I signed up to this site with the Obama wave. I was starting to be politically involved and after digging around on ABC News, CNN and other places then I quickly learned I wasn’t getting the news the way I liked it.
I wanted the stories, I wanted the facts, and I didn’t want it filtered through major corporations; plus I liked the comments here. So I’ve stayed. I don’t post much at all, comment less, but I’m on this site multiple times a day, every day since 2008-ish.
But it’s only recently as a black person have I felt so … relevant. Seemingly every few diaries is a discussion about my people, our feelings, our community, and our opinion. And while personally I appreciate the overall attention I feel that it’s contrived and politically convenient to suddenly elevate our lives and plight to argue over candidates.
Being the enginerd that I am, I wanted to do some data analysis before writing this, as it’s been in my chest for a few weeks now, I thought maybe I’d be wrong and could go back to my comfort zone. So doing some rudimentary data digging using the search function for “African American” in diary title and body I came across 645 results. I removed two recurring titles: “Live Elections” and “High Impact” diaries (thank you Jotter) as they weren’t really relevant to my search. I came away with 461 unique diaries spanning back to February 2014. Arbitrary time, but I didn’t want to overload my search and this seem like a good place to start.
I chose “African American” first and then ran a search for “Black People” and attempted “Blacks” [a term which I personally hate] and it seems that the system removes plural, so “Blacks” shifted to “Black” and results about “black boots” wasn’t what I was looking for.
I then took the summing up the comments per month and looked towards “black” events that aligned with the time period
Above is the bar chart for comments submitted for the last two years for diaries which featured “African Americans” in the title or body.
Above is the data from the search. We’re halfway through the month and the discussion of black people is hotter than it’s ever been. But for me, I don’t buy the concern, it doesn’t seem authentic. What it appears is that each group is attempting to boost their candidate or denigrate another’s by using a group of human beings that haven’t appeared THAT relevant in two years.
And while personally I appreciate the overall attention I feel that it’s contrived and politically convenient to suddenly elevate our lives and plight to argue over candidates.