Race and Ethnicity in Advertising

Mission

The goal of this website is to showcase advertising materials related to underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in the United States. This resource enables students and researchers to easily locate examples of advertising that touch on issues of race and ethnicity, as well as to contextualize these examples within the larger history of popular (and especially print) media. The collections featured on this website include documentation of people of color who worked within the advertising industry, research reports analyzing minority populations as consumers, and depictions of race and ethnicity within actual print advertisements. This resource does not include all of the Hartman Center’s collections; rather, it describes a selection of the Hartman Center’s items that are concerned with race and ethnicity. In the future, we hope this resource will grow to highlight additional relevant collections.

This project grew out of the 2017 Story+ program sponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute and Bass Connections, in partnership with Versatile Humanists at Duke. Story+ provides a summer research experience for Duke University students interested in bringing academic, humanities-based research to life through dynamic storytelling. Through Story+, undergraduates work in small teams with graduate student mentors, in a collaborative and creative research environment, to produce a final project for a partner organization. The ‘Race and Ethnicity in Advertising’ team, comprised of undergraduates Elizabeth Butcher, Jessica Chen, and Cyan DeVeaux, and graduate student, Meghan O’Neil, worked closely with the Hartman Center to create this digital resource.

Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info