A Macromarketing Call to Action—Because Black Lives Matter!

Why Should Black Lives Matter in Macromarketing?

In terms of the volume of research on racism in relevant disciplines of the social sciences, marketing is particularly criticized for a dearth of research and theoretical development on the topic (Burton 2009; Cui and Choudhury 2002; Davis 2018; Tadajewski 2012). The concerns of macromarketing have always transcended the microconcerns of individual firms to address the impacts of society on marketing systems (Layton 2009) and of marketing systems on aspects of society such as quality of life (Pittz, Steiner, and Pennington 2019). Macromarketing is therefore, at its core, concerned with the “interdependence of markets and marketing systems with other dimensions of civic life” (Mittelstaedt, Kilbourne, and Mittelstaedt 2016, p. 131). Because it involves “…study of the agora, across cultures and through time,…a theory of macromarketing is, in its truest sense, a theory of the agora” (Mittelstaedt, Kilbourne, and Mittelstaedt 2016, p. 131). Setting aside any issue with the appropriation of a Greek term as the standard (we could also employ the Swahili soko), macromarketing should seek to address questions that are often silenced elsewhere. Regarding the relationship between marketing and violence, for example, Mittelstaedt, Kilbourne, and Mittelstaedt (2016) note that “the silence of marketing scholarship in considering the implications of 9/11 on markets, marketers, consumers, or marketing systems is deafening” (p. 138). This is because macromarketing scholars are “uniquely positioned to ask many important questions, the answers to which have broad social impact” (ibid.). Building on this work and a paper arguing “…for constructive engagement with a complex, conflicted, and increasingly interdependent world in which marketing can and should play an important role” (Shultz 2007, p. 293), race and racism should ascend to public policy issues that demand macromarketing investigation.

As the Black Lives Matter protests erupted and the impacts of Covid-19 on Black communities worldwide became apparent, important questions emerged for which the marketing academy has yet to provide answers. Monuments toppled at universities around the globe and marketing institutions were quick to put out Black Lives Matter statements, but the marketing academy seems to have no substantive body of literature that either makes sense of the moment or engages with the marketing institutions and communities seeking answers. Given a unique capacity to address this historically and contemporaneously important issue of anti-Black racism, macromarketing is presented with a historic opportunity.

Failure to examine the historical context for race in marketing has meant de facto support for marketplace discrimination and the upholding of White supremacy. The marketing academy, like other societal institutions, has perpetuated Whiteness (Harris 2015). A review of consumer research literature concludes that “it is dominated by ‘[W]hite faces’ and ‘[W]hite spaces,’ resulting in many investigators consciously or unconsciously performing [W]hiteness” (Burton 2009, p. 171). Despite a long history of racial discrimination and the perpetuation of White supremacy in the marketplace, marketing literature has remained largely uncritical of these processes and effects.

Structural Racism in the Academy

In fact, the academic field of marketing has been heavily criticized for its treatment of race.

Rather than positioning race as a socio-politically constructed phenomenon that impacts and is impacted by marketplace practices, discussions of race in the marketplace are often subsumed into broader domains of class, ethnicity and/or multiculturalism, limiting our knowledge of how markets normalize, reify, and (re)produce systemic and institutionalized racism (Grier, Thomas, and Johnson 2019, p. 94).

Have marketers -- macromarketers -- really overlooked market-based racism and the operation of power? Any effort to answer this question satisfactorily requires a strategy for inquiry into the neglect of race and racism within the field. Critical Race Theory (CRT), initially spearheaded by legal scholars and now widely adopted in a range of fields and more recently in marketing (Mitchell 2020), provides such a framework. A major tenet of CRT holds that racism is normal, commonplace, pervasive, and deeply embedded in the culture of institutions.

The most benevolent interpretation of this normalization sees the issue of racism rendered opaque to the dominant race. As Bell (1980, 1988) argues, racism will not be dismantled unless doing so falls within the interests of the dominant racial group. Normalization of racism within marketing institutions and the academy means that we should expect to find systemic racism just as often in everyday encounters. But despite its pervasiveness and because of this normalization, everyday instances may need special strategies to unmask. Thanks to the enormous privileges and advantages attached to Whiteness by the normalization of racism, it is not easily relinquished (Bell 1980, 1988). CRT thus argues in favor of academic activism to unmask the normalization of racism and aims for transformation.

Ideology linked to White supremacy and Eurocentric perspectives is also normalized and rendered invisible as the only legitimate baseline, point of departure, or norm (Ladson-Billings 1998). When looking for racism, one should therefore expect erasure, exclusion, invisibility, and the subsuming of topics under more acceptable categories rather than overt forms of racism. Unmasking such racism in a vast body of literature, as in the case of 40 years of macromarketing publications, is no easy task. The multiple layers in which this might occur would require both time and resource beyond the scope of this essay. Nonetheless, returning to the major point of this essay on whether Black Lives Matter to macromarketing, some attempt to evaluate the field is warranted.

The section below starts with the Journal of Macromarketing, which is central to our field. Rather than provide a comprehensive review, I aim to illustrate how the subjects of race, racism, and the most significant institution responsible for anti-Black racism—slavery itself—have been treated in the Journal of Macromarketing. Those expecting a quantitative or deeply rigorous attempt to “prove” racism in the academy will be disappointed:

Sceptical colleagues typically ask where…the empirically-based data [is] to support and lend credence to that CRT stuff. This question is often loaded with cynicism, condescension, and disdain. A collective reply might be: ‘empirical data?’ ‘Would several hundred years of historical evidence of America’s continued racist structure, policies and practices suffice?’ (Hughes and Giles 2010, p. 46).

The search terms revealed that over the past two decades, a total of 34 out of more than 300 published papers used these terms. Given the magnitude and impact of systemic racism on all areas of marketing phenomena, how should this muted response be interpreted? Drawing on CRT, these 34 papers were assessed for the application of “racial lenses” in response to what is seen as a frequently asked question: “Why were people of color much more likely than whites to see American society as racist and to be pessimistic about the possibility of eliminating racism? Did they know something whites did not?” (Harris 2015, p. 267). CRT argues that the answer to this latter question is yes, “arguing for a ‘voice of color’ that needed to be heard.” (ibid).

The most striking observation is that when the subjects of race, racism, and slavery were addressed, the inclusion was mostly incidental as part of a non-critical categorization or demographic variable (for examples, see: Harker and Harker 2016; Belk, Humayun, and Gopaldas 2020; and Shen 2019). In short, the vast majority of these references occur only once and seldom return. This indicates race and racism were not central to the argument, but included only as peripheral ideas (marginal contributions to the major or central discussion) and on a list of possible minor mediating or controlling variables.

But how is it possible that chattel slavery, a market system so significant in the history of the current world, has received so little attention? Here, I distinguish between the chattel slavery of Africans and the topic of slavery in, for example, pre-history (Schmidtz and Brennan 2020) or human trafficking (Pennington et al. 2008). The obscuring or minimizing of racism is particularly poignant in a context that suggests systemic racism should take center stage. In the context of gun violence, for example, even a cursory literature search for the term “gun violence” reveals a glaring racial discrepancy. The death rate for assault with a firearm is 19.8 Black and 1.7 White individuals per 100,000 victims in the United States (Xu et al. 2018, p. 41), and reveals “…that gun owners are more likely to be more vigilant toward people of color because of stereotypical assumptions that racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to be involved with crime”. It is therefore inexplicable that in this context, race is only included in a paper on this topic as part of an “other variables category”: “Gun violence is intertwined with other, equally complex social problems, including mental illness…, racism, and domestic abuse…” (Huff et al. 2017, p. 396).

Racism is also normalized through “glossing over strategies,” such as when barbaric evidence of racism is described in neutral language or in ways that create a sense of normalcy for these historical and contemporary occurrences. Alarming ideas of racism are often so normalized that they bear no particular importance to either the overarching findings of these papers or their implications for policy and practice. In a study of Male Compensatory Consumption in American History, for instance, racism is acknowledged in lurid detail: “In the South…male dominated legislative bodies implemented, and male run courts sanctioned, nasty Jim Crow laws that restricted African-American sites of consumption and reinforced the social primacy of whiteness” (Witkowski 2020, p.533). Yet nowhere in the paper is this heinous reference returned to. Despite acknowledging “nasty Jim Crow Laws,” the paper provides no further intersectional analyses or implications. This not only suggests such violence is normal and part of the historical white noise, but also emphasizes more benign postulates.

In another example, a study of housing exclusion (Ozanne, Ozanne, and Phipps 2017) mentions racism only in passing despite the well-documented role of racism in housing segregation: “Unintended consequences include suburban sprawl…, [and] racial and socioeconomic segregation” (p. 142). Yet there is clear evidence that racial segregation was the intended objective of housing policies (Freund 2007). These allusions to suffering without attendant attention paid to the level of deprivation or violence further act to normalize such observations. As the authors may confuse an implied academic and intellectual indifference to the plight and impact of racism with objective theoretical observation, the lack of attention also carries the potential to cause further harm. A study on racial stereotyping in advertising, for instance, points to the harmful effects of racial stereotypes and the need for deeper interrogations of race (Taylor, Landreth, and Bang 2016).References to racism can therefore be seen as normative in that even when significant racism is acknowledged, it is either insufficiently interrogated or absent from substantive findings and conclusions. In a study of family and public policy in the United States (Carlson and Harrison 2010), the authors provide insights into the ways racism has played out in interventions into African American families and the fragmentation that results. Given their observation that this dynamic continues in the present, such stark findings of racism should have prompted significant discussion. Of all the family groupings considered, the reference to the history of state intervention in African American families in particular (and in light of the brutality and suffering that ensued) should have been sufficient to isolate racism as one of the most significant factors needing consideration from a public policy point of view. Yet there is no mention of this in the paper’s conlusion, and an equally alarming reference to the impacts of state interference in Indigenous families is likewise omitted.

Racism within academic literature can also be interrogated in the extent to which White scholars are cited while the world of Black scholars is ignored. Pointing to the absence of “ethnic and North-South issues” in a study of sustainability in advertising practices, Ourahmoune, Binninger, and Robert (2014) conclude that

[t]he hundreds of sustainable advertisements analyzed for this research did not mention these concerns, whether explicitly, symbolically, or even figuratively through representations of diversity or the collusion of sustainable discourse with the ethnic or North-South issues that are crucial to a sustainable world” (p. 326).

As Grier et al. (2019) point out, another race-neutralizing strategy involves subsuming race into other phenomena. For a paper that clearly deals with race in the context of advertising and the male image (Branchik, and Chowdhury 2013), the authors describe their aim as investigating “the ethnic diversity of ad models” (p. 160). But given that the paper interrogates male racial representation and the extent to which the representations of African American males have changed overtime, why not use the term race? Why the obscuring strategy? Why use the euphemism “ethnic diversity”? The use of euphemistic terms (e.g., “ethnicity,” “minority,” and “multiculturalism”) can signal an unwillingness to confront race and racism. This White centering strategy obscures the Black people behind benignly acceptable terminology, erasing both the people and their uncomfortable truths. In the end, “race [is reduced] to symbolic ethnicity” (Calmore 1997, p. 920).

An alternative strategy of erasure involves color evasiveness (Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison 2016). In this strategy, the writer avoids talking directly about race and hence willfully ignores racism by employing a color-blind ideological approach (Gillborn 2019). Even attempts at critical analysis and subterfuge can fall prey to these obscuring strategies, as in the example of Ourahmoune, Binninger, and Robert (2014) referring to “ethnic and North-South issues” (p. 326). In reading the discourse in these papers, there are times that one senses a desire for more critical lens to emerge. But this voice seems to fade in light of an anticipated need to justify the inclusion of race or racism. Once again, the effect is an erasure of the potential for racism to fully emerge and illuminate the specific ways in which race and the structural racism are drivers of the phenomenon in question.

In one of the few articles to deal honestly with racism, Davis (2007) examines the historically demeaning portrayal of the Aunt Jemima brand. What is expressly appealing about this paper is that it addresses the ways in which systemic racism and decision-making within the advertising effort expressly impacted and were reflected in the marketplace. This sheds light on why we continue to see blackface in contemporary advertising even as the advertising industry feigns ignorance. But for a paper so honest in its analysis, one of the conclusions it reaches appears oddly out of place: “[t]he final execution of the advertising effort was well reasoned, was sensitive to the perceptions of diverse consumers, and protected the integrity of a controversial brand image” (Davis 2017, p. 35). Who were these diverse consumers that the brand was sensitive to—are they Black consumers?

I was similarly struck by the upbeat tone of the special edition within which the paper appeared. Reproduced below in its entirety, the description read:

‘Aunt Jemima Is Alive and Cookin’? An Advertiser’s Dilemma of Competing Collective Memories,” by Judy Foster Davis, draws from archival records in the Caroline Jones Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Using collective memory as a theoretical framework and following a nice historical overview of the brand, the study recounts how Quaker Oats and its advertising agencies in the early 1990s wrestled with the meanings conveyed by this iconic trade character. Interestingly, in light of the often-negative associations her character has embodied historically, Aunt Jemima today has endeared herself to consumers of all colors. This article adds to the many other fine contributions Judy has made at CHARM and in this journal to African American marketing history (Witkowski 2007, p.5).

In a further diminishment of the status of the contribution, the editors employ a common strategy of subcategorizing the article as “African American marketing history” even though much of the paper is about decisions made by a largely White advertising industry for a White consumer imagination. Positioning macromarketing in a broader academic context can direct us to look for how

a Eurocentric epistemological perspective can subtly—and not so subtly—ignore and discredit the ways of knowing and understanding the world that faculty of colour often bring to academia [and] creates racialized double-standards that contribute to an apartheid of knowledge separating from mainstream scholarship the type of research and teaching that faculty of colour often produce (Bernal and Villalpando 2010, p. 171).

One of the most revealing parts of the paper by Davis (2017) is the rarely heard voice of an African American advertising executive, Caroline Jones, who ran her own agency and was an advertising consultant to the Aunt Jemima brand. As Davis points out in another publication, “Jones believed her professional career was limited” (2017, p. 99). Jones offers her own reflections:

As a member of a double minority—female and Black—I’ve learned the biggest problem in America is the existence of castes within society, business and advertising…Some might think there’s been progress. But look around advertising today and you’ll find there are fewer Black men or women than in the 1970s. Even more disturbing, there’s not much talk about equal opportunity…Caste-typing by color or sex or nationality injures everybody; especially the businesses that are deprived of the enormous talent and energy minorities can provide (Davis 2017, p. 99).

Out of all institutions for marketing, advertising provides the most visible evidence of how their practices and norms produce or support systemic racism. According to Mehaffy (1997), advertising has been a major source of White supremacist ideology through the use of juxtaposition. Typically, White and Black people were juxtaposed in a way that portrays White people as the desirable state and Black people as the opposing blight. For instance, White women were depicted in ways that associate them with notions including “cleanliness, progress, technological innovation, wise consumers, and family caretakers while Black women were seen for their labor and depicted or associated with the opposites such as with dirt, outmoded technologies, and backward habits” (Mehaffy 1997).

Charting the history of racism by looking at the portrayal of Black people in advertising in the United States from 1900 to 1960, Kern-Foxworth (1994) paints a similarly troubling portrait. Portrayals reflect denigrating and pejorative images of “pickaninny, black mammy, or black Sambo”; moreover, these portrayals “made [Black people] docile. They made them act stupid” (Kern-Foxworth 1994, pp. 40-41). The value of popular trading cards actually increased based on how insulting their depictions of Black people were, with those that depicted exaggerated features (heads, lips, teeth, etc.) to render them unattractive becoming the most sought after (ibid., p. 34).

A more recent review of the depiction of Black people in advertising from 1950-1982 found that Black people were not only largely excluded from representation in advertising, but also blatantly associated with servitude and racial segregation (Humphrey and Schuman 1984). For much of the 1950s, the results show that virtually all depictions of Black people represented them as low-skilled or laborers “with 75 percent of the ads representing [B]lacks as cooks, servants, and porters, and 25 percent representing [B]lacks as African or Island laborers” (ibid., p. 599). While representation of Black individuals in advertising increased over the period, less blatant exclusions were observed as “advertisers attempt[ed] to diminish the association of [B]lacks with their products by surrounding them with [W]hites” (ibid., p. 577; Stevenson 1992). Black children were “shown as subservient to [W]hite authority figures,” while Black people were shown being disproportionately aided by White authority figures. They were also depicted as poor and more equal in occupation, but not in social context. The Black role in society was captured in depictions of Black people in groups, perhaps to dilute the association of Blackness with brands. As the authors conclude, “the most parsimonious model is that advertisements usually portray [W]hites as [W]hites like to think of themselves and [B]lacks as [W]hites like to think of [B]lacks” (ibid., p. 563).

During the 1980s, the depiction of Black female representation in fashion magazines still indicated significant underrepresentation of Black consumers relative to their population (Jackson and Erving 1991). Black women were primarily portrayed at a distance, largely excluded from close-up, face only, or skin care ads that promoted beauty standards (Jackson and Erving 1991). Tellingly, some of these practices changed when targeting so-called Black media (Elliott 1995). This change suggests a White normalizing assumption and portrayal, except when specifically targeting Black audiences. In fact, Vats (2020) states that

the pervasive use of derogatory images of people of color as trademarks created a ‘scopic regime,’ an unspoken but accepted visual order of things, which reflected [W]hite, male, settler colonialist understandings of the world…Consumption was crafted by [W]hite men for the visual pleasure of [W]hite men and [W]hite women, in order to confirm and maintain their power, identity, and authority (p. 58).

While not exhaustive, this brief review points to the major role that marketing institutions play in the production and reproduction of systemic racism. The likewise brief analysis of macromarketing literature confirms a significant dearth of work on race and racism. When the subject of race is included, the inclusion is often consistent with the ways in which race is minimized, obscure and normalized (Grier, Thomas, and Johnson 2019). Why have we failed to address these important issues, which go to the heart of racial justice in the marketplace and in society? And how should macromarketing respond to this moment of reckoning? Over two decades ago, Black Scholars and citizens of the post-civil rights era faced similar questions “[arising] from the ashes of our expectations: how have we failed—and why? What does this failure mean—for [B]lack people and for [W]hites? Where do we go from here?” (Bell 1988 p3.). Undoing over 400 years of systemic and institutionalized racism will, of course, be no easy task. This is particularly true as both are embedded within in a wider system of discrimination. But the process must start with acknowledgement of the clear advantages that a system of White supremacy has afforded to some groups along with the damage it has caused to others. To look forward, we must first contend with the past.

So, what can we learn from the past? What lessons can we look to in order to propel change? Critical race theorists call for caution at times like these. Progress, they point out, emerges in the context of the Interest-Convergence Dilemma. The dilemma positions Black emancipation as driven by the needs, desires and interests of Whites. Drawing on a number of legal decisions including Brown vs. Board of Education, legal scholar Bell (1980, 2004) argues that progress toward racial equality will not come from the activities of Black advocacy or work. Instead, it is dependent on advances serving the interests of the White population. When they come, advances are usually a by-product of furthering other aims that benefit those Whites with power. Even if some reform follows organized demands, it is on terms “moulded to [W]hite ends and vulnerable to [W]hite changes of heart” (Ansely 1989, p. 1001). If true, these observations suggest that progress, at the very least, requires the majority and those in power to take up joint cause with those whose voices are excluded.

Re-Historicizing the Roots of Marketing Systems

How can a discipline, with a history so entrenched in and nurtured by systemic racism remain blind to it? For scholars of color, the failure to acknowledge these roots is often a source of great frustration. We are typically asked to scrub our manuscripts of any reference to racism unless we can prove its operation. We are asked to somehow produce so-called ‘color-blind’ scholarship even as we see marketing systems swimming in a sea of racism. We are sometimes silenced at conferences and brought to submission in the review process by calls for proof of what we all know to be true.

The mechanisms through which racism operates in the marketplace cannot be fully understood without historicizing marketing within the context of the enduring effects of the transatlantic slave trade, the institution of slavery, and colonization. Hence there is a need for historical (including critical) analyses that explicitly situate racism, markets, and marketing in these historical and broader contexts. As shown in a historical analysis of the market segment of African American elites, for example, historical context is central to a contemporary understanding of it (Branchik and Davis 2009). International trade and modern markets, along with their operations, practices, and norms in the Americans and Europe, owe an untold economic debt to the brutality wrought by the twin institutions of colonization and slavery. These historical foundations are critical to situating current marketing practices.

Beyond telling a tale of oppression and exploitation of the economic contributions made from Black bodies, historical analysis also renders transparent how marketing policies and practices of racial exclusion and exploitation were founded on White supremacy. The advantages afforded to Whiteness were built on anti-Black racist ideology, and exploitation of Black labor laid much of the logic for the development of capitalist marketing system, norms, and valuations. The persistence of anti-Black racism in contemporary market systems, marketing practices, and marketing norms cannot be fully addressed until the historical legacy of slavery and colonization is fully acknowledged.

To that end, I will seize the moment and make the case by re-historicizing both markets and market systems. Although Marx has been criticized for ignoring racism in his thesis, he did recognize the centrality of slavery in industrial development:

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns, as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies that have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. (Marx 1900, p. 90)

The account is both helpful and potentially harmful, as it provides a version of history that is sorely needed but one that has slaves “tightly packed” and thus seeming to anaesthetize the horrors and the brutality of this trade in bodies. For the decedents of those packed on ships, the anesthetizing of the facts leaves us silently wondering why we are the only ones weeping for the dignity of an (at least) accurate depiction so that we, too, can bury our dead. Historicizing slavery in accurate terms also requires acknowledging the ways Black labor and bodies built a system that afforded wealth, status, and privilege to slave owners, their descendants, and Whiteness writ large.

While there is some debate as to whether slavery was the genesis of capitalism (Clegg 2015) or simply a major contributor, there is no arguing the ways that slavery and slave markets helped shape the development of modern market systems, providing both the capital and capital markets to fuel growth. In the United States,

antebellum plantations were…capitalist for the simple reason that land and slaves could only be acquired through markets, typically on credit. Only a profitable plantation could afford these inputs, and if a planter failed to produce cotton at a competitive cost he would be threatened with foreclosure (Clegg 2015, p. 299).

Although getting the top prices for slaves was a trader’s major priority, brutality and indignity (as opposed to investment) were the order of the day as described in the following account:

[T]he slave depots became so squalid and disease ridden that city officials forbade them from conducting business within the city limits.…Prior to the sales, the traders housed the slaves in anything from small tents, to barns, to large pens. Sometimes they languished for months on end, waiting for a buyer to take them. To make them more attractive…a former slave recalled his chore of making older slaves look younger prior to a sale: “I was ordered to have the old men’s whiskers shaved off, and the grey hairs plucked out where they were not too numerous, in which case he had a preparation of blacking to color it, and with a blacking brush we would put it on. These slaves were also taught how old they were (Woodsworth 2008 p. 199).

A variety of market supports and institutions, including financial instruments, emerged to support White economic interests in slavery. For example, slavery was pivotal to the development of mortgage markets both in the southern United States and internationally. After examining thousands of mortgage documents in the American South, Martin (2010) concludes that mortgages were taken out on slaves both before and after the American Revolution; to obtain these mortgages, it was common practice to use Black humans as collateral. Slavery therefore “allowed the resources so central to the expansion of local and regional economies to grow and to circulate more easily.” (Martin 2010, p. 818). The mortgage in humans was so vital to the development of credit in the southern United States that 39 percent of the credit instruments examined used slaves over other forms of collateral. This 39 percent was then responsible for raising 66 percent of the cash and credit which amounted to almost three times the value of collateral from sugar in New Orleans (Martin 2010). As life insurance expanded across the southern United States, slaveholders were among its most important customers because their property interest in slaves were insured from a growing industry (Murphy 2005). These instruments were not only pivotal to economic development, but played a significant role in increasing one of the most barbaric aspects of slavery: that of the separation of families and kin (Martin 2010).

Normalization of systemic racism in markets and commerce was further entrenched by laws and policies to protect the economic positions of slave merchants and slave owners. These laws further debased, commoditized and monetized Black bodies. The 1732 Debt Recovery Act permitted slaves to be used to satisfy debts in all British colonies, for example, allowing unsecured creditors to hold slave auctions at which both slaves and real property were applied to that purpose. Slave auctions were used in the United States to market slaves after plantations fell into bankruptcy or upon the death of an owner, likewise providing collateral for debts (Heier, 2010). This Act in and of itself is seen as instrumental in the expansion of slavery, the commoditization of slaves, and their further dehumanization. The enormous cruelty meted out through family separations triggered by these auctions is viewed as one of the most despicable practices of slavery—one that provided important capital for economic development (Priest, 2006).

Furthermore, slavery was an international endeavor. The brutality that marked global slavery was institutionalized through international commercial networks. In scholarship focused on the colony of Barbados, the first society completely dependent on slavery, Beckles (2016) shows how African lives were seen simply as marketable assets but with no human significance. The model for the slave society involved the development of laws, corporate structures, and a practice of extreme brutality that was exported to both Jamaica and the United States. One of the most brutish aspects of this model was the property right to Black women, whose bodies were widely used by enslavers for gratification as well as for the production of offspring. Even the dismantling of slavery saw an ideological capture that would credit Europeans for the act, despite being largely brought about by slave rebellions throughout the nineteenth century that ultimately ended Britain’s “barbarity time” (Beckles 2016, p. 227).

Similarly, “colonialism had only one hand- it was a one-armed bandit” (Rodney 1972, p. 247). Rodney’s influential 1972 work sees colonization as “…not merely a system of exploitation but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profit to the so-called motherland” (p. 177). Viewed in historical context, colonization and slavery acted to enrich European power at the enormous expense and underdevelopment of the African continent (Rodney 1972). Europeans took control of social and educational institutions, wielding political power to dismantle the African economy and society while enriching European powers.

While a full treatment of slavery and colonization is clearly beyond the scope of this essay, even this cursory review highlights how the institution of slavery laid the foundation for the commoditization and marketization of Black bodies by setting up supply chains, logistics, pricing mechanisms, advertising, and promotion in support of the exploitation of one group to the benefit of the other. In other words, slavery laid the foundation for the construction, development and valuation of Whiteness. These benefits and assets were protected and enhanced by becoming embedded and institutionalized through laws and norms. The terms of trade, the commoditization, and all the ideologies that emerged to maintain support for slavery are deeply entrenched in systems designed to create a market valuation that valued Whiteness and devalued the Black body. Enslaved people played no role in their own market valuation and gained no benefit from the price paid for them, which means these systems were entirely invented to secure lucre that would enrich Whiteness.

In addition to their historical significance, modern marketing systems remain rife with the racism and White supremacy extending directly from this history. The term “White supremacy” is intentionally used to describe the fact that these acts of discrimination cannot simply be explained away as the private acts of individuals (organizations or persons). Instead, “Whiteness has been created, circulated, and sustained through a socio-historical process of hegemony”—hence the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter (Berry 2015, p.14).

Conclusion

Given the persistence and institutionalization of marketplace racism alongside the violence it continues to unleash, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) pay a real price when racism is ignored within a discipline concerned with ethics, distributive justice, the quality of life and the impacts of market systems on society. Racism and discrimination are not benign. They have major effects on those discriminated against in many spheres of life, including significant risk factors for: vulnerability to substance use and marketing messages among young adults (Rose et al. 2019); negative effects on mental and physical health (Gibbons et al. 2014); school drop-out (Unnever, Cullen, and Barnes 2017); economic vulnerability and poverty (Rugh, Albright and Massey 2015); and a plethora of other consequences.

If Black Lives indeed matter, the Journal of Macromarketing now has an unprecedented opportunity to seize this Ruby anniversary celebration as a moment for change. Following the lead of a wide range of market actors who have pledged change in response to the Black Lives Matter protest, we need to address our own systemic racism by profoundly examining and interrogating racism in the operation of the academy. The academy itself must become anti-racist, demanding active opposition to racism, as there is no neutral ground. Failure to become anti-racist, which involves addressing the exclusion of honest analyses of race and racism within our scholarship, is tantamount to support for the current systems of racism and White supremacy.

Recent special issues in macromarketing have brought into focus underrepresented perspectives and provide exemplars for how research on race and racism in the discipline can be similarly catalyzed. The special issue of Macromarketing, in the African Context (Dadzie and Sheth 2020), builds on the tradition in macromarketing of researching non-western societies and highlights the value of theoretical insights from non-western market systems (Ingenbleek 2020). Likewise, the special issue on gender and macromarketing aims to make visible critical gender perspectives (Gurrieri et al. 2020) including articles on systemic gender inequalities and injustices, including intersectional analysis that explicitly addresses the compounding and overlapping systems of oppression (Steinfield and Holt 2020). Is this the moment for a special issue on race/racism and macromarketing?

Rooting out systemic racism from all aspects of marketing will require the largely White research complex to courageously acknowledge the systemic racism of their own field. If we aim for transformative rather than performative change, every area should be subject to interrogation. How might we reimagine the marketing field as anti-racist? With an almost exclusively White editorial history and a practice of valorizing certain scholars and scholarship to the exclusion of others, the field must contend with both power imbalances across race, its operation in the academy and the “Euro-American epistemological spheres in which we all work” (Burton 2009, p. 194). Who gets to make decisions, and who is rendered invisible? Answering these questions forces us to interrogate how Whiteness is entrenched in the field. Power and privilege operate across a range of academic pursuits—most notably in the review process, but also in the training, recruitment and support for doctoral students, the development of more racially inclusive pedagogy, and the running of conferences. Examination of these pursuits should consider both the present and redress for the past. Researchers must also interrogate their own work in a thoughtful and reflexive manner. Imposing a list of prescribed topics for future research directions would run counter to the main thesis of this essay, which is that race, racism and slavery are so foundational to the operating of markets and the market system that no scholarship should escape the reach of this interrogation.

Becoming an anti-racist academy means we must also contend with the impact of academic racism and exclusion on scholars who wish to pursue this work. The exclusion of scholarship that is of interest and relevant to their lives and worldviews is tantamount to the exclusion of Black and racialized scholars themselves. It should be a priority, then, to ensure that scholars who will need to lead the way find a place to thrive within the academy. To borrow a term from management studies, many scholars continue to operate under significant “emotional burden.” Emotional burden refers to a performance in which one must conceal feelings and provide services to others in a way that benefits management (Constanti and Gibbs, 2004). In this sense, scholars of color are performing emotional labor when asked to contort their understanding of the world to fit the views of the so-called White research complex. This frustration often casts us into a Faustian dilemma: fit in and become erased, or step outside and remain true to the cause of Black liberation. While DuBois had to leave the academy to give voice to systemic racism, we have the opportunity to amplify these voices within it. I hope we will take it. As we celebrate this Ruby anniversary issue, let us also commit to a golden anniversary issue of the Journal of Macromarketing in which we will be truly be able to assert that Black Lives Matter.