Black bloggers find their voice

One attorney joins a growing blogosphere to take on the role once reserved for ministers: setting black agendas and shaping opinion.

Blogger goes into 'the fields'

By Richard Fausset
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 18, 2007

Excerpts:

PHILADELPHIA — Attorney Wayne Bennett ... gets home and starts blogging, however, an alter ego emerges: The Field Negro. On his website called field-negro.blogspot.com, he lashes out at commentator Bill O'Reilly as an "ignorant racist self-delusional buffoon." President Bush is "the frat boy," and "the man 'who doesn't care about black people' " -- a nod to rapper Kanye West's comments of 2005. Black activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are "pimping the 'man' in the name of civil rights."

The blog, Bennett admits with a chuckle, is an expression of raw anger, and it has earned him a modest following: He says he gets about 1,200 hits per day, and this year, he won readers' choice for "Best Political/News Blog" in the Black Weblog Awards.

To white people, Bennett's musings are like kitchen-table talk from a kitchen they may otherwise never set foot in. To African Americans, he is part of a growing army of black Internet amateurs who have taken up the work once reserved for ministers and professional activists: the work of setting a black agenda, shaping black opinion and calling attention to the state of the nation's racial affairs.

The last few months have been heady ones for black bloggers. Their numbers, while impossible to count accurately, appear to be growing as African Americans catch up with the general population in terms of Internet usage. This year, the Black Weblog Awards -- a 3-year-old, independent contest run by an Atlanta-based blogger -- received more than 7,000 entries, up from 3,000 in 2005. In that same time, the percentage of black adults with a home broadband connection nearly tripled to 40%, according to a July report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Today, the black blogs offer a nearly infinite range of voices. Civic-minded blogs have proliferated on the left and right, a welcome advance for those who have long complained that black opinion can seem monolithic when boiled down in mainstream media.

Bloggers also have become more organized, and in recent months their impact has become undeniable.

Their sustained focus on the controversial prosecution of six black teenagers in Jena, La., was one of the reasons thousands of protesters descended on the small city in September. This spring, they helped derail the Congressional Black Caucus' plan to hold a Democratic presidential candidates' debate with Fox News.

Some bloggers, such as Gina McCauley of Austin, Texas, have pressured Black Entertainment Television to alter programming that they deem degrading to blacks. "We've started to flex our muscle," says McCauley, a lawyer whose blog, What About Our Daughters, challenges what she sees as destructive portrayals of black women in pop culture.

"The black blogosphere is maturing, and coming into its own," ... says.

Jamaica is the land of my birth, but I consider myself a citizen of the world."
He acknowledges he is a son of privilege. His father was an influential Seventh-day Adventist preacher in Jamaica who was also closely aligned with the leftist government of the late Michael Manley. As an adult, Bennett strayed from the church; today, he considers himself an agnostic.

He is less than enthusiastic about some of the black spokesmen with church roots -- such as the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton -- and he thinks that the next black leaders might emerge on the Web.

"Traditionally, the church building or the church square was the only place we could organize," he says. "Now, to me, the church, or the physical space where we organize, is the Internet."

A few weeks later Bennett, a self-described news junkie, was watching Glenn Reynolds, founder of the conservative site Instapundit, on C-SPAN. Reynolds was talking about how easy and cheap it was for anyone to set up a blog.

"I dropped my coffee," Bennett recalls, "like -- 'What? It's that easy?' "

When he sat down to build his blog in March 2006, he wanted to synthesize the disparate black voices that had influenced him.

Over time, he got to know other black bloggers in different states and nations, and they began coordinating some of the issues they were covering. In March, Bennett was among those bloggers who argued that the Congressional Black Caucus Institute should cancel its presidential debate with Fox News. (The debate, originally scheduled for September, has been postponed, according to the network.)

Fox, he wrote in one post, has "consistently marginalized black people, and use us to play on the fears of their red state watchers to increase viewership."

In April, he and his far-flung Internet colleagues founded another black issues blog, AfroSpear (afrospear.wordpress.com), as a place to collect a diverse group of black voices. A month later, the blog was one of many that linked to a petition calling on the Justice Department to look into possible civil rights violations in Jena. The site directed readers to other bloggers who had been following the issue closely, as well as dozens of articles from local and national media.

On Sept. 20, the day thousands of protesters filled the streets, Bennett seemed both proud and surprised. "Sometimes you are a part of something big and you don't even realize it," he wrote.


richard.fausset@latimes.com

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