the richards group’s racist ‘crisis’ and the colonialism of white apologetics
This October stan richards — advertising mogul, founder of esteemed/eponymous ad agency the richards group, and namesake of the University of Texas’s stan richards School of Advertising and Public Relations — was caught being a racist.
Motel 6, a longtime richards client, announced the end of their relationship with the agency after stan called creative showcasing Black artists “too black,” arguing it would alienate the brand’s “white supremacist constituents.”
(If a company known for reporting its guest lists to ICE fires you for being too racist, you’re… way too fucking racist…)
The brouhaha from the resulting customer exodus — richards is one of the primary job providers for not only its own staff but the creative and production teams of many other Dallas organizations — presents a vivid window into white racial analysis and the way white response to racial ‘crises’ compounds, exacerbates, and oftentimes exceeds the harm levied by the initial event, by centering whiteness and dominating the conversation with uninformed, unlived racial analysis, and by reinforcing white power.
when everyone who agrees with you looks like you, and everyone who doesn’t look like you disagrees, it’s time to stop talking and start listening
white domination in non-white domains
white voices dominate this country’s conversation on race. In a republic-lite that is increasingly racially diverse, white thought and white voice grips tightly to the power it has to construct the narrative (and decide who are its heroes and who are its victims) in conversations about racism.
(white opinion is entirely irrelevant in the analysis of racism, because white people do not experience racism)
A search on LinkedIn for the hashtag #therichardsgroup shows the sheer volume of response in the professional sphere to the ‘crisis’ at richards. Browsing this commentary, one prominent theme emerges: praise and defense and excuse is exceedingly white, and what rare BIPOC commentary exists is almost exclusively critical.
Note the inversion in that algebra: when, effectively, everyone who agrees with you looks like you, and everyone who doesn’t look like you disagrees, it’s time to stop talking and start listening
The former describes agreement within a single homogenous perspective, while the latter describes agreement across multiple, divergent perspectives.
Layering in the reality that BIPOC across multiple backgrounds experience racism in a variety of forms, and that white people do not experience racism in any form, which analysis seems more worthy of consideration?
BIPOC silence in the presence of loud whiteness should be deafening.
The absence of white thought
Silence because we’re watching you loudly voice your opinions and getting things completely wrong, signaling ‘I not only believe I am qualified to speak on this topic and even to debate the people harmed, I might fight you and exercise my whiteness to demean and diminish you if you attempt to inform me from your lived experience.’
And yes, this is a thing that happens. Frequently. And this frequency informs BIPOC experience and the way we move about the world.
The voluminous white commentary on richards, in grandiose self-ignorance, misses several critical components of racism:
It’s not about the event
A CEO and richards alum wrote a popular LinkedIn article about the incident in which she captured, perfectly, white consensus on this issue:
“Stan Richards said a terrible phrase in what should have been a safe space (a creative internal) to discuss the merits of an ad. He was wrong. He apologized. Then he fired himself. It’s over.”
- Kristina Jonathan, LinkedIn (emphasis mine)
(there should be no safe place for racism, overt or not)
white people (the overwhelming majority who have ‘upvoted’ her essay on LinkedIn) consistently focus on the event, rather than on the latent racism the event reveals. It’s not the phrase; it’s what the phrase tells you about stan’s values. It’s what the context in which it was used tells you about how he built his business, his relationships, his organization, and its structures and culture.
The specific moment in which stan was caught is wildly irrelevant in comparison to the wide value system he was caught holding and perpetuating. Several beliefs are made clear by the statement itself and subsequent interviews with stan:
it is acceptable to cater to white supremacy at the expense of minority representation for brand security
it is acceptable to make racist statements in private domains
Layer in that richards has a prominent history of working with anti-LGBTQIA+ organizations like chik fil a, the salvation army, and hobby lobby, and another, governing belief emerges:
it is acceptable to service the oppression of minorities with business and branding
What’s most relevant is how these core beliefs influenced stan’s decisionmaking, his perspective, his leadership. What’s systemic is how his positions of power as an educator, an agency founder and CEO, and an eccentric, celebrity advertising leader amplified these core beliefs and propagated them across his industry, his locale, and beyond. One online commenter enrolled to study advertising specifically to work at the richards group. stan richards possesses both reach and influence.
It’s not about the man
In the same way that white liberals and moderates alike have galvanized to dethrone trump and… bring us back to regular racism… white response seems to infer that removing richards resolves the racism at richards.
(It doesn’t.)
This country’s obsession with individualism certainly contributes, but white racial allyship seems to exist explicitly to search for and crucify villainous ‘racists,’ rather than defend, support, and restore the BIPOCs harmed.
stan exists within a system — much of it his own creation, yes — but he exists in a larger system of market-conscious advertising and capital interest within a broader society incubated by racism. Removing the man does nothing to fix the system, and bloodthirsty white allyship serves only whiteness and it in fact alienates white centrists. It serves white satisfaction and white heroism and in doing so it harms non-white everything.
(BIPOCs should not be burdened with concerns about alienating their audiences, as it is not BIPOCs responsibility to educate on or resolve their own oppression)
One litmus test I use to quickly gauge #whitepeopledanger is pronouns: does the white person I’m speaking with refer to white racist behavior using “we” or “they?” “They” signals that to the speaker, racism is something other white people commit. “They,” especially with theatrical vigor, signals to me that the speaker lacks the self-awareness and humility requisite for interested allyship, and is more invested in the idea that they are one of the Good White People™ than they are in the idea that they should be.
There are no good white people.
There are no good white people.
There are no good white people when it comes to racism, because racism isn’t about the goodness of white people; it’s about dismantling the systems built and upheld, actively and by participation, by white people to ensure their continued dominance, power, and prosperity over non-white people.
It’s not about the impact to white people
While stan has gloriously and without a shred of irony made his formal apology about himself, white commentary has done the same.
On LinkedIn, post after post after post centers the impact to the richards group’s business, its employees, even richards himself, and not the community directly harmed.
(Impact to capital and production — and its very human components — is indirect when the initiating event is racism)
Disappointingly, white women are doing this in droves. It is remarkable how white women can register the injustice in centering ‘his bright future’ in men’s sexual violence against women, and simultaneously center impact-to-whites in conversations about white racial violence against people of color.
(To white women: can you recall what you felt in reading “a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him” following a six month sentence, and appreciate why it might be upsetting to see this?
Can you please say the words “justice brett kavanaugh” out loud before ever raising your voice over a pigmented person’s lived reality of racism?)
Removing stan richards does not remove the core values he bled into his company, its culture, and specifically the people who have planted their careers in richards’ soil.
Having a crisis does not, without intentional and intensive work, result in awareness of the issue’s root cause and solution
An orthogonal but personally-important note: this Halloween was the 140th anniversary of the hop alley riots, during which Denver’s Chinatown was razed, its businesses plundered, its residents jailed and beaten. Our once-bustling Chinese community in Denver (it was bigger than San Francisco) has never recovered. The only memorial of this event is a plaque sitting where Chinatown once stood downtown (now “bro-do,” to Denverites) adorned with three names: those of three whites who stood up to the mob to defend the Chinese. No Chinese, not even Sing Lee (or Look Young? accounts differ, speaking to the indifference white media has on Asian lives), the man beaten until his face was unrecognizable as human and then hanged until death, received the honor of a mention.
(To whiteness, even race riots are about white heroism)
This is the white racial lens, and it is this exclusive lens by which whites are commenting on the issue of richards’ racism. Each comment ignoring the impact to the community directly harmed is a new cut; each comment redeeming the racist or praising his defensive, self-centered non-apology is a reminder to all of us that you define the narrative and you do so consistently in support of white power with no awareness of the racial dynamics in play.
It’s not about your “second chance.”
It’s not about your learning and growth.
It’s not about your redemption.
It’s not about you.
It is about how the richards group’s response upholds white power
Everyone makes mistakes. Pencils have erasers. Last week I accidentally locked my dog outside during a conference call. 7% of americans surveyed in 2019 selected Mounds bars as their favorite halloween candy.
stan’s gaffe was not a mistake; it was a revelation.
It is entirely reasonable for people to want the richards group and its employees to learn and grow from this, and most do deserve a second chance.
It is entirely unreasonable for the people who have led the company in its racist status quo to expect to learn at the expense of people they harm while remaining in active leadership without doing intensive education, with massive humility, about their blind spots. Removing stan richards does not remove the core values he bled into his company, its culture, and specifically the people who have planted their careers in richards’ soil. Having a crisis does not, without intentional and intensive work, result in awareness of the issue’s root cause and solution.
stan richards’ successor, glenn dady, gives a hint as to how he will be leading forward in the company’s press release around its founder’s exit, with the unironic URL path ‘/change:’
“In the over four decades I have had the privilege of working at The Richards Group, the agency has never been party to nor tolerated racism in any form”
- glenn dady, the richards group
Which is to say he will be leading with the belief that he is 1) qualified to evaluate racism he does not personally experience and was not able to catch, not even once, in forty years, and 2) racism has not occurred at richards.
Despite it having occurred at richards.
Despite multiple public ex-employee attestations to racism at richards.
Despite the press release being necessitated by actual documented racism from the company’s founder and chief.
It is about how white bystanders respond as a phalanx of whiteness and erase non-white voices
The harm caused isn’t limited to the lost opportunities, the overt-but-subtle erasure, or the harmful statements. Those things hurt, but they are things Black, Indigenous, and other people of color deal with every day.
The real harm is the loud white dialogue missing all of the points.
The real harm is the inescapable and impenetrable coordinated, consistent, event-focused, system-ignorant, white-centered deluge that is outspoken whiteness on the topic of racism.
The real harm is the sheer amplitude by which the armies of whiteness can self-congratulate and applaud their single-vision analysis while ignoring voices of color in their unironic bleach chamber devoid of lived experience on the topic.
The real harm is the subsequent dismissal, diminishment, and violent tone policing of any non-white person who dares speak to their actual lived experience.
The real harm is the tokenization of any single affirming BIPOC voice to deny and dismiss overwhelming criticality among all people of all non-white experience.
This real harm reinforces what I find personally to be the most devastating impact of racism: the powerlessness.
The powerlessness to speak to your pain and have people believe you.
The powerlessness to seek justice behind the shield of white esteem when a racist is finally caught.
The powerlessness to impact the public narrative whatsoever when white waves threaten to crash.
The powerlessness to do something, a reminder of the futility of all the times you did do something, all the more crushing because this time, he was caught. This time, maybe, there was a chance to be heard by the people who hold the power to change.
(there wasn’t)
If the essence of power is the ability to define someone else’s reality and make them live according to that definition as though it were a definition of their own choosing (credit: Dr. Wade Nobles), the white public’s response to richards is the essence of white power.
Lessons learned
Most white commentary centers second chances, the opportunity to be better, and the lessons learned. I say this is wishful thinking, but not an impossibility.
What’s important is for leadership to understand that they are accountable for the racism at richards, just as they would be accountable for any failing within the organization.
What’s important is for leadership to understand that to solve for this unexpected failing, they must first learn, and to learn they must first listen and listen specifically to the people they’ve harmed.
So here is my call to action (and free strategy — please do take it) for richards execs seeking to ‘be the change:’ put your money where your mouths are.
- Tie your bonuses to DEI objectives set by marginalized communities
- Employ an intersectionally in-minority third-party DEI expert (not a cis white woman) to measure and set your DEI objectives, informed by the voices of minority employees and ex-employees. And pay them a cost multiplier for their labor.
- Establish a third-party channel, through your expert, by which minorities can safely provide that critical feedback, without burdening them nonconsensually— this means ad spend and not reaching out to anyone directly — and pay everyone for their emotional labor.
- Work with your third-party expert to approve measurable goals and methodology, based on their findings, with your minority employees and alumni.
- Publicly broadcast your findings, your objectives, and your methodology for measuring improvement, commit to them, and then work to crush those goals.
- Share and open-source your successes and your failures, so that others may replicate conscientiously; there is no IP when it comes to improving the lives of marginalized peoples and reducing the harm you inevitably cause with homogenous leadership.
And while you’re at it, work on the homophobia and the misogyny too…
the richards group does have an opportunity to change here, but the overwhelming richards communication thus far is focused on the business and not the harm the business has caused and is still positioned to amplify. There are countless playbooks written by BIPOCs. So listen. Believe. Turn our voices into action. If you genuinely want to change, that is.
We will be watching, and we will know whether you have learned or not.
And if there’s any question as to what the man himself has learned from this hubbub, let him answer in his own words:
“I guess the lesson in the whole thing is that one has to be awfully careful as to what one says, even in an internal meeting that was not intended to go any further than that”
- Stan Richards, Texas Monthly