So I’m back from Cannes.
It was alright.
Enjoyed doing the WARC speech with Martin of course.
As much as he likes to think he’s a grumpy asshole, he’s insanely wonderful in every way.
I genuinely adore him, which is probably the last thing he wants to know or hear.
Which is, of course, why I have said it.
That said, I still have my reservations about how some people act at Cannes.
How some people walk around.
Like they’re better than everyone around them.
That their view of life is everyone’s view of life. Or should be.
And yet, even though they revel in their bubble of privilege, they deny they live in one when there is the opportunity to pass judgement or commentary on how others live, despite the fact even having a regular income puts them in a totally different orbit.
Of course not everyone was like that.
Some are great people who also happen to be great at advertising.
But I’m still not sure if that split is even or – as I suspect – in the minority.
Which is why I hope those who sit in their ivory towers, passing judgement on people they have almost zero commonality with – let alone have probably never interacted with – read this post and, more specifically, watch the clip.
In 1968, American novelist, playwright and activist, James Baldwin, visited the Dick Cavett Show and shared that he wasn’t feeling optimistic about American race relations – referencing the toll racism takes not only on individuals, but on American democracy.
To add context, Martin Luther King had been murdered earlier that year in Memphis, prompting the greatest wave of social unrest in the United States since the Cvil War.
Shortly afterwards, Yale philosophy professor, Paul Weiss, walks on set to give his “scholarly” take on the issue. Weiss launched into a tirade about how each individual has to struggle with some obstacles in life and that emphasizing one element of the struggle at the expense of others leads to a form of inauthenticity. “So why must we always focus on color?”
What happened next was unprecedented for American television. Black America’s foremost intellectual delivered a deviating soliloquy that explained institutionalized racism to millions of white people who never before experienced it or accepted it existed.
What makes it hard to watch isn’t what James says – he’s right on everything – it’s that so little has changed.
If you don’t act against the prejudices that exist in society, you’re complicit to the prejudices in society. Pure and simple.
It’s why I worry too many people in our industry, especially planners, want to be like Paul Weiss – academically victorious – when the power of James Baldwin was that he was culturally resonant.
While we may all like to think our intelligence allows us to engage and understand others, the reality is no one can truly understand what is going on in the lives and minds of segments of society if they don’t come from those segments of society, especially if their views are born from the pedestal of observation.
