Continuing the Mehri Discussion From This Week's BeanCast

I try not to talk too much about my personal crap in this blog, so let me just say what usually happens the first week after the holidays for most people is what happened to me during the second week.

Crazy!

But that's no excuse to be blogless. After all, I promised Bill Green after the last show that I'd get these links up. And I can never let a guest on my marketing podcast down! (Except those two times I forgot about having booked a guest and they ended up waiting on the line for half an hour for me to connect while I did a show with other people...but that's a whole 'nother story.)

The subject at hand, though, is the Cyrus Mehri situation. Bill Green, who has really taken this issue to heart, is the first to admit that he is not qualified to speak on racial issues in the advertising industry. He (nor I) have ever been the victim of racial discrimination, so it's hard to write authoritatively on the issue.

However, Bill has pointed out that there are plenty of people out there who are closer to the issues and writing about them. For instance, there's Hadji WIlliams who wrote Knock the Hustle. Bill recommends it as a great book on the industry but also addresses the issue of racism among us. Mr. Williams has a very well-written blog that you can read by clicking here.

Bill also pointed me to two other blog resources. One is MultiCultClassics, which deals with a range of multi-cultural issues in advertising. The other is Racialicious, which deal primarily on Hispanic and Asian issues.

Finally, the ever helpful Mr. Green has put me in touch with Ken Wheaton, an editor at Ad Age. Ken covers racial issues extensively in the magazine and was also present at the Mehri fact-finding meeting a few months back. Look for him to be on the show sometime in February.

So what are your thoughts? I'd love to continue this discussion. It's one of those topics that if you start digging you may be surprised what you find. It's easy for a white American to look around and say that racism is a thing of the past. But the facts that emerge from a little research are uncomfortable at best. I started a thread on AdGabber to discuss the issue, but feel free to comment here as well.

*Image from Racialicious