Afrospear members quoted in Washington Post article

The mainstream media continues to acknowledge the emergence of African American bloggers while black leadership and black media continues to ignore them.  The latest example is an article in the Washington Post titled Critics of Old Guard Take Black Activism Online.  Here are some of the highlights from the story written by Darryl Fears.

• The new black revolution, as singer Gil Scott-Heron famously predicted, is not being televised.  It is raging online.

• Blogger Gina McCauley, 32, who is organizing the first conference of nonwhite bloggers this summer in Atlanta, said that what Jones and Rucker have started “can potentially become a new Niagara movement,” a reference to the small contingent of black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, who met near Niagara Falls in 1905 to form an organization to oppose segregation. The organization eventually became the NAACP.

• Others have another name for the new efforts by black bloggers: Civil Rights 2.0. Blogger L.N. Rock said that if abolitionist Frederick Douglass, former congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin and “people like that were around today, they would have blogs.”

  “The NAACP’s youth-outreach efforts are dysfunctional,” Rock said. “We would have been glad to work with them had they asked. If you’re talking about the talented tenth, we are the new talented tenth,” a reference to a concept by Du Bois of a group of exceptional black men.  “The skill sets of the bloggers is no joke,” Rock said. “These guys have doctorates. They’re not being used.”

• Strong words, but not nearly as strong as what is said on black blogs. L.N. Rock, who helped form Afrospear, a network of black bloggers, wrote in the African American Political Pundit that the NAACP has been missing in action on issues involving women and called its 65-member board “the board of the living dead.”

  Andrea Plaid, a blogger whose screen name is the Cruel Secretary, has written that the NAACP stood by as activist C. Delores Tucker, beginning in the 1990s, fought Black Entertainment Television and rappers over the way music videos and lyrics portray black women.

It seems like the NAACP is always the punching bag in these articles.   As the organization gets ready to celebrate its centennial less than a year from now, it seems to continue on a path to irrelevance.  The only positive sign I have seen is the Dr. Frederick D. Haynes’ name at the top of their list of potential leaders.

To L.N. Rock’s (African American Political Pundit) point, the 65 member board of the NAACP means the group will always move at a snails pace. Things in the blogosphere travel at lightening speed.  While they are scheduling a meeting, an issues has circled around the Afrosphere 3 times.

I also like Gina’s analogy regarding the new Niagra Movement.  I am hopeful that Blogging While Brown will be just that, and can’t wait to see the result we produce in Atlanta.