Bidil, Blackbird, and Black Niche Marketing: Race vs Racism
A browser for blacks, a heart drug for blacks. Where do we draw the line between the salience of race to social life and racism? The creation of the Blackbird technology smells of the racial controversy around the marketing of Bidil--a heart medication--as a black drug . Admittedly, the issues surrounding Bidil are a bit more complex. Steven Epstein states: Having failed to demonstrate the drug’s efficacy in the overall population, BiDil’s manufacturers reinvented it as an “ethnic drug” and tested it only on African Americans. Nonetheless, both of these instances clearly capture the capitalistic economic aspects of niche marketing and the implicit (and explicit) acceptance of attitudes that blacks are a monolithic group--whether it be the presumption that all blacks have the same physiological makeup or that all blacks seek the same kinds of information. But to what extent are they evidence of racism? Before I go any further, I must define how I use the term racism. According to the U...