Some of My Best Friends Are Black (35 page)

In high school, Vann had been told by one of his white teachers that he would never go to college, that he wasn’t even equipped to graduate from high school. Today, Vann has one master’s degree completed and is working on his second, from Harvard. “The racism started early,” he says, and he wouldn’t have gotten past it but for his family behind him, pushing him. But in applying to college, other than vague thoughts about advertising, all Vann really knew was that he wanted to see the world outside Richmond. This was not the world he’d seen on
Bewitched
, but one that came into his living room every Thursday night on NBC.

Had W. E. B. Du Bois been a television critic, he might have written about the “twoness” of
The Cosby Show
. What the Children of White Flight took from
Cosby
—certainly what I took from it—was that black people were Just Like Us. Black doctor and black lawyer in a nice big house. Nothing not normal about that. Several hundred miles away in Richmond, Vann was watching a completely different program than I was. What the Children of the Dream took from
Cosby
was to honor their cultural forebears, stay true to their black identity, follow that, and
that
would bring them the American Dream.

When it first aired,
Cosby
was often criticized for showing only the comfortable, middle-class life of a black doctor and attorney, for avoiding the problems of race. But in its own way,
Cosby
was all about race. The painting that hung in Cliff and Claire Huxtable’s living room was a seminal work from Harlem Renaissance artist Ellis Wilson. When Cliff goes to a school charity auction, he gets caught up bidding on a vintage LP of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.” The defiant stance of black identity made by the Brother in the Blue Dashiki had been framed all too often as a rejection of whatever was white, but the quiet revolution of
Cosby
was to celebrate black accomplishment in and of itself. Being black wasn’t predicated on rejecting anything; it was entirely consonant with mainstream American success.

One thing the Huxtables were proudest of was that Mom and Dad had met and courted at the historically black Hillman College, a lightly fictionalized
stand-in for Howard University in Washington, D.C., itself sometimes known as the “black Harvard” or simply “the Mecca.” Wanting to carry on that tradition, when the show’s third season began in the fall of 1986, Denise Huxtable goes off to school at Hillman. For all of Vann’s senior year in high school, Denise was on TV calling home every Thursday night, loving black college life. The very next fall, the story of her sophomore year was picked up in the
Cosby
spin-off,
A Different World
. When it did, Vann was watching from his dorm room at Howard. “There was this new resurgence of black pride brought on by the world of
Cosby
,” he says. “There was pride in historically black colleges and things that stemmed from the African-American culture. Why wouldn’t you want to be a part of that? I remember watching the very first episode of
A Different World
and hearing the Whitley Gilbert character saying, ‘Richmond was so hot you could fry an egg on a Jaguar.’ As goofy as it may sound, I saw that someone from
my
hometown had made it. It wasn’t far from reality. A black kid from Richmond
can
go to college, can go beyond Richmond. A lot of the kids that went to Howard then, if you ask them what pushed them as far as seeing what was possible, at some point they’re going to reference back to
The Cosby Show
.”

The year after Denise Huxtable went off to Hillman, applications to America’s historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, spiked by 14 percent nationwide. They had been on the rise, in fact, since the early 1980s. In 1983, America’s majority-white colleges reported their first overall dip in black student attendance since the civil-rights era. That same year, Howard’s enrollment spiked by 25 percent, many of them transfers from those same white schools. Black college presidents boasted of a cultural homecoming. Their students had “gotten over” the assimilationist notions that white schools were inherently better. In December of ’83,
Ebony
reported a “dramatic comeback” in the growth and vitality of black fraternities and sororities, on both black and white campuses alike. So many applications that “we just can’t accommodate all of them,” said the president of Alpha Phi Alpha, the historic fraternity that boasted alumni ranging from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to the Olympian Jesse Owens. It was a generational shift. The Children of the Dream were coming of age and going off to
college, and, like all college students, many were rebelling against the mantle that others had tried to put on them. “Part of the reason a lot of African Americans went to HBCUs at that time,” Vann says “was because our parents had sent us to white high schools to give us opportunity or we’d been bused to a white high school, but many of us felt isolated and cut off. We were the Children of the Dream, but we also wanted to have some kind of shared experience in the African-American culture.”

Being at Howard during the
Cosby
renaissance, Vann enjoyed his shared experience in the culture. He joined his classmates in reviving the spirit of the sixties, occupying the campus administration building to protest the appointment of Republican Lee Atwater to Howard’s board. A fellow classmate, Sean “Puffy/Puff Daddy/P. Diddy” Combs, was lighting up the campus with epic dance parties, landmark events in the emerging hip-hop scene that would soon come to dominate the country’s cultural landscape. An exciting time, all in all, even if he had to work three part-time jobs and take a few semesters off to save enough to pay his way through. Graduating in the Class of ’93 with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, Vann took his diploma to look for work on lily-white Madison Avenue, and there he quickly realized the one thing his historically black college had not given him.

“It’s all who you know,” he says, “and I didn’t know anyone.”

Given the way black high schools in the South were shattered under court-ordered integration, black America’s attachment to its own colleges is tenacious. Still today over 20 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to blacks are earned at HBCUs. According to the United Negro College Fund, black colleges produce 70 percent of all black dentists, 50 percent of black attorneys, 50 percent of black engineers, and, consistently, more than half of all black PhDs in the last twenty years. If you look closely, however, you’ll see that those are all credentialed professions. It’s no coincidence that Cliff and Clair Huxtable found success as a doctor and a lawyer, respectively. Pass your medical boards or the bar exam, and you get called up to the show. Unfortunately, like advertising, a sizable chunk of the American economy doesn’t offer professional credentialing of any kind. Qualifications are softer, more vague, and more susceptible to racial
bias. I’ve yet to come across the figures boasting of black colleges’ success in social and cultural industries like media and publishing; I suspect those figures don’t exist.

Another fact often touted by HBCUs is that they produce half of all black students who go on to earn a graduate degree. An impressive stat, until you flip it over. Oftentimes, when you come out of an HBCU, you
have
to go to grad school because you’ve put yourself in the wrong pipeline. After Howard, already swimming in student loans, Vann Graves moved to New York and enrolled in the master’s program at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Pratt is an art and design school with a strong feeder program for the advertising industry; Vann had to backtrack his way into the business. From Pratt, he landed a summer internship at BBDO through the 4A’s Minority Advertising Intern Program. Vann got the chance to do some work on the Pepsi account. He thought that would be the thing to get him noticed, but his big break wound up being something entirely unexpected. “Phil Dusenberry was one of the original Mad Men,” Vann says. “He ran all of BBDO. He called me to his office one day, and he said, ‘I need you to help work on a special project, a Christmas card.’

“A Christmas card? Then he clarified. It wasn’t his Christmas card. It was his
dog’s
Christmas card—a senior art director was working on his. But I said, ‘You know what? I’m gonna bust my ass on this.’ Fa la la la la, bow wow, meow, and the rest is history. I had to go back to finish my degree, but Phil called me twice and said, ‘When you’re done with school, I want you back at the agency.’” In 1993, Vann joined BBDO as a permanent, part-time assistant art director. He was one of three black creatives in the entire agency, out of about two hundred fifty.

Two years before Vann arrived at Pratt to start his master’s, Geoff Edwards had already left with his bachelor’s, headed to take a job at Chiat/Day/Mojo. Geoff had come to New York for college by way of Detroit. Where Vann had been inspired by the Cosby kids, Geoff was a Cosby kid. He’d gone to one of the best private high schools in the country, University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy. His father, a doctor, had emigrated from Guyana in South America to go to medical school. His mother, Motown born and raised, was a chemistry teacher in the city school system.

“Advertising is one of those callings that you don’t choose,” Edwards says. “It chooses you. Your unique perspective and creativity come from things you see and experience in life, and advertising is a career that no one is exposed to early on; I certainly wasn’t. I just knew that I wanted to be an artist. I grew up drawing. Anything creative I could get my hands on, I did. At Pratt, you had to declare a major sophomore year. My dad said, ‘What are you going to do?’ I told him I wanted to be a painter. He said, ‘Okay, what do you want to do for a
living
?’

“This is my father, who grew up without shoes in a house of eight brothers and sisters in South America, came to the United States, and became a doctor. So to hear his son say ‘I want to go paint on canvases’ wasn’t something he thought was great. So that pushed me to things like graphic design, industrial design. Finally, someone mentioned advertising. It was a unique combination of all the things that I love—photography, motion picture, storytelling. The more I got into it, the more I liked it.

“At the time, Chiat/Day was the best advertising agency in America. They were like the Yankees. When I graduated, I told my teacher that’s where I wanted to go. She said, ‘You should have a second choice. They don’t take a lot of people.’

“I said, ‘That’s why I want to go there.’”

And he went, first as an intern and then moving up to art director. “I was the only chocolate chip in the cookie,” he says. “I had no idea it was going to be that abrupt. Fortunately my name was not a barrier, spelled the way it is—Geoffrey Taylor Edwards. With that on my résumé, I don’t think anyone ever expected me to show up.”

Vann Graves and Geoff Edwards were both Children of the Dream. Both came out of the same school and started out in the same job at around the same time. Both were at major agencies renowned for producing some of the best work in the industry. And both were almost totally alone in a vast ocean of white dudes, neither of them given a whole lot of guidance to help show the way. One of them had an easier time of it than the other.

Much like Hollywood pats itself on the back every year with the Oscars and the Golden Globes, advertising agencies celebrate their own annual
achievements with awards shows like the One Show, the Clios, the Cannes Lions, and through institutions like the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame. Big-name creative directors submit their work to be judged, and other big-name creative directors do the judging. Then the following year they all switch places.

The lawyers from the NAACP say they want the industry to institute a credentialing process and uniform standards for promotion, metrics for a racial accounting system. But there’s no rational standard for assessing the value of a commercial. You either like the creepy ETrade baby or you don’t. Some commercials are inspired ideas that in the end sell no products. The ads that sell the most products—discount coupons—require no thought or talent at all. There is no metric. Which is why the most sophisticated performance evaluation system the industry has ever developed is to have a bunch of dudes get together in a hotel ballroom, drink way too much, and then sit around telling each other that they’re awesome. You earn promotions in advertising by “getting your name out there.” You show up at events with the right look, shake hands, win awards, and generally create the impression that “you’re the guy.”