sherman, of the super bowl champion seattle seahawks. sherman, whose bravado sparked a firestorm of race talk back in january, posted this little league photo on twitter the day after jackson s release. his accompanying message, quote, that desean jackson and me have been boys since we were kids. no one should be judged by the action of others. #fam. sherman followed up with a column four days ago defending jackson and players like himself, who still have friends back in the hood, writing, consider that for every sever guys i try to help, who end up dead or in jail, there s another person i was able to rescue from a similar end. should i give up on everybody out of fear of being dirtied by the media? sorry, but i was born in this dirt. back at the table is mychal denzel smith of the nation. all right, i want to ask you about this, because you connected sherman s claim there, about being born in this dirt to a kind of larger process, in a recent column. and you write, in short, if you
but it s completely brilliant. and it s the kind of cultural critique that african-americans are known for, culturally, from the dozens, from toast, on down. but i also want to be clear that there is some eating of the self that occurs. you are part of what was one of the most painful things to watch over the course of the past year, something that michelle goldberg described in her nation piece as the toxic feminist twitter wars. and i ll just read a piece from goldberg, who says, even as online feminism has proved itself a real force for change, many of the most avid digital feminists will tell you that it s become toxic. indeed, there s a nascent generes of essays by people who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in it, not because of their sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists. i am as self-righteous as i can be, when i am standing just in judgment. and i will say, i have been a victim of some of this kind of
more importantly, perhaps, just draw attention to a message, it s a tremendously powerful tool. when that power is then levied against a single individual who steps out of line, it becomes a lot more like, i don t know, cyberbullying? yes, that term s been used. so richard, as you look at that particular moment, the cancel colbert moment, because i think, for all of us on twitter, there are moments where it s like, yeah, go twitter, get em, twitter. and other times, oh, god, is this happening, oh, no. how did you experience the cancel colbert moment? when that came out, you had to read into what was the process, the timeline that progressed over that period of with what, 24 to 48 hours. when i look at what suey park told the new yorker and her intent behind this. she s basically saying, hey, i know the way this system works. i know how this pool is. i know how warm the water is, why can t i get in and swim too? i don t want colbert to be
that didn t work. then, there was the bay of pigs invasion. in april 1961, the u.s. tried to topple fidel and his communist government with a group of cia financed and trained cuban refugees. well, that failed too. the group was overwhelmed by counterattacks from castro s military. of the 1,200 plus cuban exiles, 100 were killed and 1,100 were captured. despite the failures of the united states to either assassinate or oust fidel castro, poison, and an armed invasion are widely recognized methods for eliminating one s enemies. and even though castro handed power over to his brother, raul, in 2008, the thought of a fidel/communism-free cuba remains a long-standing u.s. interest. and it turns out that the u.s. has experimented with less commonly accepted tools for creating unrest. twitter. or at least something like it. according to a new report by the associated press, in 2009, the
that doesn t look like democracy to me. or at least not the kind that we want. richard, you have spent much of your career in international politics, looking at the rest of the world, and some of that is about democracization movements. and if we think about the iran green movement and the way in which twitter s avatar has turned green or the arab spring in cairo, do you think we re being a little too u.s. in our focus, and that in fact, twitter does have the capacity to do this big movement building? that is the point, isn t it? we look at twitter on any other media platform, we can t look at it holistically and say one thing about it. it s different for every context. when you talk about the reactionary movement based on what is happening in black twitter, maybe it isn t, what s the reaction, it s what is being said originally. it s not a problem with the reaction, it s what s being said. the person saying that is not used to the reaction. because they have not been in the public