As a scholar of African American culture and a professor of black and african culture who specializes in the study of race and racism, this topic deserved more care that you provided to your readers. Good journalism requires opening up topics not ending them. Your title “When Twitter Went Riacist?” is anything but a question. “Did Twitter go Racist?” or “Is Twitter Trends Racist?” and a little background research in the Trending Topic itself might have provided you with a less ethnocentric post.

I followed the thread of the Trending Topic for over 2 hours fascinated by its complexity perhaps because I understood that it was started by Africans from the continent sharing their experiences, their stories, their view of being African. What made things compicated was when whites and some blacks got offended by what they THOUGHT was racist. That was a likely story but correlation ≠ causation. The comments were in part in jest and in part valid reflections of the African experience. And yes anyone could be offended by such views. And then some African Americans were writing about their own experiences as black ppl calling it “African” too. Overlapping narratives. Then a few whtie male twits, but a few of those voices reverberate very loudly in the offended zone, came in with the dominant stereotypes learned from mass media saying AIDs #thatsafrican.

How curious it is that in the land of free speech, we still haven’t learned to distinguish between racism (how we listen to things that offend us) and ppl of color sharing their experience any way they want to and to have a bit of fun with it. Somewere bad jokes but jokes are often abt things we don’t dare talk about (sex, religion, race, gender, etc.). They are messy and if you can agree to be offended you can learn something about HOW we see each other, not like it’s real but as insight into our humanity, too.

The Trending Topic #thatsafrican was probably the first moment, or one of the first moments that an African experience was broadcast on a popular social medium of the blogosphere and reached above the regular fray to hit the top of Trending Topics. When a minority perspective gets broadcast it is not uncommon for members of the majority to get really uncomfortable. Like the status quo is being upended and what will happen if…God forbid…if the minority starts to dominate the discourse. What happens then is the majority steps in and rights what feels “wrong.”

So the trending topic was censored. Removed from the Topics list at 9:35pm by my observation (I tweeted about it when it happened. See @kyraocity). Not all the tweets were funny or jokes but some were informative and some were just off the wall disconnections by random folks of every ethnicity.

#Thatsafrican was standing firm at the sixth slot for about an hour from 8pm to 9pm and then for about 30 mins it was at #3. I hope you do some followup work on your “hastily put together piece” because readers of the Huffington Post deserve better. We don’t need haste in reporting. I love HP and expect better. I want, as I think others do, intelligent insights that inspire readers to think critically about the diversity of our communities where consensus is not the first thing we experience. To think that otehr points of view are valid and make sense from that view.

The whole thing reminded me of the Tower of Babel without the moral judgment of having to disband because of our linguistic differences. Anthropologist Wade Davis has a great TED Talk where he describes a tribe where ppl must marry a woman who speaks a completely different language than the tribe they grew up in. I was amazed by the possibilities of living a life bethrothed to difference instead of sameness. You’d REALLY have to listen to learn and listen to stay connected then.

Time to agree to be offended and STAY in the conversation and stop labeling ppl racist.

Our listening has even more power than our words. Racism is more a function of what you are listening for than what ppl are saying anymore. Times they are changin’ and its time we started getting with the complexity of our time.

I run a workshop on transforming conversations of race and racism. I am giving a workshop at an upcoming Feast Salon in July (see alldaybuffet.org) We’ve come a long way in matters of race/racism but it takes courage to be truly eye to eye with the remarkable oneness of humanity. It’s really one conversation away if we’ll simply agree to be offended and see what’s on the other side for another.