Racial Rumors: Do(n’t) Believe the Hype

For similar reasons that people of color and other marginalized communities hesitate to trust every word uttered from a TV screen or printed on a page, a sense of distrust is also common when such people of color are finally receiving attention, and positive attention at that. People of color had been ignored as a consumer group for a long while, mainly because their buying power is still fairly new. The brown, black, and yellow bourgeoisie is a fairly new group in this country, less than a century old, thanks to restrictive immigration laws (i.e. Chinese Exclusion Act), racist banking/ financing /loan /business policies, internment, ghettoization and slavery, so when someone pays a little attention to how much money they are spending and on what goods, people become suspicious and even defensive. The new attention could be considered a case of community brown-nosing, if you will. When a brand is all but modest in its attempt to call attention to its particular connection to a specific community, accusations of sycophantism are likely, mainly because it demonstrates a role-reversal of catastrophic proportions. Wait a second, they care about US? Something MUST be wrong—hence the rumors. A bit of territorialism also works in conjunction with suspicion, thus catalyzing the rumors in their infancy.

Tommy Hilfiger clothing is a perfect example. A company run by a white American male at one point had a very large “ethnic” buying population. In addition, Hilfiger wares were being endorsed directly and indirectly by celebrities of color. What did that mean for black-owned clothing companies (i.e. Karl Kani, Phat Farm) that produced similar designs and geared their advertising directly to communities of color? Wouldn’t the introduction of Tommy Hilfiger’s clothing line to such communities affect the aforementioned black-owned design companies?

Possibly. However, as I do not know Hilfiger’s intentions, nor have I carefully considered outside factors like a) the reasons why his clothes were so popular in non-white ethnic communities or b) the level of access people of color generally had to his clothing (either by the location of stores that sold his clothing and/or based on price), the effect his company had on the success of clothing companies owned by people of color at the peak of his popularity, for example, would be hard for me to gauge and even more difficult to prove as a direct result of his presence.

Assumed market dominance plays a significant role in the perpetuation of racial rumors, due in part to the limitations people of color often face(d) as they attempt(ed) to engage in business, even that which is marketed for their own communities. Yet the rumors related to healthcare and food have a much darker history, one that is hard to ignore and write-off as simple suspicion or old-wives’ tale. For example, Church’s Chicken, a fried chicken establishment found in predominantly lower-income black neighborhoods in Memphis, Tennessee, where I grew up, faced a nasty racial rumor of its own. Church’s Chicken was rumored to have had a goal to eradicate poverty in the black community in its own way, one about as creative as a scandalous proposal suggested in 2005 as a means to lower crime: by way of sterilization. Church’s supposedly laced all its chicken with chemicals that would destroy the reproductive capabilities of all who ingested it. Of course, the rumor wasn’t true, but cases of sterilization (ahem. . . eugenics, anyone?) and biological testing on people of color, the poor, and the mentally ill happened frequently in the past and continues in the present.

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