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Overview
Race has always been America's first standard and central paradox. From the start, America based its politics on the principle of white supremacy, but it has always lived and dreamed of itself in color. The truth beneath the contradiction has finally emerged and led us to the threshold of a transformation of American identity as profound as slavery was defining.We live in a country where the “King of Pop” was born black and a leading rap M.C. is white, where salsa outsells ketchup and cosmetics firms advertise blond hair dye with black models. Whiteness is in steep decline as the primary measure of Americanness. The new, true American identity rising in its place is transracial, defined by shared cultural and consumer habits, not skin color or ethnicity. And this unprecedented redefinition of what “American” sounds, looks, and feels like is not being driven by the politics of protest or liberal multiculturalism but by a more basic American instinct: the profit motive.
Smart marketers discovered that the inherent, subversive appeal of transracial American culture was the perfect boombox for breaking through the noise of a crowded marketplace: Nike and the NBA used unambiguous black style to create modern sports marketing; Pepsi validated Michael Jackson as a superstar while adding millions to its own bottom line; Hollywood turned a taboo into a lucrative cliché with black-white buddy films; Oprah Winfrey created the model for the ultimate individual corporate brand; and Budweiser created a signature series of commercials built around four ordinary black men signaling something ineffably
American with one word—“Wassup?”
Inthe end, this is a hopeful but clear-eyed argument that while we fall short of true equality, we are opting to carry on that struggle together within a common American cultural skin.
"There's been a radical shift in the place of race and ethnicity in America. Near revolutionary developments in advertising, media, marketing, technology, and global trade have in the last two decades of the twentieth century nearly obliterated walls that have stood for generations between nonwhites and the image of the American dream. The mainstream, heretofore synonymous with what is considered average for whites, is now equally defined by the preferences, presence, and perspectives of people of color. The much-maligned melting pot, into which generations of European-American identities are said to have dissolved, is bubbling again, but on a higher flame; this time whiteness itself is finally being dissolved into a larger American identity.
On its surface, this book tells the story of how and why big business turned up that flame, and a brief history of race and pop culture leading up to this watershed. But at its core American Skin is about the revolution that higher heat on American identity is bringing about: the end of ‘white' America. This book begins, and my arguments and insights ultimately rest on, one premise and guiding belief about this country: We have always been, and will ever be, of one race—human—and of one culture—American." —From the Introduction
About the Author: Leon e. Wynter created and wrote the “Business and Race” column for the Wall Street Journal for ten years and is a regular contributor to National Public Radio. His essays on race, business, and American culture have been published in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, and New York Newsday. He lives in New Rochelle, New York.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Making an indisputable if sometimes obvious case for non-white influence on American culture, Wynter, an NPR commentator and former Wall Street Journal columnist, here joins a chorus chronicling the dissolution of America's once-clear racial delineations into a "transracial" culture. With vivid, witty prose, Wynter carefully explicates the influence of black musical idiom on mainstream ragtime, jazz and Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s; the black roots of rock and roll and disco; the multiracial casting in the 1997 Disney TV special of Cinderella (following the sharp increase in the 1980s of corporate marketing along ethnic and racial lines); MTV's 2000 "hip-hopera" based on Bizet's Carmen; the emergence of black-urban-inspired clothing, such as the FUBU (For Us, By Us) line in major department stores; and many more object lessons in cultural exchange. The downside of "transracialism" is "the steady erosion of black identity as the organizing principle for community development," but Wynter concludes that "the future is not about black people leading black people [but] about black people leading all Americans, especially black Americans" through popular culture and the commercial marketplace, which, for better or worse, he sees as the motor of race relations. (On sale Aug. 6) Forecast: Along with Richard Rodriguez's Brown (Forecasts, Mar. 11), this will be seen as the answer book to Pat Buchanan's bestselling The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, decrying the decline of whiteness. If pundits can find a way to integrate questions of race into "the war on terror," look for these three books to come up frequently. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
Nativists and know-nothings beware: northern European culture is on the decline in America, replaced by a friendly beige. In the early days of the republic, writes sometime Wall Street Journal columnist Wynter, anyone who was assimilable culturally and ethnically into the nation's Anglo-Protestant majority was considered, more or less automatically, "white," with all the privileges appertaining thereunto; others were "presumed permanent outsiders with no legitimate role in the American economic or martial potential, much less the American cultural stock." This disenfranchising supposition defied the "true transracial nature of America," of course, and it has lost its power in recent years thanks to a number of cultural forces-not least of them mass music, mass advertising, mass marketing, and mass consumption, through which white culture has been thoroughly integrated to the point that stockbrokers greet each other with cries of "Whassup" and farm kids in North Dakota communicate in rap. Embattled whites who quest for a Leave It to Beaver homeland and who are now abandoning, say, Los Angeles for the woods of Idaho will find that they can run but not hide, Wynter observes; "the Old Majority, if it's running from the combined presence of blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and others who are not counted as non-Hispanic whites, really has no place to go, except perhaps to a shrinking number of countries in Europe." Provocative though it may be, Wynters's grand thesis is less interesting than the data and anecdotes he assembles to support it, as is so often the case in books of pop sociology; of particular interest are his remarks on the inherently commercial nature of hip-hop culture and the culturalassumptions of the "Echo Boomers," the young people of today, who are now more numerous than the Baby Boomers and who are driving the present culture; for this generation, Wynter writes, race as such has no meaning, and instead "identity is rooted in cultures that can be freely traded in the marketplace, not imposed by race or ethnicity at birth." American skin, then, is eminently sheddable. Trendspotters will find Wynter's study fascinating.Book Details
Published
September 1, 2002
Publisher
New York : Crown Publishers, c2002.
Pages
304
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780609604892