March 22, 2008
Just Under the Surface
[Quoting Melissa Harris-Lacewell.] "One of the things fascinating to me watching these responses to Jeremiah Wright is that white Americans find his beliefs so fringe or so extreme. When if you’ve spent time in black communities, they are not shared by everyone, but they are pretty common beliefs." ... What’s happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck.Speaking as a fully assimilated Negro, with a white boyfriend and a surfeit of white friends, living in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood, it's hard for me to write about Obama's speech. There's a lingering note in Kristof's column that threatens to narrow and polarize this conversation just as it begins -- "You white folks just don't get it." Some even heard it in the speech itself, and it instantly deafened them to what was said; it sounds so much like assigning blame to non-blacks for something that they just cannot help. And for me, inhabiting the whitest world a black American man can inhabit, it's even more awkward to say that the note rings true. From the severity of the reaction to Jeremiah Wright's speeches, it seems that a large number of Americans, including many of my colleagues in the press, just had no idea.
In black communities, words like Wright's are commonplace.
Those words you're hearing over and over again on YouTube are not the rantings of a lunatic fringe, they are the frequent utterances of a sizable segment of black America. It's just that this time they've spilled out of our closed conversation in a dramatic way.
... Read more ....
File under: Self-Disclosure, Snarkpolitik, Society/Culture
August 1, 2007
December 26, 2006
The Tag Stops Here
Matt says,
Er, Robin, Will tagged us with this '5 Things You Didn't Know About Me' meme last week. We don't really have a protocol for this stuff on Snarkmarket. Hmm.
OK, how's this? I will throw an unspecified number of things about myself into the comments as I come up with them. If you're reading this, consider yourself tagged. Feel free to jump in the comments and add stuff about yourselves as well, or do so on your own blog and link back to it here. And if you, gentle reader, have no interest in trivia about the lives of me, Robin, or any of your fellow Snarkmarket readers, consider yourself unmolested.
October 3, 2006
How Current Works
Robin says,
Hey, if you have any interest in the nuts-and-bolts of how Current works, check out this long interview with my boss Joanna Drake Earl over on [itvt]. It is almost ridiculously long and in-depth... I love online interviews.
One of the things Joanna talks about is the fact that aspiring VC2 producers can now download legal, licensed production music for their videos from the Current site. As I said on the Current blog, it exemplifies my favorite thing about Current: We take people (and their desire to do good work) seriously.
July 10, 2006
No Visa Required
Robin says,
I'm totally going to Svalbard.
(No, see, the thing is, I have one of those world map shower curtains, right? But all the continents are down at waist-level... so all I see every morning is Svalbard and, like, Franz Josef Land.)
June 27, 2006
Um, Who's Been Using My Computer?
Robin says,
I know it is self-indulgent to post a screenshot of your Firefox tabs, but this made me laugh, so permit me: Ha!
April 1, 2006
Yahoo!® Buys Snarkmarket
Matt says,
It's exciting to be finally able to say this is official. This deal has been in the works for what feels like ages. But Robin and I are thrilled to announce we will be joining the Yahoo!® family. When we started Snarkmarket almost two-and-a-half years ago, we really didn't know what to expect, and we definitely weren't expecting to sell this baby off. (Under the terms of our acquisition, we're really not allowed to discuss figures, but I think saying there are three commas involved is oblique enough.)
But as we've evolved into a media powerhouse, with a user base of almost 7 regular commenters, it became clearer and clearer that the only responsible thing for us to do was to partner with a large organization that could give this community the resources it needed to realize its potential. Yahoo!® is certainly the best partner we could have imagined. We're excited about what's in store for us, for you our users, and for the world.
For more info on the acquisition, see here, here, and the official Yahoo!® announcement here.
January 6, 2005
These'll Be Worth Something Someday
So I was just doing a long-belated sweep of an old work e-mail account before it gets closed down for good, deciding what to save.
I'm pretty swift with the delete key, and exactly two classes of messages survived the cut:
- E-mails from girls I had/have crushes on
- E-mails from friends or colleagues who I think might one day be famous
Both surprisingly large groups, as I am by nature optimistic.
Also, this may be revealing too much, but I had an Outlook folder titled 'NYT stalking.'
January 18, 2004
Confessions of the Unread
Matt says,
From Crooked Timber: Books I Did Not Read This Year. Also see the MetaFilter thread this post inspired. (And note well the title that dominates the thread!)
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