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On SheaMoisture and whitewashing natural-hair-care marketing

hair care aisle

So…SheaMoisture released this online video, and many of the brand’s black women customers aren’t having it.

I think few people are begrudging SheaMoisture for seeking to expand its customer base. But it’s interesting to me that making this product appealing to the “mainstream” (read: white women) means lessening the presence of black folks in its advertising. (Carol’s Daughter, apparently, has undergone a similar phenomenon.) It’s a pretty tired trope at this point: gain a following among black consumers but abandon them once you seek to make it big, so to speak.

On a broader level, as a business journalist, I’m interested in two things:

  1. I think on some level there has been a move away from racial demographic-based marketing. Now it’s about psychographics and more specific affinity-based segments, from what I’m seeing. There’s some rationale for that: the customer profile for, say, a Luster’s Pink buyer probably looks quite different from the profile for a SheaMoisture buyer. (For one, the latter is more expensive.)
  2. The notion that Afrocentric spaces cannot be inclusive ones is quite odd to me, especially given the extraordinary influence of hip-hop culture. (There’s lots to say about business influence, co-opting, etc., but I think it’s very fair to say the culture is primarily driven by black folks.) Yet this idea persists in so many arenas, from this ad, which claims inclusivity yet doesn’t feature any dark-skinned or kinky-haired women, to criticism of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, in which it’s claimed that the emphasis on black lives is somehow an affront to non-black people.

I’ve spoken to several other natural-hair-care* entrepreneurs, most of whom are black women. Several of them discussed their initial surprise when they saw that women of other races and ethnicities were flocking to their products. Most described their marketing approach as driven by social media and user-generated content (e.g. customers sharing photos of their hair and videos of their styling tips), hence representing their customer base by default. All acknowledged the personal origins of their companies (i.e. they began making hair products for their own hair needs) and their predominantly black and female customer bases, while noting their desire to welcome customers outside that group.

Indeed, achieving sales growth usually means tapping into new markets, yet any business must be careful not to alienate its core customers while doing so. The SheaMoisture kerfuffle demonstrates (once again) that black customers won’t tolerate perceived exploitation for the sake of racial solidarity. But why even flirt with such a marketing hazard? Reaching a broad customer base, in 2017, should not require erasing blackness.

*That label in itself is murky, given that now there’s another segment of “natural” hair products, i.e. juices and berries, that aren’t necessarily marketed to black women!

Update: SheaMoisture has issued an apology and removed the original video from its social media accounts.

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The 5 biases pushing women out of STEM

Woman typing on laptop

I think this Harvard Business Review piece is applicable to fields beyond tech. This part especially resonated with me:

Our new study uncovered a fifth pattern of bias that seems to apply mainly to black and Latina women. On our survey, 42% of black women agreed that “I feel that socially engaging with my colleagues may negatively affect perceptions of my competence,” only slightly more than with as compared with Latinas (38%), Asian-American women (37%), and white women (32%) – but in our interviews, black women mostly mentioned this pattern.

“A lot of times,” said a microbiologist, “There are things that people exclude me from because they say, ‘Oh, she’s going to be the only black person there… just don’t invite her, she won’t feel comfortable.’”

“You don’t know who you can trust,” said a biologist. “This has been a very lonely life.”

In some cases, the women intentionally kept their personal lives hidden in order to maintain their authority. One scientist said she avoided socializing with her colleagues because “to me, that lessens your authority.”

“I do not discuss personal things with people,” said another microbiologist. “Judge me for me, not my personal life.” She said she kept her personal life separate because “I don’t want anything in my family life to be used against me.”

My mother always advised me to keep my personal life close to the chest and not to get too friendly with colleagues for exactly these reasons. The unstated assumption was that (white) folks would use anything they could against you, so best not to offer them any ammunition. Plus, there’s the issue that Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about so well: how black women’s emotions are often read differently (and more negatively) than white women’s.

However, being extra buttoned up seems, to me, to go against a whole array of literature advising people to be authentic and build a personal brand in order to climb the career ladder. So reconciling that advice with the above can be a real minefield.

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Critiquing biased journalism: Shonda Rhimes edition

Viola Davis at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con

Amid all the furor over Alessandra Stanley’s piece on Shonda Rhimes in the New York Times last week, I saw a smart suggestion from Jeff Jarvis about a possible response: use News Genius to annotate the biased/offending text.

So I decided to do that myself, by compiling many of the criticisms of Stanley’s piece that I’d read and adding my own two cents. The annotated piece is below. (I saved you a visit to the Times!)

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Down with OPP (other people’s pathologies)

African American Union soldier and family

The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates is having a vigorous debate with New York‘s Jonathan Chait. I side with Coates. This post, regarding the erroneous conflation of the “culture of poverty” and “black culture,” is excellent.

However, I still don’t totally agree with Coates’s criticism of Obama’s addresses to black audiences. As I wrote in the comments:

I’m getting from your posts the idea that President Obama can’t speak as a member of “Team Negro” (to use the metaphor that Chait set up and to which you objected) when he addresses black audiences—he’s only to speak in his capacity as “commissioner of the league.” I think this is unfair. Many of the things President Obama says in such addresses are, as you have noted previously, the same things our parents and grandparents have told us. But, IMO, he’s not saying those things as Barack Obama, the president of the United States, but rather as Barack Obama, a black man who succeeded in the face of adversity, racial and otherwise. I’m pretty sure, for instance, that Morehouse College did not invite him to speak at Commencement solely to speak about policy; he’s also there as a role model—arguably, primarily so.** I don’t think that point is acknowledged nearly enough in your posts; perhaps you don’t value this role of President Obama’s, but plenty of black folks, myself included, do. (Hence the capturing of moments such as these.) I don’t see his remarks on things like the importance of fatherhood as “lecturing”; they’re rooted in kinship. I believe that status accounts for the reason that President Obama’s speeches to, say, rural, working-class white communities sound different: he’s not of those communities and hence lacks the standing to make those kind of admonishments to those audiences. I also think RS22 makes an excellent point that Obama’s policy efforts negate the idea that he believes culture is the sole, or even primary, cause for the challenges that afflict black communities.

**I think your summary of Obama’s speech at Morehouse in this post is particularly distorted. He didn’t bring up young black men making bad choices because he thinks Morehouse graduates, despite their degrees, are subject to the same culture of poverty as a high school dropout trapped in the ghetto. He did so to encourage those graduates to be ambassadors for the young men whose point of view is framed primarily (or solely) by that culture. His whole speech was about the importance of reinforcing the policy he seeks to carry out with boots on the ground in those communities. (More of my thoughts here.)

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The Grammys and hip-hop’s fight for legitimacy

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images via GRAMMY.com

Oh, the Grammys.

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis took home four awards, including Best New Artist and Best Rap Album, while Kendrick Lamar went home empty-handed. Observers on the Internet, as anticipated, unleashed a collective raspberry; Macklemore responded with an awkward display of white guilt.

What I find most interesting about the reaction to Macklemore’s wins is that it illustrates hip-hop’s persistent chip on its shoulder. It belies any contentions that the Grammys are irrelevant to the genre. After all, if the awards didn’t matter, then why would the record exec Steve Stoute ever have bought a full-page ad in the New York Times to berate Grammy voters for not awarding Eminem or Kanye West Album of the Year?

In other arenas, hip-hop has made significant inroads into traditional cultural institutions. Jay Z’s book Decoded makes the case for readers (and listeners) to analyze the rapper’s lyrics as closely as, say, Wallace Stevens’s verses of poetry. Harvard has an institute devoted to the study of the genre; last year, the rapper Nas announced an eponymous fellowship there that will support scholars in the field. Others, such as 9th Wonder of the hip-hop group Little Brother, have turned full-time to academia.

Then of course, there’s the world of industry. Long gone are the days when rappers were merely unpaid pitchmen for sneakers and vodka. First, there was the proliferation of hip-hop-infused fashion labels, from Phat Farm to Rocawear, with Diddy even nabbing an award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America for his brand Sean John. In recent years, hip-hop artists have begun to make inroads in industries from media to tech. After reading Danyel Smith’s recent story for ESPN The Magazine on the convergence of sports and hip-hop culture, I couldn’t help but remark on Twitter, in a nod to Netscape founder and investor Marc Andreessen, that “hip-hop is eating the world.”

Oddly enough, hip-hop has struggled to attain that influence in its most immediate backyard—at least among those considered the gatekeepers of music’s legacy. By now, it’s ancient news that hip-hop acts can top Billboard sales charts (though this past year has revealed an interesting disparity in the makeup of songs versus albums charts) and achieve some measure of crossover success. Yet hip-hop artists have largely been confined to receiving genre-specific awards: no hip-hop artist, for instance, has ever won for Record or Song of the Year.

At the same time, however, there has been a gradual trend toward the collapsing of genres altogether. In recent years, the Grammys have made a big show of pairing artists from distinct genres in seemingly improbable collaborations. This year, for instance, featured the snubbed Kendrick Lamar alongside the alternative-rock band Imagine Dragons, as well as Metallica and concert pianist Lang Lang. The Grammys have also, controversially, minimized the recognition of genres it considers to be niche: the number of awards for R&B, for instance, has been slashed by half.

This blurring of genres has extended to the sales charts as well. In 2012, Billboard expanded its criteria for defining record airplay, and in many cases, crossover acts have overtaken artists with followings primarily within one genre. The change has arguably hit country and R&B hardest, but hip-hop hasn’t been immune from its effects: for instance, the Korean artist Psy quite dubiously topped Billboard’s rap charts for “Gangnam Style.”

Macklemore has been beset by a similar genre controversy, as he draws his fan base largely outside of the core hip-hop community. For this reason, the Grammys’ rap committee reportedly sought to bar his nomination in that category. But it’s hard to argue that Macklemore isn’t a rapper, at least in strictly technical terms. (During the awards show, a friend of mine wondered if his song “Same Love” should be considered spoken word rather than rap or hip-hop, but I suspect that distinction would be lost among Grammy voters.)

All of these factors produce an environment in which hip-hop is, paradoxically, both mainstreamed and marginalized. Unlike in decades past, when blues artists received neither recognition nor compensation after their songs became fodder for hits by rock ‘n’ roll acts, the stakes for today’s hip-hop artists aren’t financial. But for a genre—and culture—seeking to burnish its legacy, the slight still wounds.

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A few musings on racial diversity in tech

dyed eggs

The lack of diversity in tech has been a persistent issue well before I began my career in journalism, but it seems discussion of the topic has lately reached a fever pitch. Right now, I’m doing some research on the rise of startup hubs and its impact on diversity in tech, so I was interested to read this post at the New Yorker about Silicon Valley’s “race problem.”

Among other things, the New Yorker article details how the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz has made several steps to heighten its sensitivity to the issue of diversity. Tristan Walker, the African-American founder of one company featured in the story, was previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz. And the firm recently brought on Allison Munichiello, who I had the pleasure of meeting at the Lean Startup Conference, as a partner focusing on “communities and diversity.” The firm’s efforts have already yielded some successes: it has invested in Walker’s consumer-goods company (aptly named Walker & Company), as well as a company called Proven, co-founded by a Chilean immigrant, which makes a mobile app for recruiting restaurant workers.

Despite those efforts, I was put off by a few details. First of all, I don’t think Tristan Walker is the most instructive example of Silicon Valley power brokers becoming aware of the opportunities in communities of color. Before being named entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, Walker was the director of business development at Foursquare, which though not based in Silicon Valley (but in New York, which is rivaling California’s tech prowess more and more) is still a marquee name in the land of tech startups. He already had ample access to the industry’s resources. But are investors willing to bet on talented entrepreneurs of color who aren’t yet on the inside track?

Secondly, I noticed in the article a persistent conflation of hip-hop culture and black identity. There were repeated references to rappers and hip-hop initiatives—hosting a talk with Steve Stoute, enlisting Nas as an investor in one of Andreessen Horowitz’s portfolio companies, visiting Henry Louis Gates at Harvard’s Hip Hop Archive—as part of Ben Horowitz’s outreach to black communities. But hip-hop is not the sole driver of entrepreneurial ambition in black communities, and it’s misguided to use the former as a proxy for the latter. In fact, black entrepreneurialism predates hip-hop by many decades, if not centuries, as noted by the New Yorker’s reference to Madam C.J. Walker. Simply adjusting one’s “pattern matching” to account for a few people who look like Jay Z is an incomplete solution to diversity, at best. At worst, it may end up pigeonholing black entrepreneurs who identify more with other facets of black culture.

Curiously, the New Yorker article—as well as many of the discussions that I’ve seen, whether in magazine articles, on social media, or in conference panels—doesn’t address recruiting minority tech talent in an obvious place: historically black colleges and universities. There is much hand-waving about the need for Silicon Valley to expand its networks, but I see little evidence of outreach to the organizations that have historically aided networking among black professionals, including HBCUs, Greek organizations, and civic groups such as Jack and Jill and the Links. That omission squanders valuable opportunities to expose talented students and workers to entrepreneurial paths. One cultural factor that I believe even advocates for diversity in tech may overlook is that blacks (and Latinos) often face greater pressure to pursue “safe” careers in areas that have traditionally yielded success in their communities: medicine, law, dentistry.

I sincerely hope that Silicon Valley’s efforts toward greater racial diversity go beyond the surface. But it looks like investors may simply be relying on figureheads and stereotypical tropes rather than actually challenging their assumptions of what a successful entrepreneur looks like.

Update: Tristan Walker responded to this article via Twitter. Here’s what he had to say:

Indeed, organizations such as CODE2040, Black Girls Code, and Close the Divide Project are working to address the lack of diversity in the tech industry. Much of their work focuses on the “pipeline” problem—the low number of blacks and Latinos skilled in computer science—which is a separate, though equally important, issue from how minorities currently in the industry are regarded by potential investors and employers.

As Walker points out, Andreessen Horowitz is one of CODE2040’s partners. So I find it interesting that in an article about “addressing Silicon Valley’s race problem,” we hear a lot about Steve Stoute and Nas, but nothing of, say, recruiting students from HBCUs for internships. Most of the supposed efforts to address diversity that are mentioned in the New Yorker article are cosmetic solutions, at best. Perhaps the writer simply glossed over Andreessen Horowitz’s other work in this area; indeed, the venture firm’s sponsorship of events and programs to boost minority participation in tech is briefly noted in one sentence.

However, I’m not convinced that the New Yorker is solely to blame. As a business journalist, I know that companies and organizations—particularly well-financed and highly visible ones like Andreessen Horowitz—are quite deliberate in how they present themselves, and they will do everything they can to ensure that their press clippings align with their carefully scripted narratives. So I’m hard-pressed to believe that Ben Horowitz waxed at length about diversifying the pipeline of tech talent and scouting for potential investments in new areas, but somehow all of those comments were left out.

Moreover, even the outreach efforts described in the article are limited to his own network:

Horowitz told me that he recently started an African-American “network” at Andreessen Horowitz. (“I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it out loud,” he said.) Made up of prominent black figures drawn largely from his own address book, the network includes everyone from hyper-connected C.E.O.s to rappers to entrepreneurs. [emphasis added]

Many aspiring entrepreneurs seeking to conquer Silicon Valley, especially those of color, face roadblocks because they lack the connections to gain entry into the networks investors like Horowitz operate in. Yet Horowitz’s solution is to rely upon those same closed networks to diversify his pool of potential investments. That limited approach is exactly what yields tokenism: finding a few brown faces to fit the bill without examining why so few people of color gain consideration in the first place.

If organizations such as CODE2040 are working to address systemic issues such as the lack of diversity in the talent pipeline, does it matter if firms such as Andreessen Horowitz take a cosmetic approach? I believe it does. It doesn’t take much funding to start an Internet company, but rapidly scaling such a company into the likes of a Google or Facebook requires significant capital. Those who are systematically overlooked by investors thereby face dampened prospects for their businesses’ growth. Even skilled technologists of color, whose numbers CODE2040 seeks to increase, aren’t immune to the effects of that bias.

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Beyoncé’s contradictions as a feminist

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter
Queen Bey. (Photo by Tony Duran/Parkwood Pictures Entertainment)

Why is Beyoncé so polarizing? This post over at Salon sums it up so well:

We don’t trust each other. But we need each other so much. That’s a scary place to be. And in comes Beyoncé, ripping off the band-aids to wounds that we have become conditioned to avoid rather than to confront and to heal. When she invites us to say FTW, “I woke up like this,” she invites black female vulnerability into the picture. It is an invitation to whip out our arms and legs and hearts, to flex, to stunt, to revel in our flawlessness. And to show our scars. It requires trust.

If you are an incessantly single professional black woman who is living out the realities of those statistics that are merely news fodder for everyone else, it is hard (if you’re straight and/or into masculine-identified folks) not to watch Beyoncé embracing her hubby around the neck on the video for “Drunk in Love,” without longing for that kind of touch in your own life. If you’re a 30-something feeling the pull of your biological clock, the video “Blue” featuring a laughing and ebullient Blue Ivy will make your ovaries scream. If you’re a dark-skinned black woman with a certain kind of fraught history with light-skinned black women, the video for “Pretty Hurts,” and the kind of empathy that it urges for light-skinned Beyoncé might just be rage-inducing. And if you are particularly sensitive to the ways that black women come for each other, then hearing Beyoncé instruct bitches to bow down, might just take you over the top.

Beyoncé means a lot to us. She triggers a lot for us: about desire and beauty and skin color politics and access and being chosen and being the cool kid. Because representations of black female subjectivity are so paltry in pop culture, the mainstream doesn’t know that we struggle with this kinda shit, too. Nerdy girls resent the popular pretty girls. We grow up to become feminists who are beautiful in our own right, to critique patriarchy and challenge desire. And we have a sort of smugness that says, the pretty girl who gets the guy can have all that, but she can’t be radical. That Beyoncé would even want to means she has stepped out of her lane, and lanes matter greatly.

How do we make space for black women’s awe and admiration and jealousy and desire and fear? How do we acknowledge that we have spent so much time debating whether she gets to be a feminist because the power to say who is in and who is out is in fact power? And in a world where it seems black women rarely can have it all, determining who gets to do and to have, matters.

I personally think Beyoncé is as valid a representation of (black) feminism as the fictional character Olivia Pope on ABC’s Scandal. They both embody feminism in complicated, sometimes contradictory ways–but, seriously, isn’t that true for anyone who purports to be a feminist?

As I said on Twitter, the issue is that there are so few non-stereotypical depictions of black women in popular culture that those who do break through those stereotypes, including Beyoncé, often bear much too heavy of a load.

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Appropriation v. appreciation

Painting by artist Charlie Roberts
Gandolph, Charlie Roberts. (Photo via Saint Heron)

I just came across a cool post on hip-hop and the visual arts at Saint Heron. Really interesting stuff, but this quote from one of the interviewed artists, Charlie Roberts, is pretty off-putting:

I’m a White guy who loves rap and makes rap, so maybe I am a little too close to the question to answer it, but I have noticed that most of the handwringing in the press about these issues (i.e. Miley Cyrus) comes from the White media. It feels that hip hop and rap have opened up a lot in the Internet age, with regards to race, gender and sexual orientation.

Appropriation isn’t a matter of simply borrowing from another culture—it’s taking practices from another culture without showing respect. That lack of respect is especially evident when such appropriation is simply a vehicle to money and (greater) fame (e.g. Miley, since she’s already been used as an example).

Also, the issue here might not be that Roberts is white, but rather that he’s a rap artist. Rappers didn’t criticize Miley Cyrus, and haven’t criticized similar acts of appropriation, because they themselves often profit from gross stereotypes of black culture. Before they can speak out against this, they themselves have to look in the mirror.

Make no mistake, though: the issue of cultural appropriation isn’t an invention of the white media. Plenty of people of color are speaking out against it.

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Redskins: a sorry tradition

Washington Redskins flag

The New York Times‘ William Rhoden recently wrote a column condemning Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder for refusing to rename his team.

My two cents:

Many will argue that Rhoden’s comparison of Snyder to George Wallace and George Preston Marshall is hyperbolic. I disagree.

It’s an inescapable fact that the Redskins’ history and imagery are steeped in racism. Rhoden didn’t even mention the Redskins fight song, which originally contained such lyrical gems as “Fight for old Dixie” and “Scalp ‘em!” This is one big reason I have never and will never support the team. (That, and they’re just generally wack. But I digress.) And please, don’t bother mentioning RG3 or Doug Williams. It’s the football equivalent of “some of my best friends are black.”

That Snyder is defending the team’s name with an appeal to history and tradition is, hence, absurd.

But this is an issue that won’t be resolved by a national poll. How aware are most people about issues regarding Native Americans in the first place? How many Americans interact with people who identify as Native American on a regular basis? (Note the phrasing: I’m not talking about people who claim they’re part Cherokee—because that’s the one tribe folks seem to know—on their mother’s side as a fun tidbit to toss out at parties.)

I think this entire issue is so charged, yet so easily dismissed, because awareness of Native American stereotypes lags far behind that of most racial or ethnic groups in the U.S. It’s easy for the vast majority of Americans to view this as an abstract issue, or at best, to protest that there are “more important” things for Native Americans to worry about, as if people can only be concerned with one thing at a time. But as a black woman, I know well that representation matters. Just look at the “doll test,” the famous psychology study used in the Brown case that dismantled school segregation.

And it really doesn’t matter that there are some Native Americans that are fine with the name. I’ve even seen defenses of the term “redskin” along the lines of it supposedly being an honorific. (Yes, please do go call a person of Native heritage a “redskin” and see how “honored” that person will feel.) Some black folks are fine with using the word “nigger.” But most people wouldn’t dare throw out that term casually, let alone apply it to a sports team.

Ultimately, it’s the notion of the “positive stereotype,” repackaged. Just like black men are supposed to be flattered by images that play up their virility by likening them to beasts (see: Mandingo), Native Americans should be honored by being represented as “noble savages” in sports teams’ mascots. Supposedly.

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A new model for civil rights: Obama at Morehouse

The crowd at Morehouse College's commencement.

On Sunday, President Obama addressed the graduating Class of 2013 at Morehouse College, which also awarded him an honorary doctorate. (You can find a transcript and video of his speech here and here, respectively.) His speech, while seemingly well-received by his audience at Morehouse, has drawn criticism from several commentators, including Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic, whose work I greatly respect. He and others argue that Obama’s Morehouse speech reflects a tendency of his to scold black audiences on personal responsibility while failing to address flawed policies that harm black communities. I’d like to submit a rebuttal to their claims.

It’s true that in many of his addresses to black audiences, President Obama discusses the importance of personal responsibility. I have no problem with this: there’s much value in getting “real talk” from someone who has shared experiences (e.g. having to overcome personal adversity and discrimination). This is why Obama’s address to Chicago in the wake of Hadiya Pendleton’s murder is different from his address to Newtown after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting: inner-city Chicago, like inner-city black America at large, deals with drugs, gangs, and gun violence on a regular basis; suburban Newtown does not. But I also believe that “real talk” must be balanced with a recognition of the institutional obstacles black Americans in particular still face. Focusing solely one or the other, as many left-wing and right-wing activists often do, generally ends up in empty rhetoric.

That said, every speech must be tailored to its particular audience. For a college commencement ceremony, an occasion marking the beginning of one’s independent journey into the world, I think an emphasis on what one can do personally to be successful is quite fitting. And in the context of black communities, where personal shortcomings are often magnified by structural adversity, it is especially appropriate. Furthermore, Morehouse prides itself on the archetype of the “Morehouse Man,” someone who is both a pillar of his individual community and black society at large. And, as Obama noted, industriousness is a core value of the Morehouse Man:

I understand there’s a common fraternity creed here at Morehouse: “Excuses are tools of the incompetent used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness.”

In fact, one thing I liked about President Obama’s speech was it that reflected upon black America’s history of resilience and achievement by citing examples specific to Morehouse, both past and present. This is, in my opinion, what saved it from becoming yet another stern lecture wrapped up in a black history lesson. (In contrast, the First Lady’s commencement speech at Bowie State University was much less successful.)

Yet Obama is full aware that how today’s graduates participate in their communities in order to carry out the Morehouse tradition will—and must—look different than the efforts of previous generations. Increasingly, civil rights initiatives require both intra- and inter-community efforts.

This notion, incidentally, is also what informs President Obama’s own policy initiatives. Some of his critics from within black communities—among the most prominent being Cornel West and Tavis Smiley—have derided this approach. They have argued that programs such as the Affordable Care and Jobs acts aren’t enough to address the dearth of employment that specifically plague black Americans. But in his Morehouse address, Obama lays out a two-pronged strategy for contemporary activism. I cite the following passages in particular:

So, yes, go get that law degree. But if you do, ask yourself if the only option is to defend the rich and the powerful, or if you can also find some time to defend the powerless. Sure, go get your MBA, or start that business. We need black businesses out there. But ask yourselves what broader purpose your business might serve, in putting people to work, or transforming a neighborhood. The most successful CEOs I know didn’t start out intent just on making money—rather, they had a vision of how their product or service would change things, and the money followed.

Some of you may be headed to medical school to become doctors. But make sure you heal folks in underserved communities who really need it, too. For generations, certain groups in this country—especially African Americans—have been desperate in need of access to quality, affordable health care. And as a society, we’re finally beginning to change that.

[…]

And finally, as you do these things, do them not just for yourself, but don’t even do them just for the African American community. I want you to set your sights higher. At the turn of the last century, W.E.B. Du Bois spoke about the “talented tenth”—a class of highly educated, socially conscious leaders in the black community. But it’s not just the African American community that needs you. The country needs you. The world needs you.

At the government level, President Obama aims to shape and execute policy that realizes fully fleshed civil rights—not just theoretical rights but tangible access to the resources that all productive citizens need—for Americans of all races. But at the grassroots level, he implores the Morehouse graduates, and by extension, black America at large, to bolster those efforts by becoming role models not only for their own communities but for the nation. By serving their neighbors through their specific callings, he suggests, they can change and inspire America as a whole.

In other words, President Obama is calling for a new, radically inclusive approach to activism. Previous civil rights movements have been self-contained: while often inspired by and patterned after those of other groups, they served the interests of one specific community. But Obama is challenging today’s young adults to finally realize a society in which successful figures of color are considered exemplars for America as a whole, not just for people of color in America—and, ultimately, a society in which “civil rights” is immediately understood to be rights for all. In the wake of challenges to affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act, that’s an important message.