Annual Business Ethics Lecture 2023

Thursday, April 13, 2023
4:00 PM - 5:15 PM
AH 102

Wayne Norman (Duke University, North Carolina)

“From Business-as-Usual to Suddenly-Unacceptable: Lessons for Ethical Business Today from the “Whiteface” Marketing of Black Music by the American Recording Industry, 1956-68”

Wayne Norman is the Mike & Ruth Mackowski Professor of Ethics at Duke University. His books include Citizenship in Diverse Societies and Negotiating Nationalism; and he is currently writing three more: Business Ethics on the Fly: a Toolkit; a monograph tentatively entitled The Ethical Adversary: How to be Fair when You’re Playing to Win… in Business, Law, Politics, War, Sports, and Love; and a coffee-table book, Whiteface: Systemic Racism and Misogyny in the Marketing of Midcentury Modern American Music.

One of the most striking features of our contemporary social world is how quickly something can go from “business-as-usual” to “unacceptable” to “retrospectively unbelievable”. Current undergrads might find it surprising that it was “normal” not so long ago for students and profs to smoke during classes; and, more recently, for liberal arts colleges to demand that applicants for admission or employment identify themselves as either male or female. Were either thing to happen today, it would be considered outrageously inappropriate. This gives rise to two questions for business ethicists:

• How is it that practices, which we will soon come to see as unacceptable, are able to hide in plain sight for so long without many critiques? And,
• can conscientious individuals and managers get reliably “ahead of the curve”? That is, how can we identify and reform problematic practices that are still widely tolerated… without going “too far” in our reforming zeal and inviting ridicule?

We will explore the first these very general questions through the vivid presentation of a very concrete marketing practice that was employed by virtually all record labels in the 1950s and 1960s. We can call this practice the “whitefacing” of Black jazz and R&B/soul artists, and it “hid” very much in plain sight on the covers of hundreds of 12” vinyl LPs by major and minor artists alike for about a dozen years. (We will survey these LP covers throughout the presentation.) Whitefacing seems eventually to have been recognized as “unacceptable” quite suddenly around 1967-1968; despite there having been no public movement against it. There also seems to be no historical memory of this whitefacing phenomenon, even within the community of scholars of African-American popular culture. So, it now seems “retrospectively unbelievable,” even as you see it with your own eyes. We will consider some “educated speculation” about how this all could have happened, and about what this neglected case study tells us about the challenges today for those who want to be at the vanguard of ethical business within a society still beset with systemic injustices.