Happy Juneteenth.

As the newest federal holiday on the block, Juneteenth isn’t (yet) in the lexicon of many Americans, particularly those who are not Black. As more states and companies celebrate, that should change. This got me thinking about how language evolves and what its evolution might tell us about racial progress. This week, we’ll feature a study that tackles this head on.

Plus: Amazon has become the third largest advertiser in the world. What’s behind the rise of this and other retailers-turned-ad-platforms?

The stereotypes embedded in our language

The last century has seen progress for people of color, women, people with disabilities, the LGBTQI+ community, and other marginalized social groups. But how much have those gains actually upended harmful stereotypes?

Research by Kellogg’s Tessa Charlesworth and her collaborators explores that complex question by computationally analyzing language usage over 115 years, from 1900 to 2015.

They investigated both the overt and implied meanings of these stereotypes. “I often give the analogy of an iceberg,” Charlesworth says. “There’s the tip of the iceberg that we can see above the water line. These are the actual words we use to describe different groups”—what the researchers call “manifest” content. “But then hiding under the surface of the water are the hidden meanings, like how positive or negative, or competent or incompetent, those words are”—the “latent” content.

Overall, the researchers discovered, group stereotypes have changed significantly in their manifest content, but their latent content has remained much more stable. For example, “you can think of some archetypal examples of how our stereotypes of Black Americans have changed over time, from lazy in the 1900s to helpless in the 1990s,” Charlesworth explains. “It’s a different word, but it’s got the same meaning of incompetence and negativity. We can think of similar examples with women—they used to be called hysterical; now they’re emotional.”

To Charlesworth, this pattern suggests that surface-level descriptors may change in meaningful ways, but deep-rooted feelings and beliefs are more stubborn.

“It’s a really interesting social phenomenon,” she says. “Society can reinvent itself and, on the surface, pretend to be changing and making progress—despite the fact that there are hidden messages that continue to persist.”

In this way, the research sheds light on one of the most persistent paradoxes of modern life: despite immense progress for many marginalized social groups, profound inequities and biases remain.

“It resolves some of the ambiguity about how we can have both evidence of some change … and really persistent discrimination,” she says. “The words we’re using to describe these groups are changing, but under the surface, there are hierarchies that are just so persistent.”

You can read more about this research in Kellogg Insight.

Further reading: Why White Americans Overestimate Racial Progress, also in Kellogg Insight.

Do you want an ad with that?

Amazon. Dick’s Sporting Goods. Instacart. Target. Why are so many retailers going all in on so-called “retail media,” which includes offering in-store coupons, paying for sponsored searches, and in an unexpected twist, even selling advertising on third-party platforms?

“Because they’re recognizing that it’s a growth opportunity not to be missed,” argues Kellogg’s Artem Timoshenko and his coauthors Sebastien Gabel and Duncan Simester. “This is a high-growth, high-margin advertising business, one that contrasts favorably with retailers’ low-growth, low-margin core businesses, and as a result, many forward-looking retailers have decided that the time to launch a retail media platform is now.”

In a recent article, the authors offer an overview of the phenomenon, the challenges it presents, and how both retailers and brands can navigate this moment—such as, for instance, by developing transparent reporting systems.

You can read the entire article in HBR.