Poignant Campaign Asks 'What Have Minorities Done for America Anyway?'

Anti-immigration sentiments, separating families at the border, the ongoing DACA debate, the Charlottesville rally, and hate crimes on the rise - a series of grim and unsettling events in the US gave Los Angeles-based independent shop Dailey great pause. Dailey’s creative team, led by ECD Marcus Wesson, decided to take a stand and develop WhatDiversityGivesUs.com, an in-house-created web site, to counter this disturbing trend. 

The What Diversity Gives Us site asks a simple question, “What have [blank] done for America anyway?” Filling in the blank generates a curated list that highlights the contributions of various ethnic groups and other underrepresented identities to American culture, medicine, science, entertainment and nearly every facet of society. For example, searching 'Mexicans' yields contributions including the artificial heart, e-books and popcorn. Searching 'Muslims' results in surgery, chess and YouTube. Each contribution is linked to a source web site. The site includes a link to the ACLU, encouraging visitors to take action and donate. 

The inspiration for the site came from comments made by Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) during the 2016 Republican National Convention. While responding to a panel topic about the identity crisis of his party, King stated, “I mean, I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilisation?”

“Diversity is what fuels and builds America,” said Wesson. “We created this site to counter growing nativism. On the eve of our great national holiday, we wanted to inspire people to see underrepresented identity groups in a new light and make it abundantly clear that we wouldn’t live in the same world today without their countless contributions to civilisation.”