By Erin Aubry Kaplan
It has taken an ongoing technology revolution and a dwindling bank account to do it, but I think I’m finally starting to overcome a lifelong revulsion to something I always planned to avoid: marketing myself. The mere act of writing this entry is marketing, a concerted effort to be a writer who is Internet-accessible, or available, or instantly recognizable.
That isn’t my sole purpose in writing this, but it’s a big one. Though I figure that if I’m honest about my motives up front, maybe I won’t come off as so market-y. Maybe readers will forget all about my motives and simply enjoy the writing. I don’t know. We’ll see.
“Market yourself” is one of those pieces of advice I’ve gotten constantly over the last 15 years that I’ve constantly rejected on principle.What kind of writer needs to pump up his or her profile, except one who’s mediocre? I know this is somewhat unfair. I know there’s probably some fear or false modesty at work on my part.
I know that marketing is an entire field of academic study, and that advertising (not democracy, sorry) has been America’s national pastime for 100 years at least. But it has the whiff of hustle. Marketing may sound more a professional term than self-promotion, but to me they’re synonymous and suggestive of everything I never wanted to be-- arrogant, baldly ambitious, insecure, loudmouthed, desparate for attention, empty at the core. All talk and no goods.
Of course, I grew up in the 60s and 70s with a very different public-image ethos than the current generation being raised on YouTube and Facebook. I was part of the first wave of blacks to come of age after the Civil Rights movement who had to show the world that the world had changed.
Armed with the modest but historic gains bequeathed by the Movement—affirmative action, less segregated schools, a more sympathetic government—we entered a new era of visibility.
More of us were expected to be competitive and qualified than any number in any generation of blacks that had gone before. We had to become things; nothing less would do. Until we actually arrived at being something that was halfway interesting or credible, marketing was off the map, and even then it wasn’t taken seriously.That was partly because of race. My generation understood that, unless you were an entertainer, marketing was one of those career advantages not meant for black folks anyway, so the only option was to be good at what you did (preferably three times as good) and hope other people paid attention. And if they didn’t, so what? History had always ignored us. Undervaluation was par for the course.
The payoff was the satisfaction of having been somebody, of burning a trail through previously impassable ground. And then there was also the ancient, quasi-religious ideal, handed down from slavery, that all accomplished people of color are by definition race leaders who seek the limelight never to glorify themselves, but to illuminate the plight of their people.
Individual greatness came from a sense of collective mission and a magnitude of spirit; marketing had nothing to do with it.
Time passed. Decades passed. I eventually became something, a journalist. I wrote things that I think advanced the race mission. I got paid for them. All seemed well. The rise of the Internet in the 90s was good for journalism, at least at first—suddenly my stories could be read all over the world, not just in local papers in L.A. Free marketing! It was astonishing, glorious. The sky was the limit. And then, just as quickly, the Internet turned on us. Reality bit.
Newspapers and magazines began losing money and ditching writers in a kind of panic. I was among those eventually ditched. Floating alone in the freelance ether, in which millions of voices now fought to the death to be heard daily, or hourly, the calls to blog/market/brand myself became louder.
There was no other way, people said. For any writer wanting to be taken seriously, fame was longer a moral issue, but a necessity.
This is especially true for black people, who now have to struggle for ‘Internet equality.’ Achieving a high profile for the sake of a high profile, contrary to what I was raised to believe, is now a legitimate endeavor. It is part of a movement, if not the movement.
Still I protested—hadn’t I been taken seriously all along? Hadn’t I made a mark? My supporters (okay, my husband) argued that wasn’t the point. History wasn’t the point. This was another new age, and in a way it I needed to start over entirely. I didn’t have a good argument against; editors weren’t exactly swamping me with phone calls or emails as I sat at home waiting to be appreciated.
Nor was a once-attentive public trying to track me down. Or maybe they were, but there’s so much other stuff to read out there in the writing multiverse, so many Google-driven distractions on the way to finding somebody by name or category, few end up mourning the loss of one point of light. Or they forget about the point altogether and focus on a new one.
So here I am. I hope I shine. I hope, in this new effort to be heard, that it doesn’t look like it’s all about me. I tell myself, at 46, that freedom has to start somewhere, with somebody.
Might as well be me.
ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN is the first African American in history to be a weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Her musings continue to appear in the Times, Essence magazine, and a host of other publications. Kaplan is currently working on her much anticipated book, to be released in 2009.