Advertising Diversity, Shankar’s timely and important book, shows us how diversity is represented and created in advertisements for American consumers. Beyond a critique, it takes seriously an ethnographic inquiry about who makes these ads and how they do so. Shankar argues that despite good intentions to challenge white hegemony in mass-circulated media, at their worst, advertisements reproduce racial stereotypes, and at their best, generate racial identity and national belonging. Grounding her story is the intriguing, yet too little understood concept of “diversity,” which operates through economic reasoning that more racial representation simply makes good business sense. The book claims to capture a moment in which neoliberal ideologies have enabled the production of diversity assemblages, which give ethnic and racial differences—biopolitical constructs—market values. These processes, Shankar compellingly reveals, help generate capitalism while producing what she terms racial naturalization.

Drawing on ethnographic data from 2008 and 2012 elicited in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, she foregrounds the work of advertising executives, their corporate clients, and marketing researchers, as well as the role of the U.S. Census in creating racial categories that are employed for target marketing. Shankar observed workshop sessions, ad presentations, and sales pitches and conducted interviews and her own discourse analysis. The chapters are organized according to the development of the production process. It begins with the sales pitch, wherein advertising executives “sell themselves” to corporate clients. It takes us through how household items, colors, captions, sounds, pitches, and so on are interpreted and organized to sell a product. Then it ends with a discussion of how talent is cast in general market ads to convey normalcy or whiteness, that is, given American accents and minimal regional and heritage recognition. Throughout, this rich ethnography shows how advertising executives, clients, and market researchers collaborate and debate to “calibrate” brand messaging presented in print, videos, events, social media, and a range of Internet platforms.

For the advertising production process, materiality is critical at every step of the way. Before ads are made, advertising experts consult U.S. Census documents, tracking population counts of racial minorities and correlating them to their purchasing power. After ads are made, Shankar says, they have lives of their own, making discourse analysis a critical part of the ethnographic process. Hence, while these experts aim to anticipate public interpretations, sometimes they fail to do so. This is at least partially because items in ads, such as a wedding dress that is red and gold and ornate, rather than white, already have roles to play. Thus the advertising process is complicated and tenuous, producing what she terms the racial naturalization of Asian Americans, while also making Asian Americans the advertising experts of choice. Racial naturalization emerges at the intersections of value, biopolitics, materiality, language, and affect.

Shankar’s work uniquely and innovatively bridges scholarly literatures often treated as distinct: critical race theory, linguistic anthropology, and business cultures. She does this successfully by scaling analytically from embodied relationships to large-scale capitalist value formations. Advertising is “capitalism’s cheerleader,” she tells us in the beginning; it creates needs and desires for goods and services and their production channels (p. x). It also creates consumers by evoking emotions and a sense of solidarity. Aptly, Shankar has us inquire into the multiple modalities on which diversity is operationalized and the personal and impersonal ways in which this comes to life for business. For this, she builds on the rich women of color scholarship on diversity management, which shows how “diversity” functions as a benevolent pluralism (to quote Chandra Mohanty).^{Footnote 1} This enables the valuation of racial and gender differences under a corporate appreciation for all differences that reproduces specific systemic inequities.

For scholars of diversity and race, Shankar offers an important theoretical and analytical tool: that of diversity as a qualisign. Building anthropological scholarship surrounding C. S. Peirce, Shankar convincingly explains why diversity can mean everything, and that this is because the meaning and operative power of diversity is dependent on the projects in which it is enrolled. This enables us to understand the contingency of diversity through an understanding for the visual aesthetics that enable individuals to commit to specific kinds of action, particularly as these actions are “bundled” (and here she follows Webb Keane’s work in semiotics) with social, moral, and economic values. Diversity qualisigns—beyond symbolic—enable a theoretical understanding of how race and its visibility or ambiguity does certain kinds of work for these business professionals.

Yet Shankar’s proposal also leaves open the question of how, beyond normative, whiteness is also a qualisign that works in tandem with constructions of race. What would it mean to examine whiteness not as “unmarked,” but also as a semiotic representation that reproduces collectivities, a sense of belonging, and racism? How would the boundaries between representations of whiteness and diversity as non-white be negotiated as possibly a conflict in business goals and hopes for society? I pose this provocation with the understanding that well before the 1980s, which Shankar marks as a turn in the corporate valuing of racial and ethnic differences, advertising executives willfully and strategically reproduced images of whiteness by excluding others. It would behoove scholars to study these processes as valuation projects as well.

Shankar’s book is compelling for anthropological theory and ethnographic methods. It builds on a well-established ethnographic tradition in creating an analytical assemblage to show us how racial/ethnic diversity is contingent. It becomes coherent in the pursuit of profit, she shows us, in ethnoracial assemblages that take shape specifically across space and time and across linguistic, material, sensorial modalities. As such, this work is political. By choosing to show us the ins and outs of how advertising processes work to racialize non-white, Asian collectivities, she asks us to take this messy, complicated, and well-meaning task of representation and question antiracist politics, as we know them. This task needs to take into account the work of representation in extending the goals of capitalism. To these ends, I ask, how might we be able to institutionalize antiracism otherwise?