ABSTRACT
In his 2010 book Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority, marketing communications pioneer Tom Burrell argues that, in America, the wholesale marketing and branding campaign of blacks as subhuman not only has reinforced white superiority and black inferiority to justify slavery within a democracy, but also perpetually “weakens the impulse to understand or help those still scorched at the bottom of America’s melting pot” (p. 4). From colonial times and reconstruction well into the Civil Rights era and twenty-first century, this marketing campaign has functioned as a “tsunami of words and images that promote an image of black inferiority” and echoes W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1903/1989) observation that, “In propaganda against the Negro since emancipation in this land, we face one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings.” He noted that this effort included the participation of universities, spanning “history, science, social life, and religion.”
