Michiko Kakutani reviews Leon E. Wynter's American Skin:
- Anyone who's been watching television the last couple of years will be familiar with what Leon E. Wynter calls "the browning of mainstream commercial culture" in America. It's not just the high profile of black superstars like Michael Jordan and Oprah, and mixed-race celebrities like Tiger Woods (and the "American Idol" runner-up Justin Guarini). It's ads like the 2000 Budweiser "Whassup?!" commercials, featuring four little-known black men talking black street talk, and the 1999 Pepsi ad starring a little white girl who can channel Aretha Franklin. It's Brandy playing Cinderella (with Whitney Houston as her Fairy Godmother) in Disney's 1997 television remake, and Eddie Murphy succeeding Rex Harrison in the role of Doctor Dolittle. It's black women going blond, and white women wearing dreadlocks, and suburban kids grooving to hip-hop.
...."There's been a radical shift in the place of race and ethnicity in American commercial culture since the late 1970's," he writes. "Near revolutionary developments in advertising, media, marketing, technology and global trade have in the last two decades of the 20th century nearly obliterated walls that have stood for generations between nonwhites and the image of the American dream. The mainstream, heretofore synonymous with what is considered average for whites, is now equally defined by the preferences, presence and perspectives of people of color.
"The much maligned melting pot, into which generations of European American identities are said to have dissolved," he continues, "is bubbling again, but on a higher flame; this time whiteness itself is finally being dissolved into a larger identity that includes blacks, Hispanics and Asians."
....But with Michael Jackson's mega-hit 1983 album, "Thriller," Mr. Wynter argues, the equation irrevocably changed, and by the end of the 80's "color was weaving through music, sports, television, news media and literature in a bold band that had never been seen before." The color line in the Miss America contest was broken four times in one decade. The nonwhite all-American sports icon became a marketing focal point for the National Basketball Association and the Olympics, and advertisers began to realize that "transracial sells."
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