Media

From newspapers to neighborhood blogs, all the media we are consuming and considering.

Key topics in this category:

RECENT POSTS

November 23, 2010 | 3:42 PM | By

Giving Thanks by Giving Back

Mozul

Washingtonian has a great roundup of opportunities for giving back, this Thanksgiving. I’m doing the first event on the list, the Thanksgiving Day Trot for Hunger which benefits So Others Might Eat. It’s a 5K which supports “services for the homeless and hungry, including the thousand-plus meals served on Thanksgiving Day”.  Here are three more ways to volunteer or make a donation:

Central Union Mission
We know that time is precious during the holidays—help Central Union Mission with the click of your mouse by sponsoring a table for only $1.98 per meal or $19.80 for a “table” of ten people. Click here to make a donation.

Capital Area Food Bank
Donate to Bringing in the Birds With Bucks, which provides Thanksgiving meals to low-income seniors. Each meal ($15) contains turkey, cornbread mix, macaroni and cheese, stuffing, green beans, and corn. The group hopes to serve 2,500 people this year. Click here to make a donation.

Martha’s Table
Martha’s Table is hosting a community Thanksgiving dinner Sunday, November 21. There’ll be turkey, mashed potatoes, fresh veggies, and more. Call 202-328-6608 to ask about volunteer opportunities. The next day is the annual Thanksgiving Basket Giveaway, where the Obamas put in some time last year. To learn more or to donate food, click here.

More information is here.

FILED UNDER: Media, Hunger, Non-profits, Poverty
November 22, 2010 | 10:06 AM | By

Welfare Reform on KNS, in two hours.

A quick programming note– look what’s airing today at noon, on The Kojo Nnamdi show: “Rethinking Welfare: We explore recent proposals to cap welfare benefits offered to poor residents in the District of Columbia.”

The District of Columbia has long offered generous welfare benefits to poor city residents. But this week, local lawmakers suggested that more needs to be done to break dependence on government assistance. We examine a proposal to put a lifetime cap on welfare benefits, and what it would mean for D.C. residents.

This has been an extra-hot topic since Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry discussed it on FOX last week (and then followed-up that buzzed-about appearance with an Op-Ed in the Post).

FILED UNDER: Media, Kojo, WAMU
November 12, 2010 | 11:38 AM | By

“And I’m not prejudiced, but…”

After the jump, you’ll find the latest racism-related video to go viral. So far, two of you have sent it to me, even though it didn’t take place in D.C. I’ll warn you that it’s disturbing and filled with ugly language, including the “N-word”. Here’s what it’s about:

Things got ugly when a black mail carrier refused to take back a letter he’d delivered to a lady in Hingham, Mass. She went on a racist rant and slapped him. He secretly taped it all on his cell phone.

So many people assume that the South has a monopoly on racist behavior. I remember when I told my friends that I was starting this exciting new job at WAMU, and one of them, who was from Massachusetts, said, “It’s a shame that D.C. has so many racial issues.” Inwardly, I felt confused because I had heard the exact same thing about their home state. I didn’t say anything because I don’t know Massachusetts that well. I don’t know it any better after watching what’s below, but I do think it’s unhelpful to stereotype certain regions as “backwards” or prone to racism. The quote I excerpted above is from Gawker, where commenters are already chiming in about their lack of surprise that such a thing would happen in Hingham, MA.

I grew up in sunny Northern California, where I got called the N-word plenty of times. I have friends who grew up in Mississippi who never heard that word, once. Massachusetts doesn’t have a problem with racism; America does. Ignorance is everywhere– so is kindness and fairness. What’s interesting to me is how we live in a time when people can use the power of their mobile phones to record what they are seeing, upload it and allow it to go viral. Ten years ago, no one would’ve seen or heard what you are about to watch.
Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Media, Racial Divide, Social Media, That's racist., Video
November 11, 2010 | 12:36 PM | By

Rooting for Ja’Juan Jones

What are you reading, right now? I’m immersed in “South Lakes’ Ja’Juan Jones finds his place after a homeless odyssey“, from the Washington Post.

His homeless odyssey has given his play on the football field an angry edge, one that he hopes will land him a college scholarship. A senior running back and free safety at South Lakes High School, Jones has grown up sleeping on floors, couches and, at one point, spent a year living in a shelter…”I’ve always seen Ja’Juan as pretty strong…He’s always had his mind set, this is what I want to do and this is how I’m going to do it. The day he realized he could get a scholarship to go to college, it was like fireworks on the Fourth of July. That boy was running around the house screaming, ‘I’m going to college! I’m going to college!‘ “

“We’ve lost a lot of stuff in storage,” Jones said. “That’s one thing about moving a lot. You put your stuff in storage and then you go back and it’s always gone. I’ve lost trophies. My dad’s American flag that we got when he died is gone too.“

“I started off wanting to just play football in college,” Jones said. “Now, I’m starting to realize that even if I can’t play football, I want to go to college, but, football is my ticket. I want an upper-class job. I want to be in an office. I want to be able to provide for my family, like they deserve to be provided for.“

FILED UNDER: Media, Children, Homelessness, Poverty, Race and Class
November 11, 2010 | 10:22 AM | By

DCist Does the Right Thing

JamesCalder

Yesterday, we wrote about DCist’s cheeky response to the stupid Travel + Leisure assertion that Chocolate City is filled with unattractive people; DCist quoted a new study which mentioned that we are a very educated city and that the life expectancy for white residents is very high! The problem was, that same study by the American Human Development Project initiative indicated that life expectancy for black D.C. residents is the lowest, of any state. I was part of a Twitter conversation about the glaring omission, with two bloggers from PostBourgie. A DCist commenter expressed their displeasure as well:

I wasn’t going to mention it, but since you brought it up…. the lede reminded me of Sommer’s post about how she thought a study saying DC was tops in cocaine use was unfair because 1) she didn’t see it nearly as much as she did in LA; and 2) they included crack, which for some reason she thought should not count as cocaine use.

DCist editors look and sound exactly as you would expect.

Except in this case, they don’t. Hours after he published “Who Needs Attractiveness When You’re Living This Well?“, Editor-in-Chief Aaron Morrissey amended his original post: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Media, Race and Class, Racial Divide, Social Media
November 10, 2010 | 3:01 PM | By

“On the Internet, society’s most intractable issues with race and class are increasingly prominent.”

antoinedodson24

A still from Antoine Dodson's YouTube Q + A

I love what Cord Jefferson has written about Antoine Dodson and other viral videos starring people of color:

…15 million is how many times just one of the many YouTube videos of Dodson has been viewed. In other words, Internet users around the world have tuned in 15 million times to stare and laugh at a black man angry because his sister was nearly raped.

…What is interesting, however, is how common and accepted such biases have become on the Web. In the comfort and solitude of one’s bedroom, laughing at a troubled, poverty-stricken person of color is far more socially acceptable than doing the same on a busy street corner. What’s more, the disposable immediacy of the Internet means it isn’t always conducive to critical thought. Users take in hundreds of images and videos per day — and thousands of lines of text — and rarely pause to analyze what they’ve seen or why they click…

What we’re left with is an Internet community that feeds us, in the isolation of our homes or desks, distasteful videos by the truckload while rarely asking us to stop and absorb what we’re seeing. The Antoine Dodson video isn’t just insidious because we’re laughing at a low-income black man’s frustrations. It’s insidious because the Internet allows us to ignore why we’re laughing.

FILED UNDER: Media, Race and Class, Racial Divide, Social Media, That's racist.
November 10, 2010 | 10:45 AM | By

Look! 40% of D.C. is thriving!

Rafakoy

There were no statistics available on the life expectancy of blue people.

UPDATE: DCist has apologized.

I was skimming Twitter when I noticed several people had linked to this DCist post, “Who Needs Attractiveness When You’re Living This Well?“. There was a stark difference in how the links were annotated; the white people I follow on Twitter had reactions like, “this is great!”. The black people I follow on Twitter wrote things like, “There really are two D.C.s”. Here is the DCist post, in its entirety (emphasis mine):

Okay, so maybe we’re not the best looking people around. But according to a report by the Social Science Research Council’s American Human Development Project initiative, the Washington region is doing pretty well for itself when it comes to life expectancy, education and income, topping a ranking of the ten largest American metro areas in those statistics. The long life expectancy of white D.C. residents (the longest among any group in the survey at 83.1 years), large numbers of people with college educations (about 47 percent of the D.C. region have at least a bachelor’s degree) and the employment and income boost that the federal government provides to the District and her surrounding suburbs were the driving forces that landed the Washington metro area the top spot. Take that, you shallow Travel+Leisure readers!

I understand why they didn’t include the statistics about D.C.’s chocolate residents; the average life expectancy for black people is the lowest, of any state. That’s not the greatest statistic to use when trying to address linkbait, and refute the baseless claim of an irrelevant magazine which no one reads.

FILED UNDER: Media, Race and Class, Racial Divide
November 4, 2010 | 10:14 AM | By

A Better Post about African Americans and Voting

So, I’ve been a bit sad that no one ever comments on DCentric, even though I know better than to take it personally– I’ve been blogging for eight years, and in the beginning, no one. ever. comments. But, after yesterday’s post about African Americans and voting, several of you spoke up– and one of your comments was better than my post, itself.

Making up 10% of the voting electorate can’t meant that only 10% of registered African Americans voted. ~ 90 odd million people voted, so 10% of that is approximately 9 million voting African Americans. Voter participation in this midterm election was supposed to be 42%, so if 90 million = 42%, the total registered voter pool was 214 million, and 13% of that means there are probably 27 – 28 million registered African Americans. 9 million out of 27 million is much closer to 32- 33% participation rate, not a measly 4.7%. That’s pretty comparable to the general rate of 42%, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the discrepancy is due to being disproportionately burdened by the factors that depress voting for the less than wealthy. It’s a working day, not a holiday, there’s no childcare, and polls are often hard to get to–all things we should fix. ( I got my statistics on the voting numbers from this AP article by Matthew Daly.). According to Wikipedia In 2000 there were 36 million African Americans in the united states, so assuming growth was steady, there are about 40 million *now*. Many of those people are under the age of 18, so they can’t vote, so that means over all participation was AT LEAST 25%. That strikes me as pretty respectable–especially when you consider wide spread evidence that African Americans have been disproportionately and unfairly disenfranchised b/c of the discrepancy in felony status laws regarding the use of crack vs. the use of cocaine, not to mention other less clearcut kinds of unfairness in the criminal justice system.

Moral of the story: we need more numeracy in all of our communities. Support the Algebra Project.

Uh, I’ll take quality like that over quantity, any time. Thanks for breaking it down so beautifully, Saheli.

FILED UNDER: Elections, Media, 2010 Elections, Race and Ethnicity, Social Media
November 3, 2010 | 3:45 PM | By

Why was “African Americans” a trending topic on Twitter?

http://twitter.com/bfnh

A riff on Slate's infamous "Brown Twitter Bird", inspired by their “How Black People Use Twitter”-piece.

At any point throughout the day, Twitter lists the ten most popular “topics” being discussed on its micro-blogging service. As soon as they rolled out this feature, I opted to see a more specific list of what was popular in Washington, D.C. vs. a world-wide compilation of hot topics.

This afternoon, I noticed that “African Americans” was trending. Initially, all the tweets I read regarding that topic had to do with yesterday’s election, specifically a rumor that only 4.7% of African Americans voted. There was no source for the statistic and it was on fire, showing up in hundreds of tweets, every minute. There was also some consternation being expressed at the lack of African Americans in the Senate. I chose to focus on the former issue, and collected some tweets:
Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Elections, Media, 2010 Elections, Race and Ethnicity, Social Media