We welcome you to this special issue of the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (JHRM) on historical aspects of race in the marketplace! Presented in two volumes, this research centers perspectives and approaches which are often absent from traditional marketing history literature. The authors provide substantive and compelling examinations of marketing practices, ideas and philosophies using ephemera, archival documents, empirical data and relevant evidentiary materials which illustrate the contexts, experiences and outcomes concerning historically racialized peoples in market settings around the world. Surrounding this topic, Davis and Sauber (2026) developed an integrative framework for examining racial dynamics in marketplace contexts across the globe, identifying key historical antecedents which are foundational to market structures, functions and outcomes. They join other scholars (Bádéjọ et al., 2022; Knight et al., 2025; Thomas and Ncube, 2025; Shabbir et al., 2023) in advocating for market-oriented research which decenters race and marketing paradigms historically dominated by Western and Global North orientations and objectives. Instead, they call for research approaches that are inclusive of Global South, indigenous and (formerly) colonized people’s and culture’s perspectives and interests. Noting pervasive structural inequalities between racialized market segments in diverse contexts globally, Higgins and Tadajewski (2026) recognize the need for academic research which facilitates social justice in market settings and broader society.
The genesis of this special issue was the 2023 CHARM (Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing) in Durham, North Carolina (USA), where a special session titled “CHARM meets RIM” introduced the RIM (Race in the Marketplace) scholarly group to CHARM for the first time (Charm Association, 2023). Similar to CHARM, the RIM Research Network is an international and cross-disciplinary scholarly community. RIM’s focus on social justice through innovative knowledge production, practice and advocacy was received as a welcome addition to CHARM’s emphasis on unpacking and interrogating marketing history (RIM Network, 2026). Indeed, several scholarly pieces emerged from this initial meeting, including published conference proceedings (Charm Association, 2023) and an invited exhibition review (Harrison, 2023). Eighteen months following this first collaboration, the RIM Network hosted its 2025 research forum in Cape Town, South Africa – aptly titled “Past in Present” – where a pre-conference methodology workshop titled “Storytelling with Receipts: Historical Approaches to RIM Research” was conducted for interested attendees, and the call for papers for this JHRM special issue was announced (RIM Network, 2025). This call yielded submissions from scholars from across the world on a span of race and markets topics concerning Brazil, postwar Britain, the Caribbean, France, India, Nigeria, Spain, South Africa and the USA, reflecting diverse multiracial contexts and marketing settings.
As we publish these issues, the state of affairs on matters concerning race, markets and society in many parts of the world is fraught and turbulent, rendering RIM scholarship necessary and important, but difficult and potentially dangerous at the same time (Meckler, 2026; Whitford, 2026). In many places and contexts around the world, we are witnessing book bans in libraries, schools and universities; censorship of racial and colonial topics by governments and education leaders; efforts to police thought; rising nationalism and alt-right politics; and the suppression/erasure of content concerning the histories of racially minoritized peoples. Meanwhile, initiatives concerning diversity, equality/equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) have been reduced or eliminated in many government, corporate and educational settings, given mounting political pressures (Massie, 2024; Murray, 2025; Subbaraman and Belkin, 2025). Further, legitimate academic theories concerning race – particularly Critical Race Theory (CRT) – have been politicized and weaponized by government, political and media leaders (Rufo, 2021), with some academics being discouraged from pursuing such topics in their scholarship (see Davis and Sauber, 2026; Douglass, 2023). Previously valued academic research priorities concerning topics like race, gender, sexuality, inequality and diversity have been stricken from the evaluative guidelines for promotion, tenure and grant-seeking. In the US, for instance, conservative organizations are training students on how to surveil the content of their courses and report “woke” professors to right-wing media outlets. As such, for some scholars, pursuing research on race has become a threat to their academic careers, inviting a chilling effect and/or self-censorship.
Despite the current sociopolitical turbulence, we can also identify important resistance efforts (Associated Press, 2025; IPEA, 2026; Oladipo, 2025) – although not always entirely successful – to confront structural racism through intersectional public policies, particularly by promoting equity in education, implementing anti-discrimination training within public institutions and advancing early childhood development strategies that incorporate racial justice into broader national development goals. Against this backdrop of both persistent challenges and emerging transformations, the timing of this special issue is fortuitous since it aligns with the 10th anniversary of the RIM Research Network in 2027. At a moment such as this, providing first-person narratives, documentation and scholarly analysis of race and markets phenomena could not be more fitting. We believe that historical evidence and perspectives should not be obscured or erased, but must be documented and preserved for educational purposes and further examination to promote social justice! Therefore, in these two special issues, we aim to:
center marketplace experiences and perspectives from historically marginalized peoples;
counter current sociopolitical efforts to suppress and erase histories surrounding race and markets via evidentiary documentation and scholarly analysis; and
introduce alternative viewpoints which decenter traditional Western and Global North orientations.
Given this background, we hope you appreciate and are inspired by this special issue on historical aspects of race in the marketplace. Following this Guest Editorial, the first article “Then, Now, Next: A Brief History of the Race in the Marketplace (RIM) Research Network” by RIM founders Sonya Grier, Guillaume Johnson and Kevin D. Thomas provides a historical narrative and timeline of the organization’s milestones, accomplishments and contributions to race and markets scholarship. Moreover, the overview highlights RIM’s position as the leading scholarly organization dedicated to race and markets research around the world, involving a wide range of topics, methodological approaches and global contexts.
The second article by Guillaume Johnson and Noémi Michel, “The Use and Abuse of History in Antiracism Marketing: On Quoting Historical Figures,” examines how quotes attributed to notable historical figures are utilized in posters produced by mainstream French antiracist organizations. Observing Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s mid-1990s call to recognize the power relations underlying historical narratives, Johnson and Michel conduct a critical discourse analysis of promotional posters appearing between 1949 and 2019. Through this process, the authors identify four logics – gendered invisibility, externalization, whitewashing and domestication – which work to compromise the complexity and dull the political edge of these historical messaging. The article effectively illustrates how history is mobilized in social marketing to produce easily digestible and commodified versions of the past. The analysis reveals how these organizations selectively and often inaccurately quote certain historical figures to achieve particular ends. In this process, racism is usually presented as external to and aberrant within the French context.
In the third article, “Dancing on the Line: Advertising, Race, and the Ambivalent Legacy of the California Raisins,” Edward Timke and Christina Myers critically unpack whether beloved advertising icons can simultaneously serve as problematic drivers of cultural appropriation and racial commodification. Analyzing the California Raisins advertising campaign between the late 1980s-early 1990s, the authors illustrate how Will Vinton Studios’ innovative “Claymation” technique was used to engage in racial coding without explicitly naming race. By capitalizing on the popularity of historical Black music culture to maintain mass-market appeal, the campaign effectively conveyed visibility without power – leveraging the aesthetic of Black entertainment performances while keeping creative and financial control under White authority. Consequently, the historical and political contexts of the borrowed music were obscured, reducing a rich cultural legacy to a tool for selling consumer products. Ultimately, the authors conclude that the California Raisins represent a “cultural grey zone” that embodies the tension between nostalgic affection and socio-economic exploitation. Currently preserved in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the legacy of the California Raisins campaign raises critical questions about how contemporary advertising and marketing practices continue to appropriate and commodify race for profit.
The fourth article also examines advertising strategy in popular culture, as Xavier Jou-Badal’s “Commodity Racism and Semiotics in Chocolate Advertising: The Case of Chocolates Amatller, 1914” thoughtfully explores how the use of posters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries captured and promoted racial hierarchies, particularly through the advertising of specific commodities – in this case chocolate. The paper builds on previous analyses of Chocolate Amatller (including within JHRM), to examine “poster advertising as a site for the construction of racial meaning.” Using three specific promotional posters that were selected as winners for a 1914 nation-wide competition, Jou-Badal makes the case that colonial, class-based and racially stratifying logics informed Amatller’s branding strategies. Situated in the Spanish colonial context and using semiotic analysis, Jou Badal illustrates how luxury and White consumption is intertwined with the subjugation and sexualization of the Black body. In this sense, the analysis meaningfully contributes to enduring, critical, intersectional frameworks such as, eating the other and orientalism within the European context, ending by asking the reader to continue to consider the present-day legacies and implications of such advertisement messaging.
The fifth article, “Beyond the Braai: Diversifying the Heritage Narrative in South Africa,” by Lizette Vorster Larsen, Gaye Bebek and Eva Kipnis, takes a critical look at marketing practices surrounding South Africa’s National Heritage Day (NDA) Campaign. In this dynamic piece, the authors utilize a tripartite methodology combining:
a longitudinal study of campaign advertisements between 2014 and 2023;
interviews and focus groups with consumers; and
interviews with marketers.
Their findings reveal how marketing practices around this national holiday not only maintain existing racial hierarchies, but further entrench racial segregation. By building NDA campaigns around the braai (a common South African reference to barbeque that is rooted in Afrikaans heritage) these campaigns center the historically privileged racial group. Furthermore, across the three prominent brands the authors surveyed, there is an absence of images representing interactions and integration among South Africa’s diverse cultural groups. As such, these campaigns are shown to be out of touch with the lived realities of most South African consumers. In closing, the authors advocate for marketers to become more culturally knowledgeable and sensitive to these issues since, in an era of digital connectivity, frustrated consumers are increasingly empowered to speak back against representations they object to.
In the sixth article, “Archiving Resistance: Claudia Jones and the Racial Historiography of Marketing in Postwar Britain,” Natalie Clue introduces readers to Claudia Jones (1915–1964), a pivotal cultural strategist who challenged the racialized discrimination and violence experienced by Caribbean migrants in British labor and housing markets following World War II. Using archival materials, Clue reconstructs the compelling life story of Jones and how she utilized media and cultural production as forms of resistance to help Caribbean migrants navigate a British marketplace that often rendered them peripheral or undesirable. Key among these initiatives was the 1958 founding of the West Indian Gazette newspaper, which served as a domestic counter-sphere, guide for cultural adaptation and platform for political discourse, often emphasizing decoloniality. Additionally, Jones established the Caribbean Carnival in 1959 as an artistic outlet to assert the visibility, dignity, freedom and cultural value of peoples of Caribbean descent living in Britain. Today, the Caribbean Carnival is often referred to as the Notting Hill Carnival and is considered among the largest and most important cultural street festivals in Europe. By centering Claudia Jones, a diasporic figure, Clue’s study serves as a theoretical provocation to reconsider the boundaries of marketing thought, link decolonization with the need to situate markets within historical contexts, and question whose experiences matter.
The seventh article explores a different dimension of Caribbean history and markets, as Jonathan Bowman and June N.P. Francis’s “Haitian Emancipation (1791–1804) as Reflexive Decoloniality: Redoubling Marketing Boycotts of Plantation Sugar as White Gold,” use the case study of the sugar boycotts that followed the Haitian Revolution to illustrate how colonial forces – by exercising control over narrative explanations of the decrease in sugar production – succeeded in suppressing Haitian post-colonial ambitions and furthering their own hegemony over the global sugar trade. Using a reflexive decolonial framework that centers DuBois’s 1903 notion of double-consciousness, the authors advocate for the value of multiple perspectives, transdisciplinary analyses and Afrocentric orientations when striving to achieve a genuinely decolonized approach to historical marketing. Bowman and Francis juxtapose French and Haitian accounts of the sugar boycotts, showing how the former displayed willful ignorance of the circumstances underlying the decreased sugar supply. By presenting the boycotts as Parisian female consumers responding to price gouging, the French version of events rendered the Haitian revolutionary triumph all but invisible. In contrast, the authors argue that a distinctly Haitian national identity was achieved through boycotting the entire colonial marketing system. The article illustrates how symbolic orders shape material histories. Beyond this, Bowman and Francis uphold the value of material, epistemic, restorative and reconciliation reparations as important measures toward achieving decoloniality.
In the eighth and final article for Part I of this special issue, William Trevor Jamerson ethnographically guides us through the experiential and exploratory Harlem, New York (USA) tourism scene, where he argues Blackness and Black socio-cultural history is commodified through walking tours. The article provides important, empirical arguments on how cultural tourism is not merely an instrument in broader, ongoing gentrification efforts (especially in Harlem); conversely, under the right conditions, cultural tourism could actually aid in resisting gentrification. Jamerson’s contribution to the special issue (which is stirring to read in some places) combines insights from conversational interviews during his ethnographic fieldwork, with online discourse analysis of specific walking tours via tourism review websites. Taken together, his results construct a compelling and historically-grounded discourse around Black life and commerce in Harlem, particularly the tensions that arise between tourism as a tool of African-American empowerment, versus the racial othering inherent in many touristic practices. Professional and entrepreneurial tour guides are shown as savvyingly navigating honest portrayals of Black African-American history versus more crowd-pleasing topics and narratives that do not require much self-reflection or awareness of the, at times, voyeuristic tourist. The article concludes by reminding us that the social triumphs embedded in Black resistance to racial oppression are core to understanding Harlem as it truly was, as it is today, as well as to contemplate what it could be in the future.
In publishing this special issue, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the authors and reviewers who contributed to this important work. The authors’ intellectual engagement, critical insights and commitment to advancing scholarship on race and markets made this publication possible. We are equally indebted to the reviewers for their generosity, rigor and thoughtful feedback throughout the editorial process. Their careful evaluations and dedication were fundamental in strengthening the quality and relevance of the research presented here. We deeply appreciate the time, expertise and collaborative spirit that both authors and reviewers devoted to bringing these publications to fruition.
