Before the communications revolution du jour, back in the last century, back when e-mail and chat rooms were killing off the handwritten letter, I went online looking for the new frontier of race relations. It made sense to me: Mix a volatile but irresistible subject with the promise of uncensored anonymity, and you get authentic discourse.
So I dove into the chat rooms of America Online. I waded through the thick alphabet soup of a segmented, loquacious and profoundly lonely populace in search of conversations that delved deeply into race relations. I figured that journalists, who have a hard enough time talking about race themselves, might find their way to insights, sources and even stories if they could just get past that first level of fear that makes everything else so difficult.
People were talking, I found. But the conversation would usually take one of two roads that always seemed to meet the same end. I imagine the first scenario might go something like this: Someone I'll call Un4GetABullMe has a promising exchange with someone else, call him NotherRomeoDude, about the difficulty of speaking honestly about race. Then EveryDayNazi enters the room and throws down some bigoted bait. Romeo can't resist, and name-calling commences until the room empties.
The equally common Scenario Two might look like this:
Un4GetABullMe: I was thinking that it would be a lot easier to talk about race if people would just let down their guard sometimes and trust one another.
NotherRomeoDude: Yeah. We do tend to hide behind our computers. LOL.
Un4GetABullMe: Trudat, but I wanna talk straight about it right now.
OverCompenSater: HEY … ANY FINE HONEYS HERE GOT PICS AND WANT TO CYBER?????
And away they would go.
Now comes blogging -- the next communications revolution -- and, with it, a new round of optimism. Cautious, tempered, guarded optimism, to be sure. With millions of people out there pulling down online stories and essays, slapping commentary upon them and inviting the world to append an opinion, journalists can tap into the blogosphere in search of a timely, cutting edge look at race relations.
Blogs, like the disappointing chat rooms, hold the strong, attractive promise of offering low-risk insight and, with a few more key strokes, low-risk interaction for journalists interested in telling the stories of race relations.
For many of us, fear and ignorance related to race are locked in a self-perpetuating cycle, each growing stronger as it feeds off the other. What the blogs offer is a chance to break away, to find in one place vast assemblages of information and perspective from the mainstream media, offbeat Web sites and the myriad commentators who provide everything from one-line zingers to provocative racial critiques like this, opinions once hidden away in your local alt weekly.
From the privacy of your computer, you can tap into opinions across race otherwise reserved for those places -- the barber shop, the bar stool, the backyard fence -- off-limits to all but the most adventurous among us. I've spent a few days lost in cyberspace looking with the eye of a journalist for places to go, learn, grow.
Here's one thing I learned right away: We are a ways away from mainstream journalism being able to print URLs or link online directly to many blogs. The inhibition-lifting quality of unfettered e-journaling seems to also summon from the masses the crudest of obscenities. I link henceforth with that warning.
I spent no time slogging through the race-hate mainstream. Those folks aren't shy. They don't require much unearthing. The blogosphere doesn't seem to have created anything of theirs that you can't already find online or on talk radio. Start in the relative safety of the Anti-Defamation League or the Southern Poverty Law Center, follow the links to the sites they monitor, and choose your poison.
If there is another end of that spectrum, where people of color express their bigotry, it's often nuanced or so intertwined in less virulent discourse that it's hard to tell where reactive anger ends and racism begins. So the blogs provide a chance to see thought evolve in complete, unedited sentences over days, weeks, months. Because of the inward-looking nature of many blogs, the cost of insight is often measured in the time it takes to scroll past the mundane and titillating accounts of daily life that wrap themselves around these forays into racial discourse.
The blogosphere pulls together an array of thought among people of color that white America has always seen of itself. Surf through such sites as Negrophiles, Hispanicon, Latinopundit, Chocolate covered banana or blacklogs and watch as the political currents shift with every click. For journalists stuck in the rut of common racial dichotomies, this journey into the complex can be startling.
When the controversy over Bill Cosby's racial pronouncements kicked up last spring, much of the media treated his treatise as a rare burst of contrary thought from black America. A quick trip across the blogosphere immediately puts to rout the notion that Cosby's thoughts were either new or simply one half of a liberal/conservative schism.
Kim Pearson, a professor at The College of New Jersey, blogs on the issue, as does George Kelly, editor of Negrophiles. What they have in common is this: As they weave in and out of opinion, they bring together different perspectives; they connect readers to other sites and other voices, and they offer themselves up as new, willing sources for talking about this untouchable topic. That's the promise of the new frontier.
The blogosphere is no substitute for face-to-face conversations. It's just another journalistic tool limited by, if nothing else, the amount of time you're willing to spend reading and clicking. I like the way folks like "Professor Kim" and George Kelly feed me quick glimpses at a wide range of thought from mainstream journalism and blogs. I'm also acutely aware that the same dialogic dysfunction that leapt from the solid world to the virtual one, from living room chats to chat rooms, infects the blogosphere.
Following links to plug into the Cosby conversation, I arrived at AOL's Black Voices, the Web site dedicated to black commentary that was once run by the Orlando Sentinel. The first posts, from liberal black people agreeing and disagreeing with Cosby, was a layer deeper than what I'd read in mainstream papers. Then, "Haffman Haffamazing" got into a scrape with "QueenG1." The first casualty was civility. Candor was a close second. Finally, the conversation withered under the heat of breathless obscenities.
*sigh*
Even in the no-holds-barred blogosphere, authentic communication can be rough when the matter is race.
I have encountered the same types of things myself. Most...
