Blog is beautiful
People of color challenge mainstream views online
On the blog Ultrabrown, Manish Vij criticizes the "terrorism hype" of a Newsweek cover story on Pakistan. He hates that the article makes it seem as if the country is overrun with jihadis, a point Vij believes is underscored by accompanying photos of a "scary, screaming bearded man," bullet-ridden walls, and Osama bin Laden T-shirts.
An entry from the Jack and Jill Politics blog analyzes an Op-Ed piece that ran in an October issue of the Christian Science Monitor titled "Media Myths of Jena 6" written by an assistant editor of the Jena (La.) Times newspaper. In the piece, the blog's pseudonymous writer, dnA, finds "amusing errors and what appear to be willful fabrications" of the events that led up to and occurred after the arrest of six black high school students in Louisiana.
These intellectual challenges to mainstream and other viewpoints are some of the opinions Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander-American, and black bloggers are exposing on a growing number of sites focused on social, political, and cultural issues. The sometimes facetiously named blogs range from Angry Asian Man to The Angry Black Woman. Readers can find Latino viewpoints at Guanabee, The Unapologetic Mexican, or Latino Pundit. Those interested in information from an Asian angle head to Ultrabrown, Zuky, or Sepia Mutiny. Sites created by blacks include The Field Negro, Too Sense, and Resist Racism. But often these bloggers discard the handcuffs of their ethnic origins to tackle subjects affecting a range of racial or ethnic groups.
These sites - many of which launched in the past year, although a few are older - have become places where people of color gather to refine ideas or form thoughts about race relations, racial inequities, and the role pop culture has in exacerbating stereotypes. The writers often bring attention to subjects not yet covered by mainstream media. Some of these blogs first sounded the alarm about blacks receiving harsher jail sentences in the court system, an issue spotlighted in the Jena Six, Genarlow Wilson, and other cases. Vij was among the bloggers writing about the racial offensiveness of the accented South Asian character Apu in "The Simpsons" just before the big-screen version of the television show came out this year.
"I'm trying to give a voice to people who don't have a voice at all in the mainstream," says Vij, 34, who cofounded the politically minded South Asian blog Sepia Mutiny in 2004 and launched Ultrabrown, his own South Asian pop culture blog, last year. He'll be doing that work locally when he moves to Boston this month.
"They're not covered and not listened to," Vij continues. "There's some things that the mainstream gets entirely wrong. We're trying to correct some of these things."
As bloggers make these corrections, they've become fresh voices in the very places that they feel ignore them. The subjects they write about sometimes become mainstream media stories. Vij and bloggers at Jack and Jill Politics and Racialicious, a compendium of links and original content about race issues, have appeared on CNN, the BBC, and NPR, and in The
"Ever since the assassination of [Martin Luther] King and Malcolm [X], there's been a hunt for the black guy who will speak for the other black guys and gals out there," says Baratunde Thurston, 30, who contributes under the pseudonym "Jack Turner" to Jack and Jill Politics, a site launched last year to explore political news from the perspective of black, middle-class people under the age of 50. "I think blogs can help disrupt the tendency to select a single individual as default leaders and default spokespeople."
Jack and Jill Politics was among several blogs commenting on the story about Nobel Prize winner James Watson, who said in an interview with the London Times that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites. Writing about the incident under the title " 'Tis the Season to Claim Black Inferiority," Thurston noted that Watson based his supposedly scientific argument on the experiences of "people who have to deal with black employees." Watson's views were quickly debunked, but the public response to Watson's theories clearly showed a latent desire among some for this fallacy to be true. Racialicious pointed readers to Wired magazine's site, where a multitude of commenters supported Watson's statements, some even providing online links to show Watson's accuracy. Thurston appeared on the BBC to talk about the Watson incident.
"What was tricky with the reaction to Dr. Watson is not the people who said, 'Yeah he's right, black people aren't as smart as white people,' " says Thurston, a 1999 Harvard graduate and longtime Boston resident who moved to New York in August. "It was the people who said, 'But isn't it fair to ask the question? How can you silence science and scientific inquiry? Is it wrong to look for differences between the races?' . . . That's more dangerous; it appeals to the ideals of fairness and freedom and especially freedom of speech."
Posts from Jack and Jill Politics and Ultrabrown occasionally appear on Racialicious, a blog that offers links to thought-provoking news stories or blog items about race and posts on various subjects from its 25 guest contributors and three regular contributors. The New York City-based creator of Racialicious, Carmen Van Kerckhove, launched the blog in 2004 as Mixed Media Watch. Her goal, as a biracial woman of Belgian and Chinese decent, was to spotlight how the media portrays mixed-race people and interracial couples. Last year Van Kerkhove relaunched Mixed Media Watch as Racialicious, because of her readers' strong responses to posts analyzing race and pop culture. Now in addition to posts about racism in the video game industry or recent examples of the use of the noose for racial intimidation, Racialicious includes items analyzing TV shows such as "Prison Break" and "Heroes."
Pop culture, says Van Kerckhove, 29, "really is instrumental in shaping our view of race. It helps introduce us to and helps confirm a lot of racial stereotypes. As TV shows and movies have become more diverse in terms of the race and ethnicity of the characters and actors, I think it becomes necessary to analyze that and not to uncritically celebrate the fact that there is more diversity on TV." 