Troy

Classic Cynique. @Cynique, do you still send editorials to the newspaper. You should send something to the Defender. Well @Del, I've been to Nigeria and that country alone has about 180M Black people. Black people will absolutely survive. We will survive even here in America. My only issue is will we share equally in the spoils, or continue to allow ourselves to be exploited. I will never give up fighting for our piece of the web--even if I have to fight for it single handedly...

@Del, you can;t use yourself as the benchmark for the masses. We were born before marketing was so pervasive and effective. Remember we only had a few TV stations and they stopped broadcasting late at night. Today kids have handheld devices and are targeted nonstop by marketers 24 hours a day--every day of the week! They never knew a world different from this. You and I can go without out cell phones and TVs. The average person under 30 would probably have actual physical withdrawal symptoms if they with without a cell phone for more than a few hours. Their minds are never still... it makes a big difference in how we think.

Well I obviously agree with you @Del, the more I dig into who controls Black images, at least here in the web, I beginning to see that Black people control FAR less than even I expected. As a result, people are confused because they simply do not know he truth. White people are at a loss to understand why Black people have anything to complain about. We have high paying jobs providing their entertainment, expensive cell phones with internet access to consume their products, and even a Black president--what else could we want?

Partially, Ebony and Jet magazines were. The company that purchased it is Black owned.

During my research on Black websites (a deeply enlightening activity for we own far less than I through), I stumbled across this article on DiversityInc. @Pioneer1, of course you and I will notice how much darker the model is in the photo compared to the commercial... maybe you are on to something man when it comes to the motivation of these corporations.... "The Black model who appeared in a Dove ad that garnered negative attention for its racist message claims that critics may have jumped the gun before knowing the full commercial’s intended message." —Kaitlyn D'Onofrio, DiversityInc

I agree. I doubt I could be hypnotized, but I can be, and have been, influenced by marketing, which is why I try to avoid the efforts of corporate marketing--which is virtually impossible unless you live in a cave. Even in a cave, in some far flung country, Facebook is coming for you; they are going as far as building infrastructure and giving away handheld devices to accomplish this.

I've been working on my top Black owned website project I've modified my formula for ranking sites, adding the age of the website as a factor. This seems to have elevated sites with more serious content, as they tend to have the oldest domains. I been removing many tops sites because quite a few websites focused on Black content are simply not Black owned. We don’t own the web-based hip-hop presence. It really is worse than i thought... Fortunately there are many great sites out there. We just need to patronize them. I'm afraid if we don't Facebook and the website they own will be our only options, and then we'll really be in deep doo-doo.

Well the lack of control is just a function of knowledge and technology. Controlling brains will come first because, as it is child's play compared to controlling the weather. I've seen people hypnotized, I see how easily we can be deceived and manipulated, and of course the owners of social media with access to tremendous amounts of our data have taken this type of control to a new level.

OK @Delano please start a new conversation when you add more. Also can you explain what you mean by "...existential contemplation of essence." Finally, some believe the mind and our actions could be perfectly predicted like the trajectory of a tossed ball, provided we have complete information about the initial conditions, external forces, and sufficient computational power. But like weather or brains are very complex and it is only a matter of time before we can predict and control both.

OK then we agree @Pioneer1, I guess our fundamental point of disagreement stems from motivation. You believe industry created high employment because they wanted to thwart Obama's efforts. I believe they did it because their excessive greed led to terrible decisions; decisions they were ultimately rewarded for when they should have been thrown in jail.

@Del, yeah someone else on YouTube argued that content was important when comparing the two videos. Dove was selling soap so that made the commercial racist. It seems "context," or one's interpretation of context, is subjective. The context to me is an environment were people are easily distracted by nonsense, losing track to what is actually important. Del, if you don't decide what is important then someone else will do it for you. We as Black people lets others set our agenda. I know I sound like a broken record with this, but it is true. This is why I side with @Pioneer1 on this issue; thought I may disagree on some points. I may disagree with Pioneer about the motivation of what is going but the outcomes is the same nonetheless. We are busy running round complaining about some stupid commercial meanwhile Black people are fighting for survival. I watched News One convene a panel to talk about the Dove commercial--Their news is directed by whatever nonsense is trending on Twitter. .All talk no call for action. Five minutes from now we will be focused on the next shiny object held in front of us. As predicted, we've forgotten all about Colin and are now debating how to respect the flag. We have no control over our agenda. It will remain that way until we own some platforms that do more than discuss what is on twitter and that the rest of us value through patronage.

An old buddy of mine reminded me of the Michael Jackson Video below. Again it seems social media has has driven people in sane. I guess today Michael Jackson would be vilified as a racist all over Twitter too. Interestingly, "the gloved one" did make is own personal transformation from Black to white, including his own progeny... We have better things to be outraged about.

I dunno @Pioneer1, Wall Street made a pretty good mess of things before Obama came into office. Wall street s motivated by greed not race. They did however make Obama bail them out by holding a global financial crisis on his watch if he failed to do it. They'll use 45 in a similar manner. In fact 45 will be easier because he is greedy too and has no moral compass to restrain his behavior.

I'm still researching this subject. Interestingly this post came up #2 on a query on "the best blackowned websites" (without the double quotes). I'm still plowing these sites: https://aalbc.com/top_black_websites/top_black_sites_list.php removing sites that are not black owned, adding other that are. I'l going to factor in a website's domain page to calculate a site's AALBC Score. Any sites that have made it for 20 years or more deserve special props. The oldest domain I found was Vibe.com which was registered in 1994! But Vibe is not Black owned so they'll be removed from the list...

...why Black celebritie's skin tones are often recorded much lighter than they really are.

Mel at the risk of mansplaining, the government counts unemployment 6 different ways, the most conservative figure, is U1 which is reported by the media. It completely hides the facts that, 50% of Black men, in Harlem are unemployed. Nor does it tell you that many of those are working in low age, menial jobs. So no, I do not take the government numbers as the gold standard to help me understand my community. But I understand why others might; they have no investment in my community and in fact despise it based upon their actions and certainly there beliefs I don't reject the government numbers on this matter, based upon what I "believe." I reject them based upon comparison to reality

I could play devil's advocate and say; This commercial is not racist. The Black woman in it was paid and was obviously happy doing what she did. You men are not entitled to even speak on any subject relating to Black women. We don't need or want you mansplaining anything to us. You old people are out of touch. It is 2017 and Black women have reclaimed their agency and if we want to magically transform into white girl that is up to us! Seriously, if you don't like it boycott Dove and tell you friends to do so too.

Net-net hurricanes are a job loser. Many of contractors working to rebuild were already working. in any event. more jobs are lost than gained. Indeed in the worse cases like Katrina, many jobs will never come back as entire communities are wiped out... Biloxi MS, was hit again a couple of days ago a hotel I stayed in a few times was flooded. The information regading real unemployment in New York is not new. A quick google search turned up this NBC report: https://highered.nbclearn.com/portal/site/HigherEd/browse/?cuecard=679# When I get a chance I'll try to track down a primary source (then again you could do that too). I live in the community I don't need anyone to tell me when it is raining... I know this is hard for people outside the community to believe, and the government statistics are laughable to anyone here, but what else is new.

Wendy thanks so much for taking the time to say that. I know people read the forums, even conversations abandoned years ago. But it is not "thankless" when people like you actually express those sentiments. @Delano, Hmm that is not exactly a positive aspect is it?

It is now October of 2017, and as we speak I'm still migrating old content to the new format. As far as I can tell I have less than 1,000 pages of content to move, but I as I move stuff I discover all types of problems, from technical issues to out of date or stale content. An upgrade I thought would take 6 months will take two years and six months. For the life of me I really don't know what drives me in this effort. Someone looking at me from the outside might legitimately think I'm obsessed. It does not feel this way and the last two years have flown by but it has been quite an effort. I actually started the website on this day 20 years ago. @Delano, I guess that makes my website a Libra, opposite me on the Zodiac. I bet that means something huh? :-)

Try Huria Search you might get lucky there. It queries over 300 black websites maybe one of the newspapers may have written an article on the type of business you need. There are a few sites that provide lists of Black owned business but I've already went through those most of the business crafts, clothing, oils and the like. I've been talking to many more people lately who are serious about doing business with Black owned businesses. Indeed, one Brother I spoke with on Friday has written a book on the subject. I'll share it when I get the information. But it feels like supporting Black business is becoming part of the zeitgeist, and important part of Black social consciousness. I actually know people who refuse to do business with Amazon! That is serious stuff and if enough people do the same we can have a real impact.

I'm glad we can agree one something... I suspect you'd need to do some research too Mel. For example, if we looked at the currently unemployment stats. I doubt anyone could say with certainty what caused the decrease, whether is was actually a bad thing, or even if it proves that 45 is a worse president than Barack Obama, as the person who shared these numbers concluded. You see many things impact these numbers. It is simply foolish to compare these numbers, in isolation, because so many thing were different, between this October and last October. I'm not saying you are doing this @Mel Hopkins, but many people like the person who shared these numbers do. In deed the media do it all the time, just announcing numbers without context as it that is meaningful information. We know for example that wages have not kept pace with inflation. We know the "gig economy" has replaced many jobs that provided a some level of security and benefits. The unemployment figures provide no transparency. We know those seeking work are not counted in the unemployment figures after a period of time (two years I think). We know the real unemployment for Black men in Harlem is 50% during Obama's presidency. You can't tease this out from the unemployment figures. As you implied the financial meltdown caused many job losses, some of those jobs are reflected in the numbers above. We know many of the jobs that were lost on Wall Street are never coming back--there are fewer high paying wall street jobs today than there was in 2008. Many of these people ultimately went back to work if not in financial services in other industries those number would be reflected under Obama, though that recovery cost us the better part of a trillion dollars. Now we know Wall Street employment is down and Amazon employment is up. Of course we know the Wall Street investment bankers are not packing boxes in some Amazon warehouse. But we again we know wages are down. I'm not sure a growth of low wage jobs is something to sing about. Again, I freely admit there is a lot I don't know so no, I don't profess to know the cause of the numbers above--any more than I know the causes of climate change. in the former case I know enough to know I'm being misled with inadequate information and in the later case I trust the scientific community.

I used to used the free version Grammarly, but it got in my way. Cynique may feel I should go back to using it, but the additional overhead was not worth it to me. Is the grammar checker that comes with your word process in adequate? As far as checking for plagiarism I was not aware that grammarly did that. Maybe you get that feature with the fee based version. When I feel the need to check for plagiarism I just run a Google search against a string of the questionable text in double quotes. But if you are a teacher that needs to check an entire class' papers there is of course software available but I can't recommend any.

I hear you Mel and thanks. But there are so many new books that I am made aware of lack of knowledge of this book will not make a difference. Still it is surprising was was not made aware of it prepublication. I have no interest in reaching out to the publisher, they obviously did not put a big marketing push behind the book. I suspect they are relying on the author's platform--he did win a National Book Award. Who knows. Again, I was just surprised I have not heard about the book. I actually did share info about this book on social media in an effort to see if this book was new to anyone else and wondering if it might attract attention, but organic reach on social media for brands is largely dead, so there was very was engagement.

Check out THE TEA book club's reading list. They create interesting video of all of their book club discussions. I'll be working with them to help share the content. The folks behind the scenes really care about the subject and the video are high quality. Out goals overalp so I'll be working to help spread the word :-) _____________________ Sometimes I think the conversations on our discussion forum might make make interesting videos given the range of opinions. Logistically it would be a challenge just because of geography. We could do an online video, but I wonder if the dynamic of what we write could translate to video. Then again it night be better... who knows.