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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Unity in diversity - the universal problem

If we're going to have a useful discussion on solving our most important common problems, we need to understand the concept of "unity in diversity" at more than a basic level.

I want to stress two features of this design problem of "unity in diversity" as I'm using that term:

• The design problem is very wide-spread. There are instances everywhere in space, time, and scale.
• The processes and principles behind this are not just a little similar, or even very similar - they are identical.

First - the problem is very wide spread, across space, time, and scale.

• Our bodies have muscle tissue, nerve tissue, bone, blood, etc. - each with different jobs to do.
• Companies may have marketing, engineering, and manufacturing departments, each with different orientations and vocabularies.
• Families may have very young, young, middle-age, older, and very old members, each with very different interests and needs and vocabularies.
• A university may have different departments - such as "engineering" and "literature" and "athletics", with very different orientations, priorities, needs, and vocabularies.
• A hospital may have departments, specialties, and sub-specialties - such as medicine versus surgery, emergency medicine, emergency pediatric medicine, emergency pediatric respiratory medicine, etc. -- each with different interests, needs, orientations, and vocabularies.
• Our cells, internally, are not uniform but have specialized subsections for energy production, protein production, effectively library services (DNA), etc. These are all specialized with different structures, orientations, and functions.
• Our planet is not uniform but is divided, somewhat contentiously and fluidly, into "nations" which don't line up exactly with "cultures" or "continents." These may very specifically speak different languages and have different values, needs, and aspirations.
• There are often "classes" of society with differnt values, needs, and use of language, even if it appears at first glance to be "the same language."
• There is, literally, "no end to this." If we look upwards and outwards, it seems that the visible universe is divided into solar-systems surrounding stars, and the stars are clumped in to galaxies, and the galaxies are clumped into clusers.
• If we look at the internet and the world of weblogs and interest groups (the "blogosphere") researchers have found that it too has differentiated and clumped into subgroups that mostly talk within themselves, not across groups. (See Lada Adamic's work.)
• If we look at a high-school cafeteria, sometimes the breakup into groups, cliques, etc. is obvious.
• If we look at our cities, there are "neighborhoods" with local flavors that may be very different from each other.
• Our very concepts of life and knowledge have somewhat dynamic boundaries put into them breaking one world into different "fields of knowledge" with specialized vocabularies and interests and persistent identities.
  

This tendency to break apart a homogeneous population and turn it into specialized sub-groups is everywhere. This is a very basic physical process that always tends to happen.

If you don't believe me, ask any Dean, Director, parent, school-principal, general manager, mayor, governor, president or king. As soon as you get a large group of people together they tend to break apart into "warring factions." over the smallest things. And these people will also confirm that this problem is not just wide-spread and one that absorbs a lot of their time and attention, but is one that has a dramatic, often fatal impact on the survival of the collective enterprise - from productivity to creativity to agility. Everything gets wrecked by this breaking up into silos. So, yes, there is a lot of interest in ways to counteract that tendency, and in design patterns that are "reusable" and can be plugged into your own problem situation.

What's not yet shared, however, is the realization that these problems don't just span space, but they span scale and time. These are all, mathematically, the same problem - and it is the central problem everyone on earth has a vested interest in getting solved right now, if just to "fix" their own little corner that has gone wrong and spends more time fighting itself than it does getting useful chores done.

Without destroying the benefits of specialization, and without homogenizing everyone into "the Borg", how do we overlay something else additional on top of those specialties so that they all also have a common identity, a shared component, and can, when we need to, act as one? That's the engineering design question. What works? What has ever worked?

Second, the processes and principles behind this are not just a little similar, or even very similar - they are identical.

The good news, then, is that anything we can learn about this process in one "field", say sociology, is immediately helpful in understanding another "field", such as "developmental biology", if (and only if) we can distinguish the universal aspects from the accidental local implementation details.

The physical laws and principles behind this tendency to break up into self-sustaining clusters come to us from "control system engineering", not physics or chemistry.

There are only a few stable and simple ways to make a self-sustaining control loop, with certain parts we will always find. More on this tomorrow. We know this can work because we're sitting here reading this, and our bodies are made of trillions of cells that are differentiated and yet integrated. There is a solution to this design problem. We need to understand it better.

If every level and instance of this problem has its own low-resolution sense and view and picture of this problem, limited by the very small size of their receiver, mathematically, we can still assemble all of those low-resolution pictures and process them using "image processing" techniques to come up with a single, high-resolution image of the design issue. That's where I'm going with this, phrased as an "image processing" problem. There are very powerful muscles to do that, if we can rotate this problem around and get it over to those muscles.
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Looking ahead , in the next few days I'll bring this back to the question of "immune systems" and the defenders of the faith, or at least, defenders of certain specialized substructures that life has rearranged itself into. There are some fascinating problems caused by the difference in scale between "members" and "the whole."

For example, in our own bodies, to function, we want our cells to be specialized into very specific functions and grouped into tissues and organs, and we want blood cells to be good blood cells, not sloppy blood cells. There are standards! Deviations must be rooted out!

But we also don't want "bone" cells to attack "blood cells" as if they were foreign invaders and enemies.

Now, this is a challenging problem, because we love our cells but, like loved birds like parakeets, they are still, well, to put it crudely, bird brains. PhD's have trouble understanding differences between cells - how are single-celled cells supposed to make a better job of it? (And, the astounding reality is that they do!)

Something really, really important is going on here. Somehow, a collection of dim-witted cells (relatively speaking) has managed, between them, to be collectively bright. This may be something some of us could use. How do they do that! Can we use the same principle to become collectively bright?

It's as if they don't have a brain cell between them. Actually, that's because they don't. They're too small to have "a brain". So, huh. How do we craft a design so that low-IQ cells, making only local observations, will correctly tell "good guys" from "bad guys" quickly and reliably - when the concept "good" and "bad" are actually not even meaningful at that level, but are concepts from a higher level of existence, at the organism level?

This kind of cross-level exchange of wisdom, and the relationship between the police of the immune system and the "immune system as a whole" is where we need to go to understand how things work, and therefore, how it can break, and therefore, if we have a broken one, how to fix it.