It aint easy being black

If Kermit the frog, thought it was hard being green, he should have spent some time being black. It seems like every time I turn around I'm hearing more and more about how blacks have higher rates of sickness, higher incarceration rates, lower educational achievement, lower salaries, on and on and on. As a black man myself, for me it always felt like there was a huge bifurcation in the community, on one hand you have the blacks who are driving those statistics and on the other hand you have blacks like me who are well educated, have fancy jobs, probably aren't going to go to jail (I hope!) and exist as the perpetual counterpoint to those aforementioned underachievers.

The other day I saw an ad that really spoke directly to this sense of a split community
















That's an ad by 100 Black men's Baton Rouge chapter (if you don't know about 100 black men you should definitely check out the website. They are a national nonprofit that provides services to black men to help them stay on the right track). Technically speaking I don't hate this ad. I'm not in love with it but it's simple, big, has an interesting image, clear next steps, all in all not a bad execution of a billboard ad. The thing that really struck me about the ad was that it set up a false choice that I think often makes things so difficult for so many black men.

I was fortunate enough to be raised in a home where "pinstripes" was a perfectly achievable goal, and therefore, I did the things I had to do to make sure that I'm able to afford my fancy suits, but for many of my peers, pinstripes is an unattainable goal. Many black men couldn't imagine themselves in corporate settings (and the homogeneity of the corporate world and the potentially discriminatory hiring practices isn't exactly helping) so the only other option that they see is the 'prison stripes'.

I always say, as marketers for causes, we have to do better, and I believe this was a case of a marketer sacrificing the message for a pithy line. Am I being nit picky? Yes. Do I think that this is important? Yes. If you set up an argument in the viewers mind that has a foregone conclusion ("I'm never going to get to pinstripes, so it's prison stripes for me") the viewer won't follow up on your call to action. Rather than being a provocative question that deserves investigation by going to your website, you end up with a statement that may end up actually playing against your mission. There are plenty of alternatives to prison stripes and you've got to make your destination a place for people to go to learn what those alternatives are.

We've got to do better.