I didn’t watch the BET awards on Sunday night but I did watch the coverage of it on Twitter. A lot of the people I follow were pissed all night with what BET was serving up. The overall sentiment: why can’t they just be better? Michael deserves better. We deserve better.
There were other people on Twitter who were mad at the BET Awards too. They weren’t even watching them but they were upset that names like Jamie Foxx, Neyo and Keith Sweat were taking over the list of Trending Topics on their Twitter.
When you watch an event while on Twitter you’re watching the event but you’re also watching the world watch the event and you’re also watching the world watching the world watch the event.
So on this particular evening some of the people watching the world watch the world watch the BET Awards noticed all these tweets from really angry white people. And so these people very quickly threw up a Tumblr site to log what they were seeing from others.
The url was http://omgblackpeople.tumblr.com/ If you go there now, you won’t find anything but a message from Tumblr saying they can’t find the page. The creators of the OMGBlackPeople site were told that Tumblr doesn’t condone “hate speech”. Apparently this includes a site documenting and exposing the hateful remarks of others. So just talking about racism, pointing out its existence is apparently hate speech! That phenomenon I was just talking about with Twitter, watching others watching something… Tumblr apparently clueless on that.
The site’s back up because they took the show over to Wordpress. I spoke with one of the site’s creators and he told me it was up for 15 hours on Tumblr before being shut down. After the shutdown Tumblr was totally unresponsive to any of the site creator’s attempts to explain the situation and get the site back online.
Of course there’s a certain irony in the fact that both sides on Twitter agreed that the BET Awards and its performers were a ridiculous embarrassment. But to make that assessment as the omg tweeters did without watching, without secretly praying for some kind of dignity to show up – that’s racist. And to feel that your insular, individual vision of the world is more valid than a nation sharing an experience, well that’s fucking racist too. Not to mention an unsustainable fantasy.
I changed the focus of this site because I came to recognize that hip-hop culture is as close to mainstream culture as we have these days. Is it possible that the hip-hop generation is the new silent majority? We elected a presient and we shift the Trending Topics on Twitter.. whether either of these displays have meaning remains to be seen but those who want to own the culture and keep it whitewashed are delusional.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Saw all the fuss for @omgblackpeople on twitter, but didn’t care enough to check it out.
surprise: there are a lot of racists in this country.
Even Larger Surprise: racists have no problem saying so on the internet, pseudo-anonymously.
Just crazy if you ask me…but whatcha expect from ig-nor-rant people.
I’m ACTUALLY quite surprised. My prejudice is that the more technologically savvy are also socially progressive. Twitter has crossed over to the masses then? Or I’m just wrong in my assumption?
Twitter has most definitely crossed over.
@ Mr. Verhoeve:
More technologically savvy people may also be more socially progressive. That doesn’t mean they can’t be aversive racists. They just keep their own racism in their personal blind spot, though it escapes from time to time in the darndest ways.
Some of that stuff was racists. However I don’t think all of the comments found on the Wordpress site can necessarily be labeled racist.
I am white. I think Jamie Foxx is dumb. Does that make me a racist? Am I allowed to have an opinion like this if I am white?
Anyone who’s spent any time looking at the comments on youtube videos should know that technology is not always dominated by intelligent progressives. Average comments there would make cavemen look progressive.