Post-racial America? Forget it

The United States is almost as segregated under Obama as it was in the time of Martin Luther King

As I arrived in New Orleans this summer, there was a juicy racism row blazing across the airwaves and the blogosphere.

Like lots of the juiciest rows, it was over a little thing. The question was, do black people use the social networking site Twitter differently from white people? According to Farhad Manjoo, Slate magazine’s technology correspondent, the answer is yes.

He’d noticed that a group of black Twitter users in America were much more likely to react to particular topics. Some of them were race-based, such as ‘If Santa was black …’; answers included ‘He wouldn’t say ho-ho-ho, he would say yo-yo-yo’. Another topic was ‘ghetto baby names’; ‘Weavequisha’ was the most popular answer to that.

But, according to Manjoo, there were patterns of black Twitter behaviour that went beyond purely racial issues. Black Twitter users tended to be keener on following amusing Twitter threads such as ‘Words that lead to trouble’. Among the answers there were, ‘Don’t worry, I got you’, ‘We need to talk’ and ‘The condom broke’. Black people also apparently tend to form ‘tighter clusters on the network; they follow one another more readily, more of their posts are directed at other users. It’s this behaviour, intentional or not, that gives black people — and, in particular, black teenagers — the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter.’

The article was given a sharper edge by its illustration of Twitter’s bird emblem, given black skin and a baseball cap at a jaunty — some might say gangsta — angle.

A media firestorm blew up, with some agreement — and more objections — from both blacks and whites. Why are white people always studying black people in this voyeuristic way, went the complaint (despite Manjoo not being white himself).