“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@