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Fallout continues from what stole the show at the recently BET awards telecast. The tributes to Prince by various artists were supposed to be the highlight of the night but their performances along with a surprise opening act appearance by Beyonce were all overshadowed when Jesse Williams, a featured actor on the hit TV show, "Greys Anatomy", was presented with a humanitarian award. His acceptance speech turned out to be what I'd describe as a kind of spoken word lament about - you guessed it - race in America. It was a very articulate and dynamic, not to mention provocative indictment of the white power structure, and it brought down the house. Predictably, it was just a matter of time before Jesse's rant which also criticized certain blacks for being complicit in the plight of their race, spilled over into the social media. While blacks were full of praise, whites were offended by the way Williams excoriated them, and a post by superstar Justin Timberlake was the most notable response shot down on black twitter. As a result, a campaign presumably by whites to have Jesse fired from Grey's Anatomy got underway. Shondra Rhimes, however, the producer of this series was having no parts of it and defended Williams' right to his opinion. But the controversy continues as the question remains as to whether a black celebrity has a right to do what a white one would be branded as a racist for doing had he aired his grievances against blacks... The following is an excerpt from Jesse Williams' speech and is what he spat in bringing it to a close. "...We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil – black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. The thing is though… the thing is that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real."

I've deliberately avoided consuming any material related to this "controversy," on social media. As these things go viral on social media, they just strengthen the very structures and systems that we, and even Jesse, complain about. So while Jesse's spoken word piece was moving, it will not change a thing. Going viral on Twitter only enriches the owners of Twitter. The only thing that will change anything is a change in our behavior. White folks don't "extract" our culture we give it way, in many cases freely. We boast about writing for the Huffington Post for free, while turning our noses up a payments deemed to small from a Black owned platform. We even go as far as claiming ownership when none belongs, to the point when some people actually believe that "black Twitter" or BET are things that Black people own.

Thanks Troy! The check is in the mail!!!!!! LOL!

Well considering that there are far fewer Black Lit sites today than 10 years ago, and many of the ones that remain are undiscoverable; you may not be over reacting. On the whole jumping through Google's hoops has helped make AALBC.com a better website. A few years ago Google made SSL a ranking signal for their search engine. I'm going to make AALBC.com secure as a result. Google are also behind making the while web secure, which is not a bad idea.

Here is a another notice from Google I got this morning (I don't post all of them). Google claims this page: http://aalbc.com/books/bookinfo.php?isbn13=9780446179980 violates one or more of the policies described below. I disagree and will try to fight this one. Google ads may not be placed on adult or mature content. This includes fetish content as well as sites that promote, sell or discuss sexual aids. Examples include, but are not limited to: sexual fixations or practices that may be considered unconventional sexual aids or enhancement tools such as vibrators, dildos, lubes, sex games, inflatable toys penis and breast enlargement tools sexual fixations or practices that may be considered unconventional sexual aids or enhancement tools such as vibrators, dildos, lubes, sex games, inflatable toys penis and breast enlargement tools For more information about keeping your content family-safe, please review our program guidelines and these tips from the policy team. Additionally, you can watch our short animated video & policy refreshers on this topic.

I got my hand slapped again by Google this morning. I was warned that I was serving Google ads on pages without content. My initial reaction is always frustration when I get these nastygrams from Google, because these notices generally preempt anything I had planned work on. In this case I was not aware that I had any pages without content. After checking out the sample link provide I discovered the types of pages Google does not like; Basically if someone runs a query on my website and there are not results you end up with a page that says no results. Check out the results page on "Flying Pigs," you see here since the query returns no results (well it may return this page now). Google does not wants ads served on this pages. For my website I think this is a mistake, for the ads still have value there. Basically I have to created new templates which excludes google ads for my search pages and my 404 error pages. Fortunately, this did not take very long. While I was creating the new header, I also took the time to redesign the search bar which looks a lot nicer now: