Not Everything Has to be about Race

While browsing Metafilter, I ran into this rather "interesting" article:

MySpace is no longer cool. As a matter of fact, its number of users is now one-half the size of rival Facebook. Is this because MySpace is too black for the rest of America? Teenage Internet users may hold the answer. High-schoolers report their use of the social-networking giants along racial lines—MySpace is seen as “black,” while Facebook is “white.”

I'm sorry, but I just can't even begin to take this sort of argument seriously. Did its author ever even bother to use both social networking sites before firing up a text editor? If he had, perhaps he'd have realized something millions of others who have tried both MySpace and Facebook cottoned on to a long time ago: that MySpace with all its garishness is a usability and design nightmare, while Facebook is much more pleasant to use for anyone who isn't looking to have his or her senses continuously assaulted. That MySpace is supposedly too "black" for America doesn't explain why Facebook beats it out everywhere outside the United States, even amongst people for whom America's racial divisions are irrelevant, most of whom have no Americans of any color on their friends' lists. The fact of the matter is that MySpace sucks, and what's really worth remarking on is that black Americans seem so reluctant to abandon what is clearly an inferior product, not the existence of some imaginary online "white flight" ...

All the things I've said above would be readily apparent to any "researcher" or journalist with an awareness of the world beyond America's borders, but what this pathetic excuse for an article illustrates is that the "writer" Dayo Olopade and the "ethnographer" Danah Boyd are both so blinded by their parochialism that they allow racial paranoia to lead them down a blind alley. That black American kids have mostly black online friends, and white American kids white contacts, is neither a stunning revelation nor an indication of a pernicious tendency enabled by the internet, but merely a reflection of the realities of American life: it's not as if black and white children attending the same schools and colleges all sit together chatting during their lunch hours, is it? To say social networking "magnifies" this is just so much b.s., while attributing all the segregation one might see online to "white flight" denies any agency of the black children these whites are supposedly "fleeing" from, as if black Americans never prefer to associate with others who share their own historical and cultural background ...

Racism is still very much a problem in America (and in plenty of other places as well), and it is a problem which can manifest itself in a depressingly large number of ways, but spurious articles like Mr. Olopade's only serve to detract from efforts at fighting the real thing, by making it that much easier to dismiss all complaints about racism as paranoid whining.

Comments

[Chuckles]

[...but spurious articles like Mr. Olopade's only serve to detract from efforts at fighting the real thing...]

Dayo Olopade is female. First discovered her when she used to write for YDN. Has her own blog: Race is very much a preoccupation - as is the case @ TheRoots, which I stopped following a while back. The gaudiness of MySpace reflects the style of much of what is called Urban Fashion in general: I think the division is not so much between black and white as it is between urban and preppie type clusters. For the grad school contingent, I think, MySpace is horribly declasse - and it isnt because of race. The test is to deconstruct the black social network population and see if the divide holds per immigrant africans and carribeans.

[Abiola]

I'm surprised Olopade is female: hers is an obviously Yoruba name, and as far as I knew "Dayo" was very much a male appellation. It makes me wonder about her family background, as I just don't see typical traditional-minded Yoruba parents giving their children gender-atypical names ...

[Chuckles]

[...typical traditional-minded Yoruba parents...]

Okay, so since I have a hobby of tracking the not so rich and famous, just wanna point out that young Ms. Olopade might in fact be related to a certain MacArthur genius grantee noted for work on cancer in certain African populations etcetera - said grantee also happening to be female competing in a predominantly male field, etc - perhaps would qualify as not being quite so traditional minded?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-1004-sunday-olopade-coveroct04,0,5974469.story

[Abiola]

If Dayo is the daughter of Dr. Funmi Olopade, that would explain her unusual name, as well as her writing for an outlet like "The Root"; conservative Nigerian parents would never willingly accept such a choice of profession in place of becoming a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer or something else along those lines.