About this issue.

The recent talk of diversity among African Americans turns out to be a much more complicated three-part discussion. We all know about Part One: Before 1989, corporate diversity meant hiring African Americans or reaching out to include them in all matters mainstream. Universities and colleges could count on federal dollars if they hired black professors and faculty and accepted black students. Radio and television producers tried to create programming that appealed to an African American audience. In corporate America, it meant opportunities for blacks to climb into middle and upper-level management positions. In advertising--an industry that this magazine follows very closely--it meant corporations hired black agencies in an effort to target the black consumer market, a market with a current total money income in excess of $600 billion. When there was widespread talk of diversity, mainstream corporations--not all of them, of course--put money into attracting black employees and black consumers, even though many publications like ours, Essence, and Ebony had to struggle to get advertising dollars.

Part Two of this complicated discussion kicks off from a post-1989 Supreme Court decision (City of Richmond v. Croson), which basically abolished diversity in doing business with municipalities. That ultimately undercut affirmative action overall. After that decision, diversity became so broad that it has been rendered virtually ineffective in many areas. Today's definition of diversity refers specifically to a broader market base known as "people of color and women" (which includes gays, senior citizens, the physically challenged, and--brace yourself--white women). As a result, large corporations have, suspiciously, overlooked African Americans in matters of hiring and promotions. And even the urban sector, for marketing purposes, has been redefined to mean younger, not-necessarily-black kids who enjoy black music and fashion.

Our first indication of a shift in the definition of diversity came when we began taking a closer look at our own advertising list, which appears in the annual report on black business published in our June issue. After years of being ignored as a market, African Americans were suddenly discovered by Madison Avenue when hip-hop music began generating millions of dollars in sales. It hired a few black firms to target the urban marketplace, then decided it could do it better themselves by either merging or creating their own urban marketing boutiques. As a result, our 2003 BE ADVERTISING AGENCIES list dropped from 20 companies in 2002 to 15, which means larger corporations are either targeting their products at other ethnic markets or handling the push to target black consumers themselves. That we selected GlobalHue as our 2003 Advertising Agency of the Year meant that Don Coleman, CEO and president, had the foresight to implement a strategy to ensure his survival in the brutal and ever-changing advertising climate.

We are now looking at Part Three of the discussion: the uglier side of diversity's impact on our community (see "Does Your Company Discriminate?" this issue). In today's economy, corporations are making substantial reductions in their labor force as a cost-cutting strategy, and in this environment, blacks are often the last hired and the first fired. And while many of the companies that we feature in the article have proven their commitment to diversity, many African Americans still feel ignored or passed over altogether. In the feature "Black Men Can't Coach?" we examine, among other examples, why an equally (if not more) qualified black coach, Sylvester Croom, was passed over as head football coach at the University of Alabama. Why did Alabama eventually hire Mike Shula, son of Miami Dolphins legend Don Shula? We have a long way to go before true diversity is embraced in America.

--The Editors