Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby

Author:Tanner Colby [Colby, Tanner]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101583692
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

By 2008, my last year in advertising, I was mostly freelancing part-time, but I’d spent close to nine years working on and off at a total of five different agencies, all of it during a time of mounting legal and public pressure to hire minorities. Yet I can count the number of black people I worked with on one hand—not including the ones who emptied the wastebaskets or installed the telephones.

Moving from full-time to freelance and back again, from one agency to the next, I never had to sit for a single performance evaluation or go on a single job interview save the first one. I never had to produce a résumé, a portfolio, or fill out any sort of application. I just kept getting work because I knew the people doing the hiring because they’d known the people who’d hired them; just a few years in and some of us were already management. All that time I had one foot out the door because what I really wanted was to “be a writer.” Yet by the end of my run, I’d tripled my pay rate, was using a window office overlooking the Hudson River, and had been offered a managerial slot that came with a very decent low-six-figure salary. My cubicle-mate? The guy with the degree in furniture design? He was running the department. He’s the guy who offered me the job.

I’ve since been told—by those who defend Madison Avenue’s hiring practices—that my experience in the industry was some sort of anomaly, that you’re not supposed to be able to skate through the system and get as far as I did the way that I did. Maybe. But I’m pretty sure I’m not that clever, and I know I’m not that charming. The truth is that a bunch of kids out of college happened to be in the right place at the right time and the world started dumping money in our laps.

Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good summary of how the entire modern advertising industry was born. After World War II, a bunch of white guys in New York happened to be in the right place at the right time the last time the next big thing came along. And, no, it wasn’t television. Madison Avenue became what it is today—incredibly lucrative and permanently divided—thanks to the federally subsidized, racially restricted suburb.

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