Africans capturing other Africans and selling them as slaves in Western Sudan, 1879
One of points I made during my recent interview was that out of the vast sea of Black owned websites, BlackEnterprise.com is the only financial-based site I know that gets a decent amount of traffic. Most of our contribution
to cyberspace hovers in the area of entertainment and gossip. Check out this quick PDF I created.
Black Web Stats 9/24/11
If you notice, the less entertainment a site has, the further down it appears in the Alexa traffic rankings. And as I said before, I was unable to find any Black-owned site that exclusively dealt with finances. If you know of one, please let me know.
When you look at some of our most “hard core” news sites, if the dialoge isn’t about race, that topic is typically the one with the least amount of comments and the least amount of shares. As soon as race enters the picture, you have our full engagement while the powers that be have our full ignorance on the other issues. This is something that is nothing short of a stone fact in the world of politics.
While most of Black cyberspace was fully engaged in the Troy Davis case, there were three major stories that we missed.
Gov’t paid $600 million in benefits to dead people
A recent internal government report that shows its own excessive spending.
The ongoing Solyndra story where millions of dollars was wasted on a few “friends” of the government.
None of these stories deal with race. Therefore, they are automatically filtered out of most Black-owned news feeds. But these stories are all linked to a common denominator: Money.
Think about the millions of wasted dollars just in these 3 stories that could have gone to improve the facilities of just one school. Or how about the many students that are forced to drop out of college because of the lack of funds. But as a people, we ignore these stories because they lack a racial element when these are the very stories that demand our attention.
One of the biggest complaints in the Black community is that we are oftentimes left lacking when it comes to the allocation of resources. For decades many of the pubic schools in our districts (the ones that actually work) consistently go underfunded, hospitals in urban areas are both poorly managed and underfunded, police and other first responder services are typically underfunded (so we are told).
So how do we typically respond to all of this? We raise a stink about how big daddy government is ignoring Black folks. In other words, we get emotional. We set up town hall meetings and roundtable discussions to do one thing: complain.
Blacks get town hall meetings and Jews and Whites with money are asked for a time slot by the president.
This is by far one of the most damning facts in politics today. It is those with money (or at least know how to use it) who get the political machine to work for them.
When the news about former Representative Anthony Weiner’s wild indiscretions hit the news wires, his Jewish constituency threw him out. The response by the media (and no doubt covertly the White House)? Post an image of the president with a Jewish yamaka with the headline “The First Jewish President”. On the flip, Black media outlets take a queue from CBC Chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and continue to defend this president even if some of the most basic concerns of the Black electorate are not being met.
At the recent CBC gala (because that is exactly what it was), Obama told Black folks to stop complaining, stop whining, stop crying and march. And you know what? He has every right to talk to Black folks that way. Why? Because we are not bringing any money to the table. All we bring is a bunch of symbolism. I have yet to hear of any report of Obama talking that way to folks on Wall Street or to the Jews during his fundraisers.
I recently spent an afternoon with a VC (venture capitalist) who is as hard nose as they come when it comes to money. He didn’t start off that way and had to get his butt kicked a couple of times until he understood the game. So he threw some big money behind a few candidates. He also joined a Jewish business organization (this guy is not Jewish) and told me that he did not give a “damn” about Israel. Yet he saw it simply as a way to build up some “street cred”. Apparently, it has been paying off for him big time. He basically told me that he did not care about the issues. For him, it was simply about making those connections. All the emotional debating over which politician said what about Black folks, “Is the tea party racist?”, “Is Obama a natural born citizen?”…all those endless debates we have online, the real movers and shakers like this guy could care less.
As a people, we desperately have to move beyond the emotionally-charged headlines. Marches, sit-ins, threats of boycotts are nothing more than the tools of the politically ignorant. I have said it many times, the only color that matters in politics is green. Having money isn’t the problem for us. It’s learning how to use it.
How keeping the dialoge on race keeps a race in bondage
by Duane on September 26th, 2011 at 7:25 amAfricans capturing other Africans and selling them as slaves in Western Sudan, 1879
One of points I made during my recent interview was that out of the vast sea of Black owned websites, BlackEnterprise.com is the only financial-based site I know that gets a decent amount of traffic. Most of our contribution
to cyberspace hovers in the area of entertainment and gossip. Check out this quick PDF I created.
Black Web Stats 9/24/11
If you notice, the less entertainment a site has, the further down it appears in the Alexa traffic rankings. And as I said before, I was unable to find any Black-owned site that exclusively dealt with finances. If you know of one, please let me know.
When you look at some of our most “hard core” news sites, if the dialoge isn’t about race, that topic is typically the one with the least amount of comments and the least amount of shares. As soon as race enters the picture, you have our full engagement while the powers that be have our full ignorance on the other issues. This is something that is nothing short of a stone fact in the world of politics.
While most of Black cyberspace was fully engaged in the Troy Davis case, there were three major stories that we missed.
Gov’t paid $600 million in benefits to dead people
A recent internal government report that shows its own excessive spending.
The ongoing Solyndra story where millions of dollars was wasted on a few “friends” of the government.
None of these stories deal with race. Therefore, they are automatically filtered out of most Black-owned news feeds. But these stories are all linked to a common denominator: Money.
Think about the millions of wasted dollars just in these 3 stories that could have gone to improve the facilities of just one school. Or how about the many students that are forced to drop out of college because of the lack of funds. But as a people, we ignore these stories because they lack a racial element when these are the very stories that demand our attention.
One of the biggest complaints in the Black community is that we are oftentimes left lacking when it comes to the allocation of resources. For decades many of the pubic schools in our districts (the ones that actually work) consistently go underfunded, hospitals in urban areas are both poorly managed and underfunded, police and other first responder services are typically underfunded (so we are told).
So how do we typically respond to all of this? We raise a stink about how big daddy government is ignoring Black folks. In other words, we get emotional. We set up town hall meetings and roundtable discussions to do one thing: complain.
Blacks get town hall meetings and Jews and Whites with money are asked for a time slot by the president.
This is by far one of the most damning facts in politics today. It is those with money (or at least know how to use it) who get the political machine to work for them.
When the news about former Representative Anthony Weiner’s wild indiscretions hit the news wires, his Jewish constituency threw him out. The response by the media (and no doubt covertly the White House)? Post an image of the president with a Jewish yamaka with the headline “The First Jewish President”. On the flip, Black media outlets take a queue from CBC Chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and continue to defend this president even if some of the most basic concerns of the Black electorate are not being met.
At the recent CBC gala (because that is exactly what it was), Obama told Black folks to stop complaining, stop whining, stop crying and march. And you know what? He has every right to talk to Black folks that way. Why? Because we are not bringing any money to the table. All we bring is a bunch of symbolism. I have yet to hear of any report of Obama talking that way to folks on Wall Street or to the Jews during his fundraisers.
I recently spent an afternoon with a VC (venture capitalist) who is as hard nose as they come when it comes to money. He didn’t start off that way and had to get his butt kicked a couple of times until he understood the game. So he threw some big money behind a few candidates. He also joined a Jewish business organization (this guy is not Jewish) and told me that he did not give a “damn” about Israel. Yet he saw it simply as a way to build up some “street cred”. Apparently, it has been paying off for him big time. He basically told me that he did not care about the issues. For him, it was simply about making those connections. All the emotional debating over which politician said what about Black folks, “Is the tea party racist?”, “Is Obama a natural born citizen?”…all those endless debates we have online, the real movers and shakers like this guy could care less.
As a people, we desperately have to move beyond the emotionally-charged headlines. Marches, sit-ins, threats of boycotts are nothing more than the tools of the politically ignorant. I have said it many times, the only color that matters in politics is green. Having money isn’t the problem for us. It’s learning how to use it.