Hoodwinked! Led Astray! Run Amok!

So, I woke up like any other day and decided to check my Twitter, Facebook & Ning for the haps. Forget reading a paper, to really get the pulse of the people – let’s see what they’re talking about. And I walked into ANOTHER fight about black relationships. I’m not going to share the names or venue, to protect the guilty, but I will share with you their points of contention.

They were arguing over some points regarding black female empowerment, and whether or not those points aligned more with black empowerment (the entire community) or the denigration of black men. Please note that I’ve now officially exhausted all the fancy language I intend to use in this post. Put simpler, it was the “ABW” (angry black woman) vs. the “BBM” (bashed black man). Stereotypes and incendiary language abounded.

Now, I’m not well versed in feminist ideology, but I’ve always been from the school of black female empowerment. Or so I thought. Although I rarely use the term, I identify with the idea of the Strong Black Woman, or Independent Black Woman. After logging on and reading a bit of both sides, and listening to the wise words of one of my friends, I had to reconsider my position.

It occurred to me that maybe the feminist was wrong and sounded a bit bitter. As did the BBM. They both sounded like the outlying ends of a whole black relationship discussion spectrum. It also occurred to me that they just might be an incredibly vocal minority. The fringe, for lack of a better word. Here’s the thought, put simply:

What if…those fringe writers/bloggers/twitterers/authors weren’t speaking for “all” or “most”? What if they’re really just sharing where they are, in this moment? What if we stopped giving them credit for being the “voice” of the masses that they’re suggesting they speak for? What if we questioned the “truth” of what they’re saying? Great points aside, and whether I agree with them or not – who is qualifying these folks to speak on behalf of…us?

So, I decided to do a quick straw poll on one of those points of contention: whether/not black men actually want to get married. It wasn’t simply to prove anyone wrong/right, but to figure out if maybe, just maybe the common perception (read: blog post) regarding the attitudes of black men was skewed.

I polled 57 of my friends, exes and high school classmates, with and without their knowledge. Meaning, I looked at some of their Facebook relationship statuses. #dontjudgeme. Here’s what I found:

• 23 are married
• 13 of those 23 indicate (act) as if they’re happily married
• 28 of them want to be married (I’d guess happily)
• I think one or two of the remaining 6 is gay. I’m scared to ask. (No, they’re not exes, nosy!)
• The remaining 5 are exes that don’t like talking to me…lol

Note that this poll is far from scientific. Don’t let that stop you from believing it’s the gospel. Far too many of us take a blogger’s quoting of statistics and run with it, simply because it’s on the internet. Don’t believe me? Ask your own M/F friends, ask your exes, poll your social circles. Do your own research, and stop taking blog posts, tweets and discussion forum topics for granted.

Beyond that, stop believing that the most vocal minority is an authority on black relationships. One black man doesn’t necessarily speak for all (or most) black men’s thoughts on any issue. Same thing for women. The person who talks the loudest, or gets the most page hits, or most site traffic, or is most often cross-posted, or most track-backed/retweeted isn’t the one representing common thought.

You do realize that one of the oldest tricks in the social media handbook is to a) write an inflammatory headline, b) add incendiary content, c) cross-reference well known people/bloggers/celebrities/pundits/websites and d) post about it a LOT, to make sure EVERYONE sees where you stand, right?. It’s easy to gain a reputation on the Internet quickly, simply by starting a flame war. If the prize here is traffic, the very vocal outliers win it easily, because we all buy into it. Even if the prize here is to get people thinking/talking/posting, the very vocal minority still wins.

So, after my lil straw poll (which, btw, took HOURS. Thanks, exes), I returned to see if the “neo-feminist” and the “bashed black man” were still arguing. They were.

Here’s the lesson: The more people that buy into the idea that black women and black men cannot get together, the more books, adspace, seminars, radio shows, tv specials, websites sell. The money here is not in the cure, it’s in the come-back. Truthfully, if we just talked, we’d find a great deal of variance in that black relationship discussion spectrum. Common black folks would fall in between the two outlying schools of black relationship thought.

We’ve been bamboozled, and as long as we pick up rocks to help throw them at our perceived opponents, we will stay that way.

Meh. Who would’ve thought that we’d progress to the point that we’re quite literally throwing internet sticks and stones at each other?

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3. [LIFE] Rewind: 13 Black Truths
4. Today in Blackness or lack there of: GOP really needs some chocolate in their life.
5. [LIFE] Catching Feelings in Cyberspace