The Tanning of America (43 page)

So, for starters, to wake up on a Sunday morning and see a powerful analysis of culture and where it's headed on the front page of the Sunday
Times
honestly put a twinkle in my eye! I called my girlfriend, I called my friends and colleagues, and I was jumping up and down. What I really loved about the article, and what made me feel so inspired, was its declaration that the term “mulatto,” so long employed to describe someone of mixed race, was no longer enough. Mulatto doesn't apply to an individual, say, who's Portuguese, African-American, and Haitian. It doesn't apply to someone who can check off the boxes that are “Black” and “White” but also “Polish.” Mulatto doesn't apply. Nor should it.

We have a lot of old history to overcome. Back in the 1930s, the Census Bureau had a standing rule that if you had any trace of African-American in you, you were considered African-American, and they had to put you in that box—the “one-drop rule.” Then they decided to open up the conversation, and by the 1970s there were more choices. Sort of. The article states, “Americans were expected to designate themselves as members of one official recognized racial group.” You could select any of the following: Black, White, American Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Korean, or Other; with that “Other” box intended for Hispanics, because they were viewed as an ethnicity and not specifically a race. It wasn't until 2000 that the Census permitted responders to mark more than one race. When seven million people did so that year, about 2.4 percent of the population, it led for the first time to a category understood as multiracial. The Census Bureau now estimates that within ten years the percentage of the population considered mixed-race has exploded to 35 percent!

Just how far and wide this phenomenon has spread was underscored in yet another installment of the “Race Remixed” series in
The New York Times.
This one was on racial intermarriage and looked at census data from the Deep South, a region historically hostile to mixed-race couples, and revealed that a dramatic shift in attitude is well under way. Love, it turns out, is as powerful in changing the mind-set of America as the marketplace.

When I started using the term polyethnic to speak to marketers about the races coming together, we were asking them to look literally at society and see how different ethnicities look, overlap, and touch. Tanning, even though we use it broadly at times, is something much different. Tanning speaks about how the cultures come together, where the cultures touch. The article was backed up with facts about how polyethnicity is coloring society—where one in seven Americans are marrying outside of their “race”—on top of the digital acceleration of cultural tanning that is happening with shared information. The reality is dramatic, given that somebody can go online and listen and watch and pick up other cultures quickly; for example, that a four-year-old from Newark, New Jersey, is learning skateboarding at the exact same time a four-year-old would learn it in Venice Beach, California, where skateboarding culture is dominant. With music, culture sharing continues unabated, amplified by youth culture and college students on social networks. Nobody's sticking in their labeled box culturally or even ethnically.

We have more bridges to cross, although I, for one, am excited about seeing the commingling of different cultures that has inspired me all along. One of the meaningful barometers I love to study is the American edition of
Vogue
magazine and everything it stands for. I was speaking to a particular artist of prominence who pointed out that no matter how many icons of color have come to epitomize beauty and style, there may have been a very small number that after many YEARS of hard work had the privilege to grace this most prestigious cover—some of whom include Michelle Obama, Halle Berry, and Naomi Campbell. A newcomer who happens to be white, like Blake Lively from
Gossip Girl,
gets on the cover after two years of her rise to prominence, while it took superstar Beyoncé ten years of worldwide success and sixteen Grammys to receive this privilege. Good for Blake Lively. But the fact that the media specifically puts people in these boxes and decides what category can go on the cover—because of some traditional measurement that no longer reflects the way people feel today—is something that I see as needing to fall by the wayside, that I hope this book will propel. Again, it always confused me that only in America do you still see that women of color have a special aisle called the Ethnic Beauty aisle. Does that mean Caucasian or Asian women who see Rihanna grace a magazine and love her hair need to go down the “Ethnic Beauty aisle” to find those products? This categorization needs to stop. (Amazingly, not long before we went to print on this book, most of an
Allure
magazine was devoted to the subject of multiethnic beauty, demonstrating how the changing cultural attitudes brought about by tanning have already created a new cross-cultural aesthetic.)

To know where we're going next, I hope that telling the journey of how we got here can point out the way, a shared cultural heritage that has and will continue to provide us with opportunities to speak across the generational and social divides. The polyethnic and multicultural megalogue has developed organically and against the odds.

In the entertainment business, as an example, it was artists like Eminem who had to make music for all cultures—African-Americans and Hispanics and Asian-Americans and others—that they could understand, rock with, and connect to his POV. The cultural collision with commerce happened because multicultural audiences in mass wanted to duplicate the way he dressed and spoke, or duplicate the way Jay-Z spoke and what LL Cool J and Puff Daddy and Lil Wayne and all the artists who have galvanized culture did.

Just as “Race Remixed” tells us, the specifics of our racial DNA do not define who we are as individuals or as a cultural group. Race doesn't define how you choose to dress or how you choose to act or what you decide to purchase. The beauty of this time and how we move forward is that I think the boxes are ready for the dustbin of history. The Census Bureau, along with the advertising businesses and media companies, are starting to see the memo. Finally, culture is in the driver's seat.

The future of tanning is the option to look at all the boxes and mark off the one that reads “All of the above.” By choosing “All of the above,” I mean in the sense of spirit, in the sense of shared humanity. Isn't that what we are all about? Aren't we all about tasting different foods, tasting and borrowing each other's culture to understand one another better and to provide insight about ourselves? Sure, we grew up into a race and into a household that had certain understandings around religion, certain understandings around tradition of that race in particular. But it doesn't set us up or prepare us for when all these things come together and they're shared, and it cannot work within the confines of the boxes when we should embrace our shared connections as Americans.

One of those connections, obviously, is in the marketplace. How will culture help us reenergize and remix the power of our shared economic interests? What are the new rules?

Let's face it—the only rule that really matters in the new twenty-first-century economy is that thinking in terms of rules has limited marketplace value. That said, I would hope that if we've learned anything from observing the economic, social benefits of tanning, it would be the truth that our distinctly polyethnic American culture is our greatest, most valuable, and most underused national resource. And based on that premise—call it Rule One—I'd like to offer some final recommendations as to how all of us can learn from tanning's powerful properties and apply the lessons we've seen so far in new, repurposed ways.

As a prime example, we can look as far back as the early house party days when a movement was born out of an MC's need to extend an invite to as many people as possible; the goal was to get them to show up to a countercultural event that simultaneously marketed inclusivity and exclusivity. This created the DNA for today's social networks, using the party-rocking capacities that have created the multibillion-dollar successes out of the likes of Facebook.

I point out the comparison as a reminder of how one of the most impoverished, marginalized, underserved segments of society was able to transform its economy, starting with nothing but beats and rhymes, and why there is no reason that we shouldn't be borrowing lessons learned for the creation of new industries—which in turn will create jobs and revenues for the enrichment of all.

To help me in this discussion, I wanted to talk to someone who I didn't have a chance to interview earlier in the book but who generously sat down to answer questions about his experiences and his cross-cultural point of view, and about some of the following themes that we've been speaking about all along: Aspiration, Authenticity, Risk (finding comfort in discomfort), Cultural Curiosity, Tanning in Culture and Commerce, Relevancy in the Marketplace, Revitalized Storytelling, the New Code of Cool, and Tanning Economic RX.

My conversation with Eminem began on the subject of his film
8 Mile
and the comments over the years that I've gotten from people who changed their thinking on race, culture, and the generation gaps from seeing that film. This was another instance of how music/culture/commerce fuel aspiration and act as a powerful goodwill ambassador and economic stimulant.

 

STOUTE:
People have said that
8 Mile
is responsible for teaching people the history of hip-hop.

 

EMINEM:
I don't know how much
8 Mile
teaches people about the history of hip-hop, but I did have some random older folks coming up to me after the film saying things like “I saw your movie. I think I understand rap now!” If the film had that unintended effect of making people respect or understand the music more, that's great.

 

STOUTE:
Marshall, let's start with the subject of aspiration. What hip-hop artist first inspired you to rap and when did you realize you had that gift for storytelling?

 

EMINEM:
Ice-T was one of the first rappers that I ever really heard, when I was ten or eleven. My uncle brought me over cassettes of Ice-T and the
Breakin'
soundtrack had “Reckless” on there. That's when I started to get into it. And then, I got turned on to Run-DMC, and got put up on the Fat Boys and then the Beastie Boys came out. And the Beastie Boys kind of got my thought process going that maybe it could be possible. Then LL probably made me actually want to do this. As a kid, I wanted to be LL. Like I literally thought I was LL, and that's when I would start writing raps and they sounded like him. I may have said this before, but that's who really made me start dabbling and made me really think, Wow, I can put some words together, they sound like him, but I'm able to rhyme these words and make these sentences and say them in a rhythm similar to him. But as I started to get just a little bit older, around fifteen, as far as storytelling, I remember taking a beat from Doug E. Fresh from “Play This Only at Night.”

 

STOUTE:
Right, that was fitting. Because in those days if you wanted to hear rap on the radio the only thing you could do was listen and tape records at two in the morning. You would listen to underground hip-hop in the middle of the night because that was the only time the records would get played. And some people would go to sleep and leave the tape player on all night recording.

 

EMINEM:
Yeah, I was one of those kids. And the Doug E. Fresh record was from one of those nights when I fell asleep while I was recording. I would always go back the next day and listen to what I had recorded. Because in those days in Detroit The Wizard was on WJLB and he used to play all these great records, crazy ones that I'd never heard of before. And this was when I was first getting into hip-hop and it was—oh, my God, I've never heard this record! So, I'd fall asleep recording the radio and wake up in the morning to see what I'd taped and that's how I first heard “Play This Only at Night.” There was something about that beat that made me want to tell a story over it. There was an open verse with a loop that went on for a long time so I made my own homemade loop....

 

STOUTE:
Storytelling began with the beats. When did you know that there was something you wanted to talk about? Or did that happen from a particular experience or actual story?

 

EMINEM:
There's a true story that happened when I was living on the east side of Detroit in a house with my mother, where I grew up pretty much all my teenage years. There was a neighbor on one side of us that apparently caught his best friend with his girlfriend, and he was beating her ass. My upstairs window was level with their's and the shades were open and you could see everything. He beat up the dude and then started smacking her—I'm not sure how it all ended up playing out, except that my mother called the police. The next night, and I'm not making this up, on the opposite side of the house, the couple who lived there did the very same thing.

 

STOUTE:
Everyone lived upstairs, houses close to each other, everyone on the same level?

 

EMINEM:
Right. And I'm looking through the window and damn if they aren't doing the exact same thing. But they're
both
naked. And he's beating her ass all the way out of the house into the middle of the street. Somebody called the cops and he goes to jail and that's how that played out. So I made a story up based on that. But this story might have even been an early version of “Love the Way You Lie” in some way because of the subject matter—me obviously not knowing it back then—but instead here I became the hero at the end. I talked about “I went downstairs in a rage, ran to the closet, grabbed the twelve gauge.” My mom had a shotgun in the closet and I pretended it was mine in the rap. In the story, I ended up shooting the dude to protect the girl and saved the day. I rapped about seeing those things happening, a story from top to bottom, and becoming a hero. That really was the first time I realized that I could rhyme words and tell a story at the same time.