With all of the emphasis in intercultural communications on recognizing and embracing one’s cultural identity, it’s important to remember that while acknowledging someone’s ethnicity may be natural, it also may have no connection whatsoever to the meaning of the interaction at hand, as with this playful ad by Wieden + Kennedy for Swagger by Old [...]

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I love intercultural communications, and I love cookies, so I had to love this ad for oreos that connects two little girls from different cultural backgrounds by their common enjoyment of and manner of eating Oreos.  For a strong diversity program to succeed, it’s important that internal programs and policies align with external communications.  This seems to be the case for [...]

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The problem with stereotyping is that it presumes guilt before innocence, dictating that someone will behave a certain way because of their race or ethnicity.  In the extreme, the results can be devastating, as they were for the late Timothy Cole, a young black man who was exonerated last week for a rape he didn’t [...]

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 Call me crazy, but if I owned a company that had as many discrimination lawsuits against it as Denny’s, I don’t know that I would lead with an ad that purposely uses ethnic stereotypes to relay its message.  Over the years Denny’s has faced suits from groups of African Americans, Muslim Americans, employees, women…perhaps they [...]

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 I took Dillon and one of his classmates to the Chinese New Year parade in Chicago’s Chinatown yesterday.  You have to love culture in an urban environment:  there were dragons and lion dancers and colorful floats from various Asian-American Chambers of Commerce, but also the Irish Shamrock Rovers and marching bands and drill teams from [...]

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