Now with one simple click, businesses can "rent a minority" to help diversify an office, event, or more.
If that sounds like a joke, that's because it is. RentAMinority.com promises companies the "illusion of diversity" with such "staples" as "Smiling Muslim Woman" and "Intellectual Black Guy."
On its main page, the website lampoons the kind of limited thinking that results in a hasty and clumsy attempt at diversity:
Rent-A-Minority is a revolutionary new service designed for those oh-sh*t moments where you've realized your award show, corporate brochure, conference panel is entirely composed of white men. For, like, the fifth year in a row.
Arwa Mahdawi, chief innovation and strategy officer at advertising agency Cummins and Partners in New York, created the joke website in her free time. In an op-ed published in The Guardian, she explained that the concept came to her after attending "a New York hackathon for stupid ideas." It just so happened that the domain name was available, and the rest has now become viral history.
RentAMinority.com has already received nearly 100,000 visits, and more than 500 applications to be a minority-for-hire. What started off as a joke has become a means of exchange and support for those who have experienced being their company's token hire.
Mahdawi spoke with NTRSCTN on the phone about her motivation for creating the site, and what she plans to do with it now that it's become so popular.
You say you created this website because the domain name was available. What else, if anything, motivated you to launch this idea?
I think it's just a lot of pent-up frustration about the way diversity is often dealt with, particularly in the business world. I think the trigger that made me think of the idea was someone asking me very straight-faced whether I found it an advantage to be brown and female in advertising. He was a very intelligent guy asking, and I found it really weird that he would think that. It made me think just how much the debate around diversity has lead to a lot of initiatives that almost make discrimination worse because you have this sense of, "Well people only got where they were because of positive discrimination."
In that regard, diversity becomes this idea of filling quotas.
The funny thing is, I hate the word diversity, because it does imply that there is this nucleus of normal and everyone else is different. But if you look actually at how demographics are changing in the U.S., the diversity is reality. It's a very mixed society. There are stats that say I don't know in how many years minorities are actually going to be a majority. It's a reality now that businesses need to deal with if they want to be successful in the future.
The funny thing is, I hate the word diversity, because it does imply that there is this nucleus of normal and everyone else is different.
Everyone talks about changing the workplace for millennials, and that's kind of the whole other aspect of it: changing the workplace for a more diverse society. I think it's so much better to talk about equality versus diversity, because that puts everyone on an equal footing.
Did you imagine the response you would get to this website?
No, I work in advertising, so I love to think that I would be able to engineer something going viral, because that would be very useful for my job. I found it funny and thought maybe my friends would find it funny, and maybe it would get a little bit attention, but I definitely did not expect it would get so much attention; otherwise, I wouldn't have set up the submissions form to go to my email. I've been deluged with submissions to be a minority.
Have the responses been mostly positive or negative?
So far, it's been 90 percent positive. You know what it's like putting anything on the Internet: Normally, you get deluged with hate mail. I was very surprised how positive it was. I haven't gone through all the responses, but I've gone through a lot and it's nice to hear people say, "I get it. I am the ethnically ambiguous person" or "This totally happened to me." It's really great to feel like you've articulated a shared experience, and that people realize their minority moments are really majority moments.
Do you plan on responding to every single submission?
I don't know what to do with the submissions. I thought about taking the best ones and featuring them anonymously. I really had no strategy for the site because I didn't think it was going to get so popular, but I've been thinking about it a bit more.
You mentioned in your op-ed that there are some people taking this seriously. What would you say to those who don't see this idea as a joke?
People have emailed me going, "Oh, do you know what? There are real-life versions of your website." There's one in Sweden, which finds diverse speakers for panels, and there are all these organizations that kind of do what RentAMinority.com does as a joke.
What I'd say is that you can't change anything if you put a bit of money in your HR department and get a few token speakers now and again—you have to entirely change the culture of your organization. I think it's a similar thing with the whole feminism debate and that whole Sheryl Sandberg thing: You get successful if you lean in. But actually, the thing is, the culture has to change. You can't lean into a broken culture. Business culture as a whole has to really change.
Do you believe social media in any way has alleviated or exacerbated some of these issues with diversity?
Yeah, a bit of both. I think companies realize they're going to get called out if they do stupid things. I think that's great that everyone now holds companies accountable, and so they realize that their policies are basically on show. At the same time, I feel like one problem with social media is that people get so angry so quickly. It doesn't really help anything to have this cycle of extreme anger. What I was trying to do was inject a bit of humor into a serious debate, because even the most serious things can benefit from some humor.
Sometimes a point can be even more strongly made if there's a bit of humor behind it.
Absolutely. I think people think they get the point and they don't feel the finger is pointing at them. I don't know exactly, but it is so powerful.
In your own advertising work, how have you combated the idea of minorities as quotas?
In a sense, the quota thing in adverts—in visuals—is tricky because you do need to show a representation in ads because that helps to change things. You can't be what you can't see, etc. Showing a more diverse world in the ads, which are a reflection of the world, does help.
In the actual workplace, when I was young, I felt really uncomfortable speaking up about things that I felt was stupid or ill-judged or racist, sexist, etc. Now I just care less about it and speak my mind. I think the more people that speak up when something messed up is going on in front of them, the better.
