When Spider Webs Unite
How African American Communities

 Are Fighting Predatory Marketing and Winning

 

Makani Themba-Nixon,
The Praxis Project and

the National African American Tobacco Prevention Network

When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion
--- Ethiopian proverb

Ellen Goodman once wrote that the call for parental responsibility seems to increase with corporate irresponsibility. Nowhere is corporate irresponsibility quite as blatant as in youth marketing. It is transforming the lives of our children -- and mostly for the worse.

Hip hop culture was once a relatively sober, drug free culture. It was mainly marketing -- not family disintegration -- that made it synonymous with liquor, tobacco and violence. Parents could not even monitor what was going on because the targeting was so narrow, so precise that few adults were exposed to it.

It all started in the late 1980s, when tobacco and liquor companies aggressively pursued rap artists as spokespersons, sponsored concerts and events and developed special products for this new market of young African American and Latino males. Extra large, 40-ounce and even 72-ounce bottles of high potency brews exploded onto local inner city neighborhoods. In tobacco, companies floated one product after another designed to link tobacco with marijuana blunt use in particular, and hip hop culture in general. These products were pushed by an aggressive media strategy that sought to link them with high profile, controversial rap artists. Key to this success was piggybacking on the record industry's use of criminal stereotypes to sell hip hop records.

No tragedy appeared too awful to exploit. One ad, featuring the rap group Geto Boys, included a light-hearted reference to the tragic shooting of group member Bushwick Bill. Bushwick, while under the influence of alcohol, held the infant of his then-girlfriend out of a window in order to force her to shoot him in an alleged suicide attempt. He lost one eye in the shooting. The group's promotion company took pictures right after the incident and published his injured face on the group's album cover. A malt liquor company followed with ads featuring Bushwick in an eye patch rapping references to the incident.

After decades of drinking and drugging less than their white cohorts (even at the height of the crack epidemic of the '80s) alcohol and tobacco use among African American youth rose dramatically in the 1990s. However, African American communities did not take this sitting down. This predatory marketing helped spur a movement that has made corporations take notice. Brand names like X, Uptown, PowerMaster and most recently KOOL Mixx have been shut down by organized community pressure.

This presentation will focus on successful strategies for beating back predatory marketing as well as new trends to watch.

MAKINI THEMBA-NIXON (mthemba@thepraxisproject.org) is executive director of The Praxis Project, a nonprofit organization helping communities use media and policy advocacy to advance health equity and justice. She is author of Making Policy, Making Change, which examines media and policy advocacy for public health through case studies and practical information, co-author of Media Advocacy and Public Health: Power for Prevention. Her latest book (co-authored with Hunter Cutting) is Talking the Walk: Communications for Racial Justice.