“The first time I walked into 
Wieden+Kennedy, 
that 
was 
when I understood passion,” 
White said. “That was when 
I understood a place that 
everything they do is about 
creativity. Everything they do 
is about enabling incredible 
creatives 
to 
do 
incredible 
creative things in the world.” 
White 
told 
students 
he 
worked 
as 
the 
managing 
director for Nike’s Shanghai 
office during the 2008 Beijing 
Olympics. White and his team 
worked on “launching the 
sports culture in Shanghai.” 
They centered their campaigns 
around Kobe Bryant and 100-
meter hurdler Liu Xiang.
“Our job was to get the 
Chinese athlete to think about 
really competing,” White said. 
“We came in with Nike and 
our job … was to let people see 
sports in a different way. Our 

entire strategy was what we 
called ‘dare to compete.’ If we 
could start with showing kids 
the self-expression and the 
fun that is sport … we can get 
them to actually think about 
competing.”
When 
Xiang 
withdrew 
from the race during the first 
heat, White and his colleagues 
reworked 
their 
message 
and released an ad with the 
message to “love sport even 
when it breaks your heart.”
“That came from focus,” 
White said. “That came from 
not walking away from the 
strategy. We told people to 
compete. That’s what we said 
and this is where we landed 
and it went everywhere.” 
White also worked with 
Tiger Woods’ campaign after 
his scandal in 2009. Again, 
he implemented his ideas of 
reworking the message to tell 
the personal story behind 
the athlete. He worked with 
the 
creative 
director 
of 
Wieden+Kennedy to create a 
close-up of Woods with audio 

from his late father, Earl 
Woods, in the background. 
“We were just thinking, 
‘what would Earl say? What 
would his dad say?’” White 
said. “We took the last shot 
(of previous footage), the 
truth, the authenticity in 
his eyes, and we found audio 
from Earl.” 
White was also the former 
executive vice president and 
global head of marketing for 
Beats by Dre and was there 
when the company partnered 
with Apple. As the pioneer for 
the #StraightOutta campaign 
in 2015, White was in charge 
of sharing Dre’s story of being 
proud of where one is from. 
“The power in Straight 
Outta 
Compton 
is 
they 
owned 
Compton,” 
White 
said. “We got to this thought 
of that’s just a human truth, 
if you can own your past, if 
you can own where you’re 
from, that becomes power. 
That becomes control, that 
becomes reassurance in who 
you are. We knew we wanted 

people to claim where they 
were from.” 
He invited various artists 
and athletes, such as Kehlani 
and Lebron James, to take 
photos 
with 
famous 
hip-
hop photographer Jonathan 
Mannion. Using this footage, 
White and his team released 
the photos with the “Straight 
Outta” tag and included the 
city the celebrity was from. 
The 
biggest 
jump 
in 
White’s career happened in 
2019 when he left Beats by 
Dre to work with the growing 
cannabis 
company 
Select 
Oil and CBD. White said 
the transition was not well-
received by everyone. 
“That wasn’t a very popular 
decision at the time,” White 
said. “CBD had just become 
legal and there were a lot of 
people that thought that was 
a bad decision.” 
White 
defended 
his 
decision by saying he wanted 
to create his own legacy like 
legendary music executive 
Jimmy Iovine.

“I want to build what 
Jimmy built,” White said. “I 
want my shot. I thought about 
Jimmy Iovine who’s always 
said, ‘Make fear the tailwind 
instead of a headwind.’ That 
has 
been 
my 
motivation 
since I got to this business, 
that has been what’s driven 
me since I left everything 
that was important to me.”
White ended his talk with 
a final message of listening 
to yourself.
“My message to you today 
is there are zero rules,” 
White said. “I think that you 
have to stop and you have to 
listen to your voice.” 
Collins 
then 
facilitated 
a Q&A with White. Collins 
asked what was the human 
story of Jason White. White 
said story centers around 
him trying to pay it forward. 
“I think what we’re doing 
in the social justice space 
with cannabis and trying to 
expunge records and reunite 
families and give people 
second chances,” White said. 

“The war on drugs ruined 
families and neighborhoods 
for generations. For me, to 
be able to now be a part of 
fixing that is … unreal.” 
Business 
seniors 
Sofía 
Ondina and Kush Choksey 
attended White’s talk to 
learn from his experiences. 
Ordina 
found 
the 
talk 
enjoyable and insightful. 
“I thought it was very 
enjoyable. 
Just 
learning 
about his career, getting his 
advice and his insights of so 
many years in the industry,” 
Ondina said. 
Choksey 
said 
he 
liked 
how White was speaking 
from personal knowledge in 
various fields. 
“I thought it was really 
authentic and he told his 
stories 
really 
well 
and 
seemed 
very 
passionate 
about what he was doing, 
like the social impact his 
work has,” Choksey said.
Reporter Alyssa McMurtry 
can be reached amcmurt@
umich.edu

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News
Friday, February 14, 2020 — 3A

YAFFE
From Page 1

academic partners and how 
much potential they had for 
growth and sustainability. 
Projects were also evaluated 
on how well they improved 
the efficacy of programs and 
policies alleviating poverty.
“Part of our work has 
always been the importance 
of having community and 
academic 
partnerships 
do 
the research,” Israel said. 
“If we promote co-learning 
and capacity building of all 
the partners involved, the 
research needs to benefit 
the community as well as the 
academic partners.” 
Carol Gray, center manager 
of the Detroit URC, said 
the 
URC 
has 
worked 
as 
a 
matchmaker 
to 
create 
mutually beneficial research 
partnerships 
between 
academic 
researchers 
and 
community actors for over 
two decades.

“We’re 
celebrating 
25 
years of partnership,” Gray 
said. 
“The 
Detroit 
Urban 
Research Center is one of 
the 
longest 
community-
based participatory research 
partnerships in the country 
if not the world. And we’re 
very proud of reaching that 
milestone.”
This 
year, 
Poverty 
Solutions and the Detroit 
URC 
gave 
$26,500 
each 
to three projects: a team 
building 
a 
greenhouse 
combining 
technology 
with African traditions, an 
experiment in food delivery 
for low-income mothers and 
a study on entrepreneurship 
programs and socioeconomic 
mobility. 
Tammy Chang, assistant 
professor in the Department 
of 
Family 
Medicine 
and 
researcher 
for 
the 
food 
delivery 
experiment, 
said 
her team partnered with the 
Women, Infants & Children 
program 
in 
Washtenaw 
County to deliver healthy 

groceries to young and low-
income mothers. According 
to Chang, these mothers often 
face 
significant 
logistical 
barriers 
to 
finding 
and 
buying healthy food despite 
qualifying 
for 
government 
food 
benefit 
programs. 
She said her team sought 
to help communities often 
underrepresented or ignored 
in research. 
“It’s our job as community 
members and physicians and 
researchers to be out there 
in the community so that we 
can seek out people and be 
ready to listen,” Chang said. 
“And provide opportunities 
for people who typically don’t 
or can’t voice issues, and then 
create programs and projects 
and studies around those 
people.”
She said her project works 
to create evidence to show 
government agencies that an 
investment of $100 or less on 
mothers during pregnancy 
can greatly improve maternal 
and child health over their 

lifetimes.
Ron Eglash, professor at 
the School of Information 
and at the School of Art 
& Design, said his team is 
working to build a high-
tech 
greenhouse 
next 
to 
the Detroit MBAD African 
Bead Museum that combines 
cutting-edge 
technology 
with African economic and 
ecological traditions. 
He 
said 
his 
team 
was 
inspired 
by 
research 
he 
conducted on West African 
societies 
using 
bottom-up, 
generative economic models 
to 
keep 
wealth 
in 
local 
communities. 
Typically, 
Eglash 
said 
Western 
economic 
models 
include 
state or private corporations 
which extract and keep value 
from individuals. 
Eglash 
said 
the 
team 
intends for the project to 
be both educationally and 
economically beneficial. 
“If we can have robotic 
systems, automated systems 
in the greenhouse, we can 

have digital sensors, if we 
can have AI do some pattern 
recognition, it’ll not only 
benefit the greenhouse, but 
help educate University of 
Michigan students, who are 
right now asking themselves, 
how do I get to the cutting 
edge in robotics or AI, oh, I 
know, I’ll do some work for 
the military or I’ll work for 
this giant corporation and 
make some billionaires even 
wealthier,” Eglash said. 
Audrey Bennett, professor 
in the School of Art & Design, 
said the project demonstrates 
the role design thinking can 
play in generative justice. 
She works with a team of 
students 
across 
a 
variety 
of disciplines in design to 
teach how technology can 
augment African traditions of 
generative justice to improve 
communities. 
“(The students) have to 
work with the community 
to see how design could help 
the community to alleviate 
poverty,” Bennett said. 

One of those students is Art 
& Design graduate student 
Keesa 
Johnson. 
She 
said 
discussions about diversity, 
equity and inclusion, often 
ignore or neglect to talk 
about equity. 
“This project for me centers 
around equity,” Johnson said. 
“Generative justice … speaks 
to that healing that I’ve been 
looking for when it comes to 
equity.” 
Johnson 
said 
her 
work 
on the project connected 
concepts she’s learning in 
class about complex systems 
design to broader lessons 
about community. 
“It’s really about building 
community for the whole of 
society,” she said. “I’m not 
extracting 
anything 
from 
anybody, 
we’re 
building 
and we’re making and we’re 
exchanging, and it all goes 
back to one thing.”
Reporter Julia Rubin be 
reached juliaru@umich.edu

DETROIT
from Page 1

these (chemical plants)? 
That’s when I made the 
justice 
connection,” 
Wright said. “I was always 
upset, but then I got 
angry.”
The panelists said some 
environmental 
activists 
failed to identify the racial 
and social facets of their 
movement. Rhiana Gunn-
Wright, panelist and a 
lead architect of the Green 
New 
Deal, 
remarked 
on 
the 
prevalence 
of 
such a norm during her 
experience 
working 
on 
the Green New Deal.
“I started truly seeing 
how much people wanted 
to combat the climate 
crisis 
without 
ever 
touching justice,” Gunn-
Wright said. “And I didn’t 
realize that that tendency 
was so deep.”
In an interview with 
The Daily, SEAS professor 
Paul Mohai, an organizer 

of the 1990 conference, 
gave the opening remarks 
for the panel, discussed 
how 
while 
the 
first 
conference 30 years ago 
focused 
on 
bringing 
attention to the issue, 
the 
current 
conference 
does more to examine the 
disproportionate 
health 
effects between different 
communities.
Robert 
Bullard, 
known 
as 
the 
“Father 
of 
Environmental 
Justice,” 
expressed 
his 
confidence 
in 
students 
as changemakers in the 
future and expanded on the 
focusing on inequalities 
in environment justice to 
The Daily. 
“This 
country 
is 
segregated, 
and 
so 
is 
pollution,” 
Bullard 
said. 
“What 
we 
have 
been 
fighting 
for 
in 
environmental 
justice 
is 
to 
make 
sure 
that 
no 
community 
is 
disproportionately 
impacted by pollution.”
Michelle Martinez, who 
served as the moderator 

for the panel, touched on 
her work as an activist 
and 
highlighted 
the 
importance of action to 
The Daily.
“Communities 
make 
change. 
Communities 

change 
laws. 

Mobilizations 
change 
laws,” Martinez said. “The 
big things that happen in 
the United States all were 
because of people, not 
because somebody in the 
capital had a good idea.”
After the talk, Rackham 
student 
Stephanie 
Szemetylo expressed her 
enthusiasm to integrate 
more about sustainability 
into her own discipline. 
“It was energizing to see 
the connectivity between 
the 
different 
panelists, 
the 
embeddedness 
of 
the 
field,” 
Szemetylo 
said. “Hopefully I can 
bring design into that 
environmental 
justice 
space.”
Contributor 
Lola 
Yang can be reached at 
lolayang@umich.edu

CORONAVIRUS
From Page 2
SUMMIT
From Page 1

HEALTH CARE 
From Page 1

other,” Lee said. “In the 
American 
context, 
it 
is 
entrenched in our system to 
fear the other, so anyone who 
isn’t (obviously) ‘American.’ 
Any medical outbreak seems 
to justify already existing 
fears in the American body.”
Engineering senior Kathie 
Wu compared reactions to the 
coronavirus outbreak to other 
prominent health outbreaks 
such as SARS, HIV and Ebola. 
Wu 
noted 
how 
common 
efforts 
to 
contain 
these 
diseases such as quarantine 
and 
marginalization 
are 
ineffective and ultimately only 
serve to hurt and ostracize the 
affected populations rather 
than help the general public.
“A lot of the state responses 
to 
handling 
the 
spread 
of 
coronavirus 
and 
other 
diseases in the past have been 
to quarantine residents … but 
that isn’t the solution and 
it honestly just scapegoats 
already 
marginalized 
populations and intensifies 
the 
panic 
that 
already 

exists,” Wu said. “Airport 
(temperature) screening of at 
least 2.4 million Americans 
and 
Canadians 
coming 
in 
did not catch a single case of 
SARS.”
LSA 
junior 
Anna 
Dang 
concluded the presentation 
by 
highlighting 
how 
we 
can approach the discourse 
surrounding 
coronavirus 
moving forward.
“To talk about resisting the 
resurgence of Yellow Peril, in 
the U.S., rather than warning 
people about coronavirus, (we 
can) warn them about anti-
Asian rhetoric,” Dang said.
Dang also reminded the 
audience to keep in mind the 
exact statistics of the outbreak 
may be unknown given that 
the 
Chinese 
Government 
historically 
withheld 
information from the public 
during the SARS outbreak in 
the early 2000s.
In an interview with The 
Daily after the event, LSA 
freshman Rose Waas said the 
event was an opportunity 
to learn about the different 
viewpoints 
on 
coronavirus 
as well as how to approach 
the 
coronavirus 
discussion 

without 
unintentionally 
promoting xenophobia.
“I 
think 
it 
was 
really 
insightful. It really allowed us 
to explore a lot of perspectives 
that are behind coronavirus 
and other epidemics that have 
happened in the past and ways 
that we can stop the spread of 
hate and racism,” Waas said.
When asked what he hoped 
the audience learned from 
the event, James Lee once 
again stressed why people 
must carefully walk the line 
between justifiable fear over 
a global health crisis and the 
xenophobia that may stem 
from that fear.
“A good synthesis that we 
want people to take away is 
... any medical outbreak is 
not to be taken lightly, but 
at the same time, we have 
to recognize how it could 
contribute to further yellow 
peril discourse,” Lee said. 
The fear of the virus really 
ends up justifying not a fear of 
medical outbreak … but rather 
a resurgence of fear that 
already exists.”
Contributor 
Sarah 
Zhao 
can be reached at srahzhao@
umich.edu

Gaba, 
however, 
said 
he 
believed in the power of 
legislation and said he is 
optimistic 
of 
achieving 
universal 
health 
care 
in 

some 
form 
in 
the 
near 
future. According to Gaba, 
perspectives on the issue have 
already shifted from more 
conservative 
approaches 
in 
the past. 
“The greatest success of 
the ACA had to do with the 
philosophical 
mentality 

change that no one should be 
denied health care, which was 
not the default mindset 25 
years ago,” Gaba said.
Erica Hernandez, a first-
year Public Health graduate 
student, said learning about 
what is happening in Congress, 
especially 
regarding 
drug 

pricing, surprised her. 
“A 
couple 
of 
classmates 
and I attended the National 
Health Policy Conference in 
D.C., and this event was a nice 
complement in understanding 
the 
day-to-day 
changes 
being made for health care 
tomorrow,” she said.

Nursing freshman Josiah 
Ratts, a member of the Health 
Policy 
Student 
Association, 
said he found it interesting 
to hear experts in the field of 
health care policy talk about 
the future of health care.
“As someone entering the 
health care world, I want 

to stay informed on what’s 
happening, so this was all 
really new to me, especially 
the different options that the 
United States is going to have 
since this is an election year,” 
Ratts said. 
 Reporter Varsha Vedapudi 
can be reached at varshakv@

