Another View
Last Thursday was the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. We need more than a day in March to eradicate centuries of racism, especially in America.
Sadly, we still have some who just can’t fathom Black people talking about Black people or anything Black-related whatsoever, and whatever we say or ask is taken out of context and twisted into something that fits nicely into their twisted narrative.
The Urban Dictionary in 2016 defined “trolling” as “being a pr*** on the Internet because you can.” A study conducted that same year by three professors from Ireland found that online hate speech has “exacerbated exponentially” on social media since the mid-2000s.
This reporter/columnist recently got trolled by racists both on social media and online articles after I asked then-Michigan men’s coach Juwan Howard about mainstream media putting him and the other two Big 10 Black coaches on the proverbial hot seat throughout the season. Yet, they continue to be role models for Black youth and others. (You can read the entire transcript and video of the March 13 postgame press conference on Bigten.org.)
I’ve been called everything but a child of God as right-wing articles became “clickbait.” Most of all, I was wrongly called a Black racist.
First, Black people in this country can’t be racist. Secondly, as a veteran reporter, I ask questions that others shy away from. If this offends the uneducated, or should I say the White racists out there, get over it.
“In the early days of doing Black Iowa News, anytime I posted anything about Black issues or something that I wrote, invariably trolls would come out of the woodwork,” admitted Black Iowa News Founder-Publisher Dana James. “I felt the need in the early days to battle them one by one, not to change their mind but to let them know this is not a space that you can come to do that.”
“I’ve gotten so used to that,” added WCCO Radio’s Henry Lake on trolling. “Sometimes, depending on the way that they come at me…maybe I’ll clap back with facts. But if they just want to be stuck on being ignorant, then I just have to let it be.”
“It’s hard to discern sometimes” if the racist troll is human or a bot, continued James. “Anti-Blackness is rampant these days,” she pointed out.
No one challenged the questions often asked of Howard’s job security by the other reporters in the room, all of whom but me were White. But I didn’t see their questions as racist any more than my question was. They were doing their job, and I was doing mine.
“You’re doing your work as a journalist…not trying to change [racists’] minds,” James pointed out.
Lake said, “I’m proud of the work that I do, stand by my opinion and what I talk about, and for those people that want to continue to indulge the racism, that’s not gonna change.”
I was born Black and proud of it. Being a racist is an acquired trait.
“Anytime you’re trying to share something of a Black perspective, trying to speak to Black kids, that is bothering a lot of people and irks the souls that you would ask a question about Black people being a role model,” noted James.
“As a part of the Black media, we see things as Black journalists from a Black lens. That’s a whole reason why Black media exist,” she concluded. “That’s why it’s even more important that we ask these hard questions, that we challenge these racist norms that we can’t talk about race in 2024.”