Is there a Black brand?

Is there a Black brand and, if so, do Black people own any part of it?

I’ve thought a lot about this throughout my life but the picture above, from a local mall, inspired this post. It’s the perfect visual analogy of using Blackness to sell as the products are clear in the foreground but the Black folks are obscured in the back so you can’t see them clearly – and there’s a 90% chance this display is in a store not owned by Black folks. The Black brand is also used to sell things but images of real Black life are omitted or obscured and Black folks don’t own most of the places this happens.

Using Blackness to sell products means showing a very narrow image of Blackness, not Blackness and Black people in all (or any) of their complexity.

The most obvious examples are in music, sports and the associated clothing. A recent experience I had with my 15-yr-old son and his white teammates on the way to a soccer tournament really got me thinking about this. The boys were playing their music in the car – exclusively rap music. At one point, I laid down the rule that they could only play music that had less than two BPMs (“bitches” per minute). Being an old guy brought up with Public Enemy’s Fight the Power, hearing rap music with mostly young, Black men mentioning “bitches” and/or money every few seconds got me thinking about how narrow an idea of Black men my son and his friends were being exposed to. It also got me Googling.

As usual, I found lots of stuff that made me realize the issue is more complex than I originally thought – and I also got an important history lesson.

The term brand comes from branding living property, i.e. cattle and slaves. In her Aug. 2017 article What Is Branding? A Brief History, Taylor Holland says, “What we brand, how we brand it, and why we brand it has changed. But branding in the twenty-first century is still about taking ownership.” Black folks must keep this in mind.

One article I found that backed up what I suspected was Hannah J Davies’ Guardian article, For white hipsters, blackness is a thing to consume but not engage with. Davies’ argues that the blackness marketed to white folks can’t be “too black” and highlights the problem for Black creators. “How can you create great art in a world where being “too black” is seen as a legitimate criticism?”, she asks. She cites examples of stories “that prioritise a proximity to whiteness picking up awards over those with radical narratives.” She mentions Boots Riley’s anti-capitalist, Afrofuturist epic Sorry to Bother You, which wasn’t even nominated at the Oscars (and I bet you never heard of), as an example of one of those radical narratives. To that, I’d add Nate Parker’s 2016 Birth of a Nation based on the true story of the slave rebellion led by slave preacher, Nat Turner. Davies gives an alternate opinion on two popular Black cultural symbols: Meghan Markle and the movie Green Book. She quotes Elaine Musiwa in a 2017 article for US Vogue saying, “Meghan Markle is the type of black that the majority of right-leaning white America wishes we all could be, if there were to be blackness at all.” On Green Book, which won five Oscars including Best Picture, Davies reveals (at least to me) that the film was created by white people and despised by the family of its Black subject, pianist Don Shirley. “Why does the turgid black-white buddy trope still persist in cinema? For many, [the film was] a highly revisionist piece of cinema, framing [Shirley and his Italian driver Tony] as friends rather than employer and employee respectively. The Shirley family was not consulted during the making of the film, with [Don’s] brother Maurice telling Essence magazine that the film was “a continuation of white privilege””.

But while Davies focuses on the pressure to not be “too Black”, other forces demand Black artists be “more Black.” R&B singer, PJ Morton’s song, Claustrophophic, tells of the pressure he got from record labels to be Blacker. Morton sings, “PJ, you’re not quite street enough/Thug life my nigga/Can you act a little more tough/Or, can you switch your style up a little more?/You can be yourself later, for now we need the radio.” Are the rappers my son and his buddies listen to told to be “more street” to sell more records?

Also, would Davies’ explain the massive success of Pulitzer Prize-winning Kendrick Lamar, and his straight-outa-Compton self and lyrics as being just “street enough” to sell to white folks? And what about the 2018 blockbuster movie Black Panther that raked in billions with a story by, and about, Black people? Black Panther’s Killmonger arguably was the on-screen expression of Black desire for revenge for historical injustices – and white people loved it.

Branding is about ownership. Those who own the channels using the Black brand control how Black are people are represented in those channels, including what’s too much or too little Blackness.

Black folks need to keep pushing to be the ones defining Blackness and telling its stories in all its beautiful, messy complexity – using more of our own channels where we’re not selling stuff.

Some great Canadian examples are: The Black Power Hour (Halifax), Black On Black (Ottawa) and Desmond Cole’s radio show (Toronto.)