Creating racial reality through advertising and film

Creating racial reality through advertising and film
This Hollywood film about the 'Red Ball Express,' which was majority black, had a mostly white cast.
Creating racial reality through advertising and film
This Hollywood film about the 'Red Ball Express,' which was majority black, had a mostly white cast.

Creating racial reality through advertising and film

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Fifty years after the Civil Rights era, 60 years after the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans, and almost 150 years after America’s abolishment of slavery, the vast majority of the images we see in film and on TV are still of Caucasian Americans.

Why are media and movies so out-of-touch with the real diversity of America? How did we get here? Where do we go from here?

Today, film contributor Milos Stehlik continues an occasional series called Images, Movies and Race. Today, Milos spends the hour with two African-American trailblazers of the advertising industry. Shirley Riley-Davis is a winner of numerous advertising copywriting and creative awards during a career that has led her from Pittsburgh to New York‘s ” Mad” Avenue to Chicago . And Herbert Allen is a Chicago playwright, professor of marketing at Columbia College, and advertising strategist who innovated concepts of market segmentation.

A film about the actual ‘Red Ball Express,’ which was 75% black: