Alan Gutierrez

When you have a stuck In-Sink-Erator, you’re going to want to read Installing A Food Waste Disposer from HammerZone.com (Better Living Through Handymanness).

Ran across a Vietnamese website called Vietnam Bridge, which read like a newspaper with a bias, rather than a blunt instrument of the state. It got me to searching. North Korea has their own propaganda website out of Japan. It is written in Newspeak. Pictures of life in North Korea leak out through the Internet, however. A Discovery Channel program about North Korean children is up on YouTube, a website called the Chosen Journal has a mind-numbing slide show of human rights violations on their landing page. Cuba’s Granma has a steady diet of conspiracy theories, about assinations mainly. A ready niche for the Cuban state in the Americas?

My invitation Storm Bridge workshop, a project of the Southern Institute of Tulane University, came to me through Michael Kane, whom I’ve come to know through my research on the Unified New Orleans Plan.

It was a non-confrontational workshop. Not one of those where they approach you like an addict in denial.

It discussed the human agency of the failure of Katrina. It presented ethnic conflict resolution strategies. There was a rational discussion of the social injustices of Katrina.

I was prepared for this discussion. In the year since the storm, when so much injustice has been presented as mere incompetence, when so much suffering has been presented as a grand opportunity to rebuild New Orleans, it has been a rapid disillusionment. I work with neighborhoods that are recovering as strongly as Mid-City and find that for all their hard work, they are handed a hard-line so that East New Orleans can be handed a line that is that much harder.

The gist of Storm Bridge, is that we can use the common suffering of Katrina to expand our caring for the welfare of others who suffered in other ways. We recognize that elderly persons experienced the storm differently, that a retiree who is rebuilding is experiencing the recovery differently than myself. Through my understanding of my Katrina year, I’m asked to imagine the additional challenges of a single mother with small children. I might be able to expand my understanding of the challenges faced by single parents as a matter of course.

What occurred to me, during Storm Bridge, was that I’d come to learn about racism through television.

There was an agenda in television programming in the 70’s. I was weaned on Seasame Street, the non-Muppet residents of which, looked an awful lot like the residents of Briarcliff.

There was message of tolerance in this children’s television was not so overt as it is today. It was simply the notion that in the street, you’re going to spend your time with different people. That checked with my reality. This was probably the most intelligent televised statement on race.

In Detroit, Michigan and again in the Detroit suburb of Huntington Woods, where I began to attend a private school in Detroit proper, there was enough of a mixture of race and religion in my upbrining that differences were the norm. I was never accutely aware of being in the majority. I never felt it necessary to dig in as hispanic, assert minority status.

There was no overt racism that I had to consider.

The only overt racism I saw took place on television.

All In The Family, where bigoty was characterized as immaturity, and that it would never stand to reason. When reason was rejected, then when faced with the humanity of the subject of bigotry, the bigot was bound to repent.

There were programs that would hit you over the head with the immorality of bigotry, often times from one episode to the next, the unrepentant bigot showdown was a staple of the 80’s sitcom with a moral.

This relentless string of straw man bigots, did little to prepare. In the face of true bigotry, I’m never quite certian how to react without the backing of a studio audience.

In Ann Arbor a discussion about race was a predictable parlor game.

The conversation would not be about race, actually, because that in itself is too selective. It would be about minorities. Such a conversation will climax like an episode of the Jeffersons, with the lighter skined or more trationally sexualy oriented person, the bigot, put firmly in their place. The participants would grasp for minority status, perhaps evoking their Irish heritage, on their grand-mothers side, or the Chippewa that manages to compose 1/16 of most Michganders.

A pantomime of this televised racial tension.

I’ve spent my weekend thinking of 1976. The sense that I had that racism was fading fast, that it was embodied by hapless bigots, does little to explain the lock-down on public housing, the one-way tickets to nowhere, or the barricade at the GNO bridge.

The year 1976 comes to mind, because it was the year we moved from 8 Mile in Detroit to 10 Mile in Oakland County, Royal Oak and/or Huntington Woods.

It has been a 11 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It had been 9 years since the City of Detroit burned and the 82nd Airborne were deployed to stem an unyielding civil disturbance. Coleman Young was elected Mayor in 1974 and disbanded Operation STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Our Streets), a plain-clothes police task force that had killed 17 African-Americans in 4 years. In 1975 the Livernois-Fenkell riot was quelled and subsequently forgotten, but speaks to the proximity of this otherworldly racial tension.

Originally, I posted this in the comments of another blog, but want it as a point of reference.

How does someone engage with the industry about (one specific example of) real world use of social networking, without being overwhelmed by the Web 2.0 nonsense?

I’ve been teaching people how to use blogging to tell stories about their recovery in New Orleans. Stories and information sharing. People who’ve taken interest in my project in the industry have this horrifying attitude:

I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve created a user base, you obviously have not heard of the transformative power of (tagging / rss / podcasting / ajax). Have you told your user base about the exciting new startup datataggr.tv? You enter in all you contact information, the contact information of everyone you know, and then you (tag it/syndicate it/podcast it/jax off to it). It empowers your user base to be empowered.

Seeing as how there is no cost to me to have you deploy, endorse, or provide technical support for datataggr.tv, there must be no cost to you to do the same.

I’m sure that if you set people in front of datataggr.tv they will gladly spend hours exploring the user interface, divulging personal secrets, and that they will forgo their recovery planning meetings, coffee klatches, lunches, church services, mardi gras krewe parties, jazz concerts, and second line parades so that they can build their social network.

I can’t tell you how many times someone sends me a link to a startup website and says, hey bonehead, you need to sign people up to this one. Extra groan for each instance of the word empower.

I’ve got a nonprofit with a mission and it’s not to provide startups with beta-testers.

I know that some of these startups end up getting sold on eBay, with Dukes of Hazzard lunch boxes. How can someone seriously suggest that I direct people to pour their post-K recovery stories into the latest Web 2.0 information orifice?

I flog Flickr and WordPress. I’m thrilled when someone who attends a workshop actually starts to post entries in their new recovery journal, or neighborhood newsletter, (not a blog, it’s a FUD word).

I’ve answered my own question. It’s that stupid long tail again.