I believe in having frank discussions on race, although the guy who I supported mightily in the presidential race, Barack Obama, proved a polar opposite approach can work wonders. He has done as much for race relations as anyone in history and he has done so by not bothering to have fluffy discussions on race.
Paul Carr, in this TechCrunch post, talks frankly about race, and that is of interest to me. "If I am wrong enough to think it, I am wrong enough to say it," Eminem once said in defense of his homophobic lyrics. What I like in addition to the frankness is Carr's exploration of the online medium and how that impacts the social discourses on that touchy topic: race.
TechCrunch: NSFW: #Ebony and #Ivory – The Brave New World of Online Self-Segregation
......the more recent story of a British holidaymaker who demanded that a hotel in Florida keep all “people of color” (or those with “foreign accents”) away from him and his family.......“black people represent 25% of Twitter users, roughly twice their share of the population in general” ......Twitter feels like one of the whitest sites in the world to me: full as it is with self-important middle-class hipster kids retweeting New York Times stories and the fact that they’re having sushi for lunch.....If apartheid or the new laws in Arizona represent the 1984 future, then there’s a real possibility that the Internet – and social media specifically – will eventually lead us into an even more terrifying Brave New World future. A future where the tools that once promised to help us meet people with different backgrounds and ideologies from our own actually end up being used, quite unintentionally, to segregate us from those same people......Since when did having sushi become a white thing to do? This world is becoming cosmopolitan by the day.
I am a Third World guy. For me race talk has to go way beyond fluff to make sense. If you want my attention, talk to me about Kiva, for example.
Paul Carr: Bringing Nothing To The Party
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