What I learned from meeting Shirley Sherrod: It's time for media to help us find a new way to talk about race
Maybe we can use our existing communication vehicles to begin a conversation about race. We can use Facebook and Twitter and blog post distribution to have a conversation that spans the nation and the globe.
We can use the editorial pages of African-American newspapers–as we have always done–but we have to pay attention and participate. We have to do it when we do not feel like it. We have to do it when we get laughed at, mocked and talked about.
We have to conduct a little independent research and read existing research about us and our community. We have to be interested in ourselves. We are a wealth of knowledge, however it does little good when we do not have the infrastructure to carry out our continuous discussion on race. The ingredients are there, we only have to put it together and use it.
We have to encourage those who can, to do. We should create a black news wire service just for the chronicling of news that affects us in the black community. We have to encourage students to major in print Journalism (some of you get what I mean). Then, have those newspapers up and running and available to hire new grads to report on and in their community.
With business infrastructure in place, advertising dollars should flow to those newspapers and back into the community. Those dollars pay salaries of news personnel. We will live with ourselves. Our community would become the community. We will witness a return to a more moral black, a discreet black and an educated black as the standard. Our families would heal and increase in size, thus increasing the economy.How do we do that? We create business infrastructure in our communities like in the olden days when we had to shop black and we cared about quality and good customer service because we loved ourselves. We knew the list of lovers of blacks was short but if we were on it, it would be alright.
Even though this is an oversimplified idea, many of you get the picture. I wish I knew how to make it a reality.
Editor's Note: Quite frankly, I am tired of begging a group of people, who obviously do not care for me or my type, to accept me. Anyone can tell when they are being excluded on purpose or when they are outright hated. I'm tired of it but I don't say anything about it. I go where I am accepted. This attitude crosses race for me. I don't fit in everywhere I go with blacks either and I conduct myself accordingly. What is the problem with this attitude? It's restrictive and I will not learn anything about anyone any different than I am. I'll be come stupid. I'll be no better than those dumb ass racists.
