Well, we should all be thankful that the DC coroner did not choose a career in the ER. #NewDefofSlow
@DCProper
Bornin Bred
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Tweet of the Day, 12.20
wow, cool fact about Metropolitan AME Zion: the church was a stop on the Underground Railroad #BloomingdaleDC
@evoque
Elle Cayabyab Gitlin
The tweet below was a close runner-up, though. I love when people exceed someone else’s expectations– and when we watch out for each other:
Tweet of the Day, 12.17
Tweet of the Day, 12.16
Oy vey. In no other city would a 9-story building be characterized as a "damn near skyscraper."
@lydiadepillis
Lydia DePillis
The Intersection of Crime and Social Media
DCentric
Obligatory screen-capture to illustrate that this post is about a popular social networking program.
This is shocking. Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher‘s home was burglarized– and though he wasn’t home when the dastardly deed occurred, he saw the perp’s face:
Sometime between 10 a.m. and 12:45 p.m. Friday, a burglar busted through our basement door — simply kicked through the 80-year-old wood panels — and took a bunch of stuff. My son, 15, got hit hardest; his laptop, iPod, savings bonds and cash were gone.
Just one more example of life in the big city. Except that the apparent thief didn’t stop with taking our belongings.
He felt compelled to showboat about his big achievement: He opened my son’s computer, took a photo of himself sneering as he pointed to the cash lifted from my son’s desk, and then went on my son’s Facebook account and posted the picture for 400 teenagers to see.
Think that chutzpah-powered picture will lead to an easy resolution of this crime? Wrong.
Continue reading
Spelling bees and Go-go music
This put a smile on my face (and made me want to take a bus in Southeast):
Riding the bus in SoutheastDC is pure comedy! Lil girls have spelling bee battles.Overworked mamas screaming at their kids & gogo music.
@AnacostiaYogi
Anacostia Yogi
Name-dropping Anacostia
The following tweet makes me want to check out “Lie to Me“, even though the mini-review it contains exposes the apparent laziness of the show’s writers:
There’s plenty of drugs in Northwest, TV writers.
“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
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
“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.