is about more than a daily espresso infusion; it is about immersion in a politically correct, cultured refuge...." speculated that it had something to do with its tie-dyed, Third World aura. "For devotees, Starbucks' 'experience' is about more than a daily espresso infusion; it is about immersion in a politically correct, cultured refuge...."6 Starbucks, however, was only a minor player in the P.C. marketing craze. Abercrombie & Fitch ads featured guys in their underwear making goo-goo eyes at each other; Diesel went further, showing two sailors kissing (see Starbucks, however, was only a minor player in the P.C. marketing craze. Abercrombie & Fitch ads featured guys in their underwear making goo-goo eyes at each other; Diesel went further, showing two sailors kissing (see image image); and a U.S. television spot for Virgin Cola depicted "the first-ever gay wedding featured in a commercial," as the press release proudly announced. There were also gay-targeted brands like Pride Beer and Wave Water, whose slogan is "We label bottles not people," and the gay community got its very own cool hunters-market researchers who scoured gay bars with hidden cameras.7 The Gap, meanwhile, filled its ads with racially mixed rainbows of skinny, childlike models. Diesel harnessed frustration at that unattainable beauty ideal with ironic ads that showed women being served up for dinner to a table of pigs. The Body Shop harnessed the backlash against both of them by refusing to advertise and instead filled its windows with red ribbons and posters condemning violence against women. The rush to diversity fitted in neatly with the embrace of African-American style and heroes that companies like Nike and Tommy Hilfiger had already pinpointed as a powerful marketing source. But Nike also realized that people who saw themselves as belonging to oppressed groups were ready-made market niches: throw a few liberal platitudes their way and, presto, you're not just a product but an ally in the struggle. So the walls of Nike Town were adorned with quotes from Tiger Woods declaring that "there are still courses in the U.S. where I am not allowed to play, because of the color of my skin." Women in Nike ads told us that "I believe 'babe' is a four-letter word" and "I believe high heels are a conspiracy against women."
And everyone, it seemed, was toying with the fluidity of gender, from the old-hat story of MAC makeup using drag queen RuPaul as its spokesmodel to tequila ads that inform viewers that the she in the bikini is really a he; from Calvin Klein's colognes that tell us that gender itself is a construct to Sure Ultra Dry deodorant that in turn urges all the gender benders to chill out: "Man? Woman? Does it matter?"
Oppression Nostalgia Fierce debates still rage about these campaigns. Are they entirely cynical or do they indicate that advertisers want to evolve and play more positive social roles? Benetton's mid-nineties ads careered wildly between witty and beautiful challenges to racial stereotypes on the one hand, and grotesque commercial exploitation of human suffering on the other. They were, however, indisputably part of a genuine attempt to use the company's vast cultural real estate to send a message that went beyond "Buy more sweaters" and they played a central role in the fashion world's embrace of the struggle against AIDS. Similarly, there is no denying that the Body Shop broke ground by proving to the corporate sector that a multinational chain can be an outspoken and controversial political player, even while making millions on bubble bath and body lotion. The complicated motivations and stark inconsistencies inside many of these "ethical" businesses will be explored in greater depth in a later chapter. But for many of the activists who had, at one point not so long ago, believed that better media representation would make for a more just world, one thing had become abundantly clear: identity politics weren't fighting the system, or even subverting it. When it came to the vast new industry of corporate branding, they were feeding it.
The crowning of sexual and racial diversity as the new superstars of advertising and pop culture has understandably created a sort of Identity Identity Crisis. Some ex-ID warriors are even getting nostalgic about the good old days, when they were oppressed, yes, but the symbols of their radicalism weren't for sale at Wal-Mart. As music writer Ann Powers observed of the much-vaunted ascendancy of Girl Power, "at this intersection between the conventional feminine and the evolving Girl, what's springing up is not a revolution but a mall...Thus, a genuine movement devolves into a giant shopping spree, where girls are encouraged to purchase whatever identity fits them best off the rack."8 Similarly, Daniel Mendelsohn has written that gay identity has dwindled into "basically, a set of product choices.... At least culturally speaking, oppression may have been the best thing that could have happened to gay culture. Without it, we're nothing." Similarly, Daniel Mendelsohn has written that gay identity has dwindled into "basically, a set of product choices.... At least culturally speaking, oppression may have been the best thing that could have happened to gay culture. Without it, we're nothing."
The nostalgia, of course, is absurd. Even the most cynical ID warrior will admit, when pressed, that having Ellen Degeneres and other gay characters out on TV has some concrete advantages. Probably it is good for the kids, particularly those who live outside of larger urban settings-in rural or small-town environments, where being gay is more likely to confine them to a life of self-loathing. (The attempted suicide rate in 1998 among gay and bisexual male teens in America was 28.1 percent, compared with 4.2 percent among straight males of the same age group.)9 Similarly, most feminists would concede that although the Spice Girls' crooning, "If you wanna be my lover, you have to get with my friends" isn't likely to shatter the beauty myth, it's still a step up from Snoop Dogg's 1993 ode to gang rape, "It ain't no fun if my homies can't have none." Similarly, most feminists would concede that although the Spice Girls' crooning, "If you wanna be my lover, you have to get with my friends" isn't likely to shatter the beauty myth, it's still a step up from Snoop Dogg's 1993 ode to gang rape, "It ain't no fun if my homies can't have none."
And yet, while raising teenagers' self-esteem and making sure they have positive role models is valuable, it's a fairly narrow achievement, and from an activist perspective, one can't help asking, Is this it? Did all our protests and supposedly subversive theory only serve to provide great content for the culture industries, fresh new lifestyle imagery for Levi's new "What's True" ad campaign and girl-power-charged record sales for the music business? Why, in other words, were our ideas about political rebellion so deeply non-threatening to the smooth flow of business as usual?
The question, of course, is not Why, but Why on earth not? Just as they had embraced the "brands, not products" equation, the smart businesses quickly realized that short-term discomfort-whether it came from a requirement to hire more women or to more carefully vet the language in an ad campaign-was a small price to pay for the tremendous market share that diversity promised. So while it may be true that real gains have emerged from this process, it is also true that Dennis Rodman wears dresses and Disney World celebrates Gay Day less because of political progress than financial expediency. The market has seized upon multiculturalism and gender-bending in the same ways that it has seized upon youth culture in general-not just as a market niche but as a source of new carnivalesque imagery. As Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson note, "White-bread culture will simply no longer do."10 The $200 billion culture industry-now America's biggest export-needs an ever-changing, uninterrupted supply of street styles, edgy music videos and rainbows of colors. And the radical critics of the media clamoring to be "represented" in the early nineties virtually handed over their colorful identities to the brandmasters to be shrink-wrapped. The $200 billion culture industry-now America's biggest export-needs an ever-changing, uninterrupted supply of street styles, edgy music videos and rainbows of colors. And the radical critics of the media clamoring to be "represented" in the early nineties virtually handed over their colorful identities to the brandmasters to be shrink-wrapped.
The need for greater diversity-the rallying cry of my university years-is now not only accepted by the culture industries, it is the mantra of global capital. And identity politics, as they were practiced in the nineties, weren't a threat, they were a gold mine. "This revolution," writes cultural critic Richard Goldstein in The Village Voice The Village Voice, "turned out to be the savior of late capitalism."11 And just in time, too. And just in time, too.
Market Masala: Diversity and the Global Sales Pitch About the same time that my friends and I were battling for better cultural representation, the advertising agencies, broadcasters and global brands were preoccupied with some significant problems of their own. Thanks to freer trade and other forms of accelerated deregulation, the global marketplace was finally becoming a reality, but new, urgent questions were being asked: What is the best way to sell identical products across multiple borders? What voice should advertisers use to address the whole world at once? How can one company accommodate cultural differences while still remaining internally coherent?
For certain corporations, until recently, the answer was simple: force the world to speak your your language and absorb language and absorb your your culture. In 1983, when global reach was still a fantasy for all but a handful of corporations, Harvard business professor Theodore Levitt published the essay "The Globalization of Markets," in which he argued that any corporation that was willing to bow to some local habit or taste was an unmitigated failure. "The world's needs and desires have been irrevocably homogenized," he wrote in what instantly became the manifesto of global marketing. Levitt made a stark distinction between weak culture. In 1983, when global reach was still a fantasy for all but a handful of corporations, Harvard business professor Theodore Levitt published the essay "The Globalization of Markets," in which he argued that any corporation that was willing to bow to some local habit or taste was an unmitigated failure. "The world's needs and desires have been irrevocably homogenized," he wrote in what instantly became the manifesto of global marketing. Levitt made a stark distinction between weak multinational multinational corporations, which change depending on which country they are operating in, and swaggering corporations, which change depending on which country they are operating in, and swaggering global global corporations, which are, by their very definition, always the same, wherever they roam. "The multinational corporation operates in a number of countries, and adjusts its products and practices to each-at high relative costs. The global corporation operates with resolute constancy-at low relative cost-as if the entire world (or major regions of it) were a single entity; it sells the same things in the same way everywhere.... Ancient differences in national tastes or modes of doing business disappear." corporations, which are, by their very definition, always the same, wherever they roam. "The multinational corporation operates in a number of countries, and adjusts its products and practices to each-at high relative costs. The global corporation operates with resolute constancy-at low relative cost-as if the entire world (or major regions of it) were a single entity; it sells the same things in the same way everywhere.... Ancient differences in national tastes or modes of doing business disappear."12 Levitt's "global" corporations were, of course, American corporations and the "homogenized" image they promoted were the images of America: blond, blue-eyed kids eating Kellogg's cereal on Japanese TV; the Marlboro Man bringing U.S. cattle country to African villages; and Coke and McDonald's selling the entire world on the taste of the U.S.A. As globalization ceased to be a somewhat kooky dream and became a reality, these cowboy-marketing antics began to step on a few toes. The twentieth century's familiar bogeyman-"American cultural imperialism"-has, in more recent years, incited cries of "cultural Chernobyl" in France, prompted the creation of a "slow-food movement" in Italy and led to the burning of chickens outside the first KFC outlet in India.
Americans in particular have never been known for their cultural sensitivity and so, not surprisingly, the road to Levitt's global marketing is paved with cultural faux pas faux pas. The most serious of these took place after the collapse of European communism, when media moguls fell over one another to take the credit for freedom and democracy the world over-a claim they would pay for later on. "We put MTV into East Germany, and the next day the Berlin Wall fell," Viacom International chairman Sumner Redstone said.13 Ted Turner claimed the credit for CNN and the Goodwill Games. "I said, 'Let's try and undo this. Let's get our young people together, and let's get this cycle together and let's try to get some world peace going and let's end the Cold War.' And, by God, we did it." Ted Turner claimed the credit for CNN and the Goodwill Games. "I said, 'Let's try and undo this. Let's get our young people together, and let's get this cycle together and let's try to get some world peace going and let's end the Cold War.' And, by God, we did it."14 Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, told the world that "satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television." Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, told the world that "satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television."15 This post-Cold War bravado didn't go over too well in countries like China, where standing up to so-called Western values remains a sacrosanct political claim. Consequently, several Western media moguls-now hell-bent on penetrating all of Asia with their satellites-have gone to great lengths to distance themselves from their earlier freedom-fighter rhetoric and now actively collaborate with dictatorships to restrict the flow of information, a situation that I'll get to in more detail in Chapter 8.
It was in this minefield that "diversity" marketing appeared, presenting itself as a cure-all for the pitfalls of global expansion. Rather than creating different advertising campaigns for different markets, campaigns could sell diversity itself, to all markets at once. The formula maintained the one-size-fits-all cost benefits of old-style cowboy cultural imperialism, but ran far fewer risks of offending local sensibilities. Instead of urging the world to taste America, it calls out, like the Skittles slogan, to "Taste the Rainbow." This candy-coated multiculturalism has stepped in as a kinder, gentler packaging for the homogenizing effect of what Indian physicist Vandana Shiva calls "the monoculture"-it is, in effect, mono-multiculturalism.
Today the buzzword in global marketing isn't selling America to the world, but bringing a kind of market masala to everyone in the world. In the late nineties, the pitch is less Marlboro Man, more Ricky Martin: a bilingual mix of North and South, some Latin, some R&B, all couched in global party lyrics. This ethnic-food-court approach creates a One World placelessness, a global mall in which corporations are able to sell a single product in numerous countries without triggering the old cries of "Coca-Colonization."
As culture becomes increasingly homogenized globally, the task of marketing is to stave off the nightmare moment when branded products cease to look like lifestyles or grand ideas and suddenly appear as the ubiquitous goods they really are. In its liquid ethnicity, marketing masala has been introduced as the antidote to this horror of cultural homogeneity. By embodying corporate identities that are radically individualistic and perpetually new, the brands attempt to inoculate themselves against accusations that they are in fact selling sameness.
The Global Teen Of course not everyone is equally amenable to the idea of treating culture and nationality as fashion accessories to be slipped on and off. Those who have fought wars and survived revolutions tend to be more protective of their national traditions. The desolately poor, who constitute one-quarter of the world's population,16 also have a little trouble getting into the global groove, especially since cable TV and most brand-name products are still just a rumor in those parts of the developing world where a total of 1.3 billion people live on US$1 a day or less. also have a little trouble getting into the global groove, especially since cable TV and most brand-name products are still just a rumor in those parts of the developing world where a total of 1.3 billion people live on US$1 a day or less.17 No, it's the young people living in developed and semi-developed countries who are the great global hope. More than anything or anyone else, logo-decorated middle-class teenagers, intent on pouring themselves into a media-fabricated mold, have become globalization's most powerful symbols. No, it's the young people living in developed and semi-developed countries who are the great global hope. More than anything or anyone else, logo-decorated middle-class teenagers, intent on pouring themselves into a media-fabricated mold, have become globalization's most powerful symbols.
This has happened for several reasons. First of all, just as in the U.S. market, there are a lot of them. The world is crawling with teenagers, especially in southern countries, where the UN estimates that 507 million adults will die before they turn forty.18 Two-thirds of Asia's population is under thirty and, thanks to years of bloody warfare, about 50 percent of the population in Vietnam was born after 1975. All in all, the so-called global teen demographic is estimated at one billion, and these teenagers consume a disproportionate share of their families' incomes. In China, for instance, conspicuous consumption for all members of the household remains largely unrealistic. But, argue the market researchers, the Chinese make enormous sacrifices for the young-particularly for young boys-a cultural value that spells great news for cell-phone and sneaker companies. Laurie Klein of Just Kid Inc., a U.S. firm that conducted a consumer study on Chinese teens, found that while Mom, Dad and both grandparents may do without electricity, their only son (thanks to the country's one-child policy) frequently enjoys what is widely known as "little emperor syndrome," or what she calls the "4-2-1" phenomenon: four elders and two parents scrimp and save so the one child can be an MTV clone. "When you have the parents and four grandparents spending on one child, it's a no-brainer to know that this is the right market," says one venture capitalist in China. Two-thirds of Asia's population is under thirty and, thanks to years of bloody warfare, about 50 percent of the population in Vietnam was born after 1975. All in all, the so-called global teen demographic is estimated at one billion, and these teenagers consume a disproportionate share of their families' incomes. In China, for instance, conspicuous consumption for all members of the household remains largely unrealistic. But, argue the market researchers, the Chinese make enormous sacrifices for the young-particularly for young boys-a cultural value that spells great news for cell-phone and sneaker companies. Laurie Klein of Just Kid Inc., a U.S. firm that conducted a consumer study on Chinese teens, found that while Mom, Dad and both grandparents may do without electricity, their only son (thanks to the country's one-child policy) frequently enjoys what is widely known as "little emperor syndrome," or what she calls the "4-2-1" phenomenon: four elders and two parents scrimp and save so the one child can be an MTV clone. "When you have the parents and four grandparents spending on one child, it's a no-brainer to know that this is the right market," says one venture capitalist in China.19 Furthermore, since kids are more culturally absorbent than their campaign parents, they often become their families' dedicated shoppers, even for big household items. Taken together, what this research shows is that while adults may still harbor traditional customs and ways, global teens shed those pesky national hang-ups like last year's fashions. "They prefer Coke to tea, Nikes to sandals, Chicken McNuggets to rice, credit cards to cash," Joseph Quinlan, senior economist at Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. told Furthermore, since kids are more culturally absorbent than their campaign parents, they often become their families' dedicated shoppers, even for big household items. Taken together, what this research shows is that while adults may still harbor traditional customs and ways, global teens shed those pesky national hang-ups like last year's fashions. "They prefer Coke to tea, Nikes to sandals, Chicken McNuggets to rice, credit cards to cash," Joseph Quinlan, senior economist at Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. told The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal.20 The message is clear: get the kids and you've got the whole family and the future market. The message is clear: get the kids and you've got the whole family and the future market.
Diversity. Whatever.-Slogan for a 199899 ad campaign for Eaton's department store, Canada Inflated by rhetoric like this, the image of the global teen floats over the planet like a euphoric corporate hallucination. These kids, we are repeatedly told, live not in a geographic place but in a global consumer loop: hot-linked from their cellular telephones to Internet newsgroups; bonded together by Sony Playstations, MTV videos and NBA games. The most extensive and widely cited study of the global teen demographic was conducted in 1996 by the New York-based ad agency DMB&B's Brain Waves division. The "New World Teen Study" surveyed 27,600 middle-class fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds in forty-five countries and came up with some resoundingly good news for the agency's clients, a list that includes Coca-Cola, Burger King and Philips. "Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps, backpacks, and Sony personal CD players, and head for school."21 Elissa Moses, senior vice president at the advertising agency, called the arrival of the global teen demographic "one of the greatest marketing opportunities of all time." Elissa Moses, senior vice president at the advertising agency, called the arrival of the global teen demographic "one of the greatest marketing opportunities of all time."22 But before the brands are able to sell the same products in the same way all around the world, the teens themselves must identify with their new demographic. For this reason, what most global ad campaigns are still selling most aggressively is the idea idea of the global teen market-a kaleidoscope of multi-ethnic faces blending into one another: Rasta braids, pink hair, henna hand painting, piercing and tattoos, a few national flags, flashes of foreign street signs, Cantonese and Arabic lettering and a sprinkling of English words, all over the layered samplings of electronic music. Nationality, language, ethnicity, religion and politics are all reduced to their most colorful, exotic accessories, converging to assure us, as Diesel president Renzo Rosso does, there is "never an 'us and them,' but simply one giant 'we.'" of the global teen market-a kaleidoscope of multi-ethnic faces blending into one another: Rasta braids, pink hair, henna hand painting, piercing and tattoos, a few national flags, flashes of foreign street signs, Cantonese and Arabic lettering and a sprinkling of English words, all over the layered samplings of electronic music. Nationality, language, ethnicity, religion and politics are all reduced to their most colorful, exotic accessories, converging to assure us, as Diesel president Renzo Rosso does, there is "never an 'us and them,' but simply one giant 'we.'"23 To achieve this state of oneness, global teens must sometimes be pitted against traditional elders who don't appreciate their radical taste in denim. For instance, a TV ad for Diesel jeans shows two Korean teenagers turning into birds after they commit double suicide, finding freedom only in the total surrender to the brand. In these ads, the ultimate product-more than the soft drinks, ice creams, sneakers or jeans-is the global teen, who must exist as a demographic in the minds of young consumers worldwide or the entire exercise of global marketing collapses. For this reason, global youth marketing is a mind-numbingly repetitive affair, drunk on the idea of what it is attempting to engineer: a third notion of nationality-not American, not local, but one that would unite the two, through shopping.
Standing triumphant at the center of the global teen phenomenon is MTV, which, in 1998, was in 273.5 million households worldwide-only 70 million of which were in the U.S. By 1999, MTV's eight global divisions broadcast in 83 countries and territories, fewer than CNN's 212-country reach, but impressive nonetheless. Furthermore, the New World Teen Study found that the single most significant factor contributing to the shared tastes of the middle-class teens it surveyed was TV-in particular, MTV, which 85 percent of them watched every day. Elissa Moses called the station "an all-news bulletin for creating brand-images"24 and a "public-address system to a generation." and a "public-address system to a generation."25 This sort of programming reach has been unprecedented since the 1950s when families gathered around the TV set to watch the Ed Sullivan show. Global teens watch so much MTV per day that the only equivalent shared cultural experience among adults occurs during an outbreak of war when all eyes are focused on the same CNN images. This sort of programming reach has been unprecedented since the 1950s when families gathered around the TV set to watch the Ed Sullivan show. Global teens watch so much MTV per day that the only equivalent shared cultural experience among adults occurs during an outbreak of war when all eyes are focused on the same CNN images.
And the more viewers there are to absorb MTV's vision of a tribe of culture swapping, global teen nomads, the more homogeneous a market its advertisers have in which to sell their products. According to Chip Walker, director of the New World Teen Study, "Teens who watch MTV music videos are much more likely than other teens to wear the teen 'uniform' of jeans, running shoes, and denim jacket...They are also much more likely to own electronics and consume 'teen' items such as candy, sodas, cookies and fast food. They are much more likely to use a wide range of personal-care products too."26 In other words MTV International has become the most compelling global catalog for the modern branded life. In other words MTV International has become the most compelling global catalog for the modern branded life.
In-Fighting While the Global House Burned Down The global economy's embrace of Representation Nation suggests that my generation's campus identity politics boiled down, in the end, to a set of modest political goals that were frequently (and deceptively) cloaked in immodest rhetoric and tactics. This isn't a P.C. mea culpa mea culpa-I'm proud of the small victories we won for better lighting on campus, more women faculty members and a less Eurocentric curriculum (to dig up a much-maligned phrase from my P.C. days). What I question is the battles we North American culture warriors never quite got around to. Poverty wasn't an issue that came up much back then; sure, every once in a while in our crusades against the trio of 'isms, somebody would bring up "classism," and, being out-P.C.-ed, we would dutifully add "classism" to the hit list in question. But our criticism was focused on the representation of women and minorities within the structures of power, not on the economics behind those power structures. "Discrimination against poverty" (our understanding of injustice was generally construed as discrimination against something) couldn't be solved by changing perceptions or language or even, strictly speaking, individual behavior. The basic demands of identity politics assumed an atmosphere of plenty. In the seventies and eighties, that plenty had existed and women and non-whites were able to battle over how the collective pie would be divided: would white men learn to share, or would they keep hogging it? In the representational politics of the New Economy nineties, however, women as well as men, and whites as well as people of color, were now fighting their battles over a single, shrinking piece of pie-and consistently failing to ask what was happening to the rest of it. For us, as students, to address the problems at the roots of "classism" we would have had to face up to core issues of wealth distribution-and, unlike sexism, racism or homophobia, that was not what we used to call "an awareness problem."
So class fell off the agenda, along with all serious economic-let alone corporate-analysis. Certainly there were those in the ID ranks with revolutionary goals. Like the sixties counterculture radicals who thought they were shaking the foundations of Western civilization by dropping acid, there were a handful of professors and students of identity politics who believed that "great blows are being struck against capitalism in the realms of theory," as critic Gayatri Spivak put it.27 And Dinesh D'Souza and his ilk couldn't resist calling the P.C.ers "neo-Marxists"-but in fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. The prospect of having to change a few pronouns and getting a handful of women and minorities on the board and on television posed no real threat to the guiding profit-making principles of Wall Street. "The real guilt of P.C....," wrote SUNY professor of literature Tim Brennan in 1991, "is not its supposed intolerance or rigidity, but that it is not political enough-that it is impersonating political struggle." And Dinesh D'Souza and his ilk couldn't resist calling the P.C.ers "neo-Marxists"-but in fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. The prospect of having to change a few pronouns and getting a handful of women and minorities on the board and on television posed no real threat to the guiding profit-making principles of Wall Street. "The real guilt of P.C....," wrote SUNY professor of literature Tim Brennan in 1991, "is not its supposed intolerance or rigidity, but that it is not political enough-that it is impersonating political struggle."28
That failure has turned out to be immeasurably problematic because the economic trends that have so accelerated in the past decade have all been about massive redistribution and stratification of world resources: of jobs, goods and money. Everyone except those in the very highest tier of the corporate elite is getting less.
And what is striking in retrospect is that in the very years when P.C. politics reached their most self-referential peak, the rest of the world was doing something very different: it was looking outward, and expanding. At the moment when the field of vision among most left-wing progressives was shrinking to include only its immediate surroundings, the horizons of global business were growing to encompass the whole globe. While CEOs dreamed of Big Macs in Russia, Benetton in Shanghai and logos projected on the moon, the political lens for far too many activists and theorists was narrowing so dramatically that with the exception of a brief period during the Gulf War, foreign and economic policy were off the radar screen. In North America, even the fight against free trade was all about protecting Canadian or American workers and resources, not about the possible effects of the trade agreement on Mexico, or the effects other rapid liberalization measures were having in the developing world. When the free-trade debate was lost, the left retreated even further into itself, choosing ever more minute disputes over which to go to the wall. This retreat reflected a broader political paralysis in the face of the daunting abstractions of global capitalism-ironically, the very issues that should have been most pressing for anyone concerned with the future of social justice.
In this new globalized context, the victories of identity politics have amounted to a rearranging of the furniture while the house burned down. Yes, there are more multi-ethnic sitcoms and even more black executives-but whatever cultural enlightenment has followed has not prevented the population in the underclass from exploding or homelessness from reaching crisis levels in many North American urban centers. Sure, women and gays have better role models in the media and pop culture-but the ownership in the culture industries has consolidated so rapidly that, according to William Kennard, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, "There are fewer opportunities of entry by minority groups, community groups, small businesses in general."29 And though girls may indeed rule in North America, they are still sweating in Asia and Latin America, making T-shirts with the "Girls Rule" slogan on them and Nike running shoes that will finally let girls into the game. And though girls may indeed rule in North America, they are still sweating in Asia and Latin America, making T-shirts with the "Girls Rule" slogan on them and Nike running shoes that will finally let girls into the game.
This oversight isn't simply a failure of feminism but a betrayal of the feminist movement's own founding principles. Although the gender politics that I grew up with in the eighties were concerned almost exclusively with having women equally represented in the structures of power, the relationship between gender and class have not always been so casually overlooked. Bread and Roses-the rallying cry of the women's movement-has its origin in a slogan on a banner in the 1912 walkout of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. "What the woman who labors wants," explained historic organizer Rose Schneiderman in a 1912 speech, "is the right to live, not simply exist."30 And March 8, the date of International Women's Day, was selected to mark the anniversary of a 1908 demonstration in which "women garment workers marched through the streets of New York, protesting dreadful working conditions, child labor, 12-hour working days, minuscule pay." And March 8, the date of International Women's Day, was selected to mark the anniversary of a 1908 demonstration in which "women garment workers marched through the streets of New York, protesting dreadful working conditions, child labor, 12-hour working days, minuscule pay."31 The young women who grew up reading The young women who grew up reading The Beauty Myth The Beauty Myth, and who saw eating disorders and low self-esteem as the most harmful by-products of the fashion industry, tended to forget those women when we marched on March 8, if we ever knew about them to begin with.
As we look back, it seems like willful blindness. The abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women's and civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness successfully trained a generation of activists in the politics of image, not action. And if the space invaders marched into our schools and our communities unchallenged, it was at least partly because the political models in vogue at the time of the invasion left many of us ill-equipped to deal with issues that were more about ownership than representation. We were too busy analyzing the pictures being projected on the wall to notice that the wall itself had been sold.
If that remained true until recently, however, it is no longer so. As we will see in Part IV, a radical new political culture is emerging in high schools and on college campuses. Rather than calling attention to the house of mirrors that passes for empirical truth (as the postmodern academics did), and rather than fighting for better mirrors (as the ID warriors did), today's media activists are concentrating on shattering the impenetrable shiny surfaces of branded culture, picking up the pieces and using them as sharp weapons in a war of actions, not images.