N.C. A&T Marketing Professor Leak Curates Series on Power, Race and Commerce

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (June 21, 2021) – Roland Leak ‘96, Ph.D., MBA, an associate professor of marketing at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, has co-curated a series, “The Intersection of Power, Race and Commerce,” in Spark, the online magazine of the National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID).

Leak, who teaches in the Willie A. Deese College of Business and Economics, compiled the collection of reports in partnership with Rebekah Modrak, MFA, an art professor at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where the NCID is housed.

“In the wake of massive racial protests over the past year, some companies began the work of reevaluating how their brand messaging and corporate actions contribute to racism,” Leak and Modrak wrote. “While some progress has been made, the marketplace has not realized a universal push to migrate from promulgating racist or white nationalist messaging.

“For this Spark series, we invited submissions from diversity scholars whose scholarship or creative work speaks to the relationships between commerce, power and race in light of shifting opinions and epiphanies about racial justice.”

After earning his B.S. in management from N.C. A&T, Leak went on to receive his MBA from Wake Forest University School of Business and Ph.D. in marketing from the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina.

Leak joined A&T as an assistant professor of marketing in 2009 and has been in his current role since July 2015. His focal teaching area are consumer behavior and marketing strategy. His corresponding research focuses on how stereotyping, phenotypically bias and ideology affects consumer behavior.

His research has appeared in Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, and Journal of Product and Brand Management, among other academic and professional publications.