Social Media and Passive Racism

There's another side of social media, and some of us were unfortunate enough to have witnessed it tonight.

Louis Gray has already written about the events that occurred during a Yahoo! Live broadcast with Wayne Sutton and Corvida. I was only there for part of it after seeing a Tweet from Louis and logging in as quickly as I could look up my rarely-used Yahoo password.

There's some analogy here to a stone being thrown into a pond and the ripples growing ever wider until they reach back to land, right? A video made a year ago that was supposed to be funny has made tiny ripples over that year until now, when those ripples are crashing around with more force than you might expect for a year-old video to have.

I won't pretend for one minute I know what the right solution to That Video is. As I said on FriendFeed , I'm neither African-American, nor a Verizon customer, so I have nothing to add there. But yes, every single African-American blogger has the right to weigh in on that issue, and, as far as I'm concerned, they are the only people we should be listening to. The white, middle-class and up men who have weighed in have absolutely zero say, in my opinion. Zero.

I do, however, wish that the individual who made That Video could see what happened in that chat room. And every single person who has defended him could see what happened in that chat room. I will go to my grave and never understand what it must have taken Corvida and Wayne to continue their discussion, sifting through the hate in that chat room and act like it wasn't even there. I'm still shaking as I write this, hours later, beyond angry that we act like we have come so far as a country when really, we haven't come that far at all.

There is a dark side to social media and that's the dark side of many of the people who use it, and every so often it rears its ugly head. I'm sure that the people in the chat tonight thought they were funny, just as people may think That Video is funny. Seeing it happening live and directed at individuals I KNOW drives the point home just that much more. It's not funny. It's hurtful. And it has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with common courtesy.

I have no screenshots, but you can see some on Louis' post as well as kicking around FriendFeed. But I first came online as an IRCop, and my first reaction was to ban. I couldn't ban since I didn't own the chat, but I reported every single person wasting oxygen in that chat. Not only do I hope every single one of them is banned from using Yahoo services, but I hope that we see a better response from the sites who think that racism in the form of "a joke" is okay. It is not okay. In any instance.

And to Corvida and Wayne, and to Steve and Shey and Bwana and Hank and anyone else I'm forgetting, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't say anything last year when I first saw the video, and I'm sorry I haven't said more since. This shouldn't be tolerated. In any form.