But Garcia's book isn't just about dollars and cents, or even dollars and diversity. It's also about changing perceptions through the concept of "multicultural chic" or the notion that ethic is the new cool. As he notes, a 2002 study of 31 mainstream magazine covers indicated that one in five, or about 20%, depicted a minority; even five years earlier, the figure was only 12.7%. Over the same period of time, fashion magazines almost doubled their use of nonwhite cover models, and Garcia says that "Brown has become the new white, especially to the MTV generation, which was reared on the ethnically and sexually diverse images of music videos and shows like Road Rules and The Real World. And it is also reflected in the success of "new mainstream" toys like David Gonzales' Homies (including Boby Loco, the bouncer down at the Homie Hot Spot, his friend Hollywood, and Wino, the former dot com millionaire who now has his friends buy him drinks) and the efforts Mattel is making to come up with a multicultural doll that doesn't carry some of the cultural baggage of Ms. WASP herself, the ubiquitous Barbie.
I was reading this book one night while watching Sunday Night Football on ESPN (yes, I multitask: my wife is just happy the stereo isn't going at the same time). And I couldn't help but be struck by the juxtaposition of Garcia's ideas of intersecting cultures (which ultimately produce something unique, as both the original culture and the new culture are modified through the merger) with what I saw on TV. The game was a blowout, but late in the fourth quarter a defensive player on the losing team hit somebody for a loss. He jumped to his feet and did a little shimmy dance number across the field. The commentators (all white) couldn't believe it - "Just do your job," one said. Another said something like, "Your team's down by twenty points, guy. Don't do that."
The point is that there are several perceptions of behavior, all largely cultural. From one vantage point, it's something along the lines of: don't draw attention to yourself, just play the game and let the way you play show how good you are. And then there's the attitude reflected by someone like Terrell Owens doing sit-ups in the endzone after a touchdown. Self-expression, self-promotion, emotional demonstration, whatever you want to call it, ultimately what we're seeing is a measure of the intersection between the old and the new.
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