For a long time I’ve had the impression that a lot of non-black people think that black people are always complaining unnecessarily about racism. I have no idea if that’s true or not, it’s just a feeling I’ve gotten over the years, based on observing the reaction whenever a member of some small community says something or someone is racist.

It bothers me a little bit that people could have that impression, because it’s always struck me as so simplistic to say that black people think everything is racist. To me, one of the defining things about being black isn’t that you always think something happened because you’re black, it’s that you never really know if something happened because you’re black. You see no difference between what you’re doing and what everybody else is doing, so you assume the reason is due to the most obvious difference.

The essence of it is that you end up having to live your life with a small, but constant, level of uncertainty. Maybe you didn’t get invited to a certain party or gathering, or you didn’t get that job you thought you were qualified for. Maybe you felt like the security guard at that store in the mall just happened to be strolling down every. single. aisle. that you were looking at stuff in.

Walking around all the time and feeling like you’re getting treated differently from other people, but never really knowing why, can drive you a little bit crazy. I’m pretty used to being in different environments and around different kinds of people, but there are still lots of times when I have to consciously push those thoughts out of my head. No, it’s not because I’m black that this person was rude to me, maybe they just had a phone call where they got some bad news. No, it’s not because I’m black that I didn’t get invited to something, it’s because I’m basically a hermit and like to stay at home, so I wasn’t around when people were talking about it. No, it’s not because I’m black that I just got pulled over for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign (well, actually that one was probably because I’m black, but you get the idea). It’s like that, over and over again throughout every day.

I’ve been fortunate enough to go to good schools, so naturally I’ve always have to constantly endure discussions about affirmative action. Those kinds of kinds of discussions can be destructive if they start to chip away at someone’s confidence because, how can you really ever know whether or not you got in ahead of someone else that also deserved it. Some people can’t handle the weight of that doubt. I ignored the discussions because I knew how hard I’d been working, I never really lacked confidence in academic settings, and always felt like my grades could kill any remaining doubts as to whether or not I belonged. Besides, for anyone to be successful, it always entails a certain amount of luck or randomness, whether people want to admit that or not. (Always.) The idea of me not deserving to be somewhere doesn’t usually enter my mind, because I keep telling myself not to let it, and I haven’t yet met anyone that felt the need to try and show me I don’t deserve it.

Maybe I’m the only black person that feels that uncertainty in everyday life, maybe not. If you don’t then I’m probably a little jealous. I think my point is that you can’t control all of the things that happen to you, but you can control how you deal with it. It’s a choice you have to make. I know things are a lot different for the young black kids growing up now than when I was younger, but I feel like this still applies. Hopefully they grow to understand it and be able to deal with it in their own productive way.

Yesterday my wife and I went to the Art Institute to check out a couple of exhibits that we had been interested in hearing about. One of those exhibits was the collection of works from the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine empires. There was one piece in particular in that exhibit that struck me. It was a sculpture of the head of a noble woman, I think from the late Roman or early Byzantine period. The description talked about how the sculpture’s hair was done in a very traditional style that dated back to a much earlier period. Apparently noblewomen started doing their hair in that style as a way of expressing their longing for an earlier, simpler time. It was funny to me, because it just shows that there are always people reminiscing about past years when things were simpler and, implicitly, better.

Those people should be ignored. Keep moving forward

A long time ago, when my grandmother was still alive and I was much younger, there was never any question about what I’d be doing on election day. Even though I had the day off from school, that was still where I’d be going, because that’s where the voting booths were. Every election, I’d go with her to P.S. 80 in Queens, right near our house, and watch her while she voted. Rain or shine, local or national, my grandmother voted. No exceptions. Four years ago, even though she wasn’t in the best of health and was living in Panama with my mother, she still sent in her absentee ballot to vote for Barack Obama.

So, with my grandmother as my example, there has never really been a question about whether or not I would vote. The only question is who the candidates are. It was important to her, and she made it important for me as well. It was natural and expected that I vote. I’ve acted accordingly.

If you can vote, please go do it. Elections really do have consequences and make an impact on people’s lives. If you can’t vote, for whatever reason, go help someone else vote that otherwise may not be able to do so. If you need more suggestions, check out barackobama.com and see how else you can help out.

Vote.

People on the web like to criticize and insult others. That’s a pretty obvious statement, but I might not mean who you think I mean. I’m not referring to the usual anonymous discussion thread or bulletin board trolls. I mean that the people who go to work every day actually building the web like to criticize and insult each other. I’m also not referring to legitimate constructive criticism–you know, the type that offers helpful suggestions about how to improve something. No, people that build the web just like to call each other idiots a lot. You’ve probably done it too and not thought much about it. Maybe you’ve had to work on a redesign for a site where it seemed like it was the first site previous designer/developer had ever worked on. “What kind of person still used tables in 2006? He/she obviously had no idea what they were doing and doesn’t deserve to even have an email address, much less make websites.” It’s almost second-nature, many of us care pretty deeply about what we do and we hate to see someone else do it poorly. Not only because it reflect badly on everyone else, but also because we’re generally nerds that like to see things done “the right way” (whatever that means to you).

I had been thinking about this phenomenon a while ago, early last year sometime, when I noticed the disproportionate contempt I had for some websites. I’d go through sites picking at all of the little errors that I noticed, wondering how they slipped through, and thinking about how of course I’d be able to do a much better job. Then I started getting a lot busier and started looking at some of the stuff I was putting out, and wondering what the next person that has to work on the site I just finished going to say about me? Yeah, there may be some things I couldn’t quite smooth out before the deadline to launch the site came up, but I had reasons! My successor has to take into account the time it took for the client to respond, or their irrational color preference I couldn’t budge, or their requirement that I everything be crammed onto the home page with terrible copy and spacing!

Actually, no. Your successor won’t take that into account, the same way you didn’t take it into account when looking at someone else’s work.

What made me think of all of this was this little controversy in the web design community due to a blog post by Andy Rutledge critiquing the design of news websites and using the New York Times, specifically, as an example. I definitely respect Andy as a designer and for the many posts he writes explaining some of the things that designers should be doing. I read that post and thought some of his ideas were pretty good. While they certainly wouldn’t completely work for the Times, maybe some news organizations would be able to implement some aspects and make reading news on the web a better experience. I’m not a fan of his outspoken, and in my opinion somewhat combative and inflammatory style, but I can usually get past that stuff to focus on the helpful parts. After reading the post, I didn’t think about it too much, until I saw this blog post by Khoi Vinh that seemed to refer to Rutledge’s post. Vinh is a former design director for the Times, so he and a lot of his friends and former coworkers built the site.

Vinh praises some of the ideas and the execution of the blog post, but he makes a critical point at the end that I found most important.

I will say this, though: unsolicited redesigns are terrific and fun and useful, and I hope designers never stop doing them. But as they do so, I also hope they remember it helps no one — least of all the author of the redesign — to assume the worst about the original source and the people who work hard to maintain and improve it, even though those efforts may seem imperfect from the outside. If you have good ideas and the talent to execute them and argue for them, the world will still sit up and pay attention even if you take care in your language and show respect to those who don’t see things quite the way you do.

Basically (in not so many words) you can disagree without being disagreeable.

Apparently Rutledge has been receiving a lot of criticism for his redesign, and he wrote another post addressing such criticism, once again written in the same tone. I read some of the articles which he linked to. Most certainly didn’t fully get across what he was trying to do with his analysis, but I didn’t think they were quite as bad as he seems to think (this seems natural, since they weren’t attacking me personally). However, when people (including employees of the Times) took to twitter, blog posts and news articles to attack Rutledge, I don’t know if they were responding to his points so much as they were responding to his tone and some of the content around his points. From the first paragraph of his post, he basically primes people to start coming up with an a response.

Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days.

Maybe he was trying to draw attention to the post, or maybe that’s just how he feels, nobody knows but him. Either way, this brings me back to my original point. People don’t seem to consider (or care) that there are actual people on the other side of the screen. As the worker bees trying to grow the Internet every day, you would think that we’d would be much more cognizant of this on a daily basis, but it doesn’t seem that way.

This isn’t about not hurting people’s feelings. That has to happen and can’t be avoided. Any kind of criticism hurts, even the constructive kind. But at least constructive criticism shows you a path to improving, so that’s what you latch on to, and you grow and get better. But if you go to work every day, trying to improve nytimes.com, what kind of lesson can you really take from someone saying “[i]t is hard to believe that the Times, or any other similar publication, actually cares about the news when they treat it with this sort of indignity”?

I think that kind of language immediately obscures the point you were trying to make and potentially forecloses the possibility of a reasonable debate about the issues. It makes it easy to argue and difficult to learn anything when you just think the person you’re arguing against is stupid and wrong. All I’m really trying to say is that I hope in the future we all think a bit more about who did the hard work to create the thing that we’re so casually insulting. I happen to think that’s a better way of operating. I intend to do my part here and on Twitter to make what I say more productive, and closer to something I would actually want to spend time reading. Hopefully others do too.

White celebrities move in a space of white privilege that allows for both forgiveness and forgetfulness on behalf of the ever-present mainstream media machine. This is a space that Black artists are shut out of. As racial identity continues to be negotiated through images and representations, Black celebrities continue to be subjected to the deeply embedded archetypes and stereotypes of Blacks in this country. Read: Chris Brown as the “angry black juvenile delinquent” and Janet Jackson as the “hyper-sexualized, overly promiscuous black female.”

• Leigh Davenport, writing for News One

I’m a little torn about this article, which you should go and read first. On one hand, I definitely agree with her larger point—that black celebrities can be subject to very different standards than white celebrities. On the other hand, this seems to be a particularly bad situation to use as an example of such differences.

I would actually argue that the black community is a little too fast and forgiving in bringing its celebrities back into the fold. Not for the stupid stuff I don’t care about, like showing a nipple on or having a stress-induced nervous breakdown, but for serious stuff, like statutory rape and violence. I think there is too much rushing to protect someone because the mainstream media is being too hard on them. One obvious example is R. Kelly, who managed to neither apologize nor suffer any long-term legal repercussions beyond the expense and public humiliation of the trial. People never seemed to stop stepping in the name of love.

I think Chris Brown’s situation is quite a bit different though, because he committed an act of violence against another person, and that person was at least as famous as he was (don’t discount how important that second part is). I don’t really follow much celebrity news and gossip, so I don’t know how many other celebrities of any race were involved with violence like this. I know Sheen has had some charges brought and abused the women associated with him on several occasions. Unfortunately Sheen is a bigger star than them, and people took their colorful pasts to mean they were slightly less…reputable. Wrongly, their accounts of the incidents were discounted. There’s also Mel Gibson, but he’s continuing to suffer some consequences. I’m sure there are more, but right now I can’t really think of any comparable situations, other than maybe Ike and Tina Turner. Yeah, Miley Cyrus and Lindsey Lohan and others have done dumb stuff, but they’re only hurting themselves, and people love to see the rich and famous self-destruct.

With Brown, I never really got a sense of any contrition. Like I said, I don’t pay a whole lot of attention, so I could be wrong. I remember him putting out a youtube video, but I also definitely remember seeing pictures of him chilling at a pool with a bunch of women having a good ‘ol time a few weeks later. I’m not saying he needed to be a hermit, but c’mon son, Rihanna’s face hadn’t even finished healing yet. Since he was apparently shunned immediately after the incident, this is basically the first time in two years that people actually want to hear what he has to say—so long as what he has to say is “I’m sorry” (look no further than Michael Vick for an example of that). His big problem (besides having a temper) is that he has now turned what could have been a bad incident into a bad pattern. He could have taken all the questions in stride, sounded contrite, performed, and moved on to the next interview but he didn’t. Why? Because he does have anger issues.

Leigh is right that Brown is a young kid that needs better people around him, but I also think he needs some serious anger management and time before he should be allowed to let slide. Domestic violence is too important of an issue for two years, a misdemeanor charge, and some bs community service to be enough. That’s not the way things work nowadays, though. Now, your road to redemption is paved with dollar bills. The way things work is that he has two choices: 1) change the topic by making himself into a sideshow, so people stop thinking about why he was originally in the news (not an easy thing to do, making violence funny, but possible, as Sheen has shown); or 2) start excelling at his craft and making hit songs (the R. Kelly/Kobe Bryant route). He had already chosen the latter path, which is the only reason he was on GMA to begin with.

Unfortunately, if he really wants people to stop asking him questions, then all he needs to do is start “#winning.”