by Carmen Van Kerckhove

If you’re in the NYC area, pick up a copy of the latest Time Out New York. It’s their “race issue” and features a package of some interesting articles that explore race, ethnicity, culture and identity in the city.

One of the articles is about race and blogging, and shows some love to Racialicious!

Recent statistics from Nielsen NetRatings cite BET’s own site, Bet.com—along with AOL’s Black Voices channel and social networking destination BlackPlanet.com—among the places that African-Americans visit the most. Those sites aren’t exactly hotbeds of savvy, clearheaded commentary, though. One place that is: Racialicious.com, a blog dedicated to the discussion of race in pop culture, headed by Carmen Van Kerckhove. Launched in 2004, the site covers everything from the subtext of the Resident Evil 5 video-game trailer (white guy shooting his way through hordes of black zombies) to German UNICEF ads that put cute Teutonic moppets in blackface. Van Kerckhove’s umbrella company, New Demographic, also publishes the Anti-Racist Parent blog collective (which features Meera Bowman-Johnson, a columnist for timeoutkids.com) and produces the weekly Addicted to Race podcast.

Van Kerckhove says that Internet anonymity—in which screen names can obscure the identities of folks creating content or commenting—has helped the multiethnic strata of the blogosphere to grow. “On the one hand, not knowing the race of a writer or commenter can be a positive thing when it comes to talking about race, because readers aren’t immediately making snap judgments about that person’s perspective,” she observes. “But a lot of the people who read my blog do end up identifying themselves racially, and it gives people a richer context to the different kinds of experiences that individuals who identify as African-Americans can have.”

Also be sure to check out Patrice Evans’ — a.k.a. the Assimilated Negro – ode to self-segregation and my short and sweet (and dorkily sincere) response piece to it:

I believe that one of the biggest obstacles to eliminating racism is self-segregation. In fact, I’m so passionate about this issue that I codified it as one of the six core beliefs that guide my work with New Demographic: ‘We go beyond the concerns of the specific community to which we belong and recognize that when one group is discriminated against, it is an affront to us all.’

I’ve seen too many examples of Asian-American activists who get outraged about offensive Asian caricatures in movies, but have nothing to say about equally offensive Latino caricatures. Or African-American activists who protest hate crimes against blacks, but are silent about hate crimes against Asian-Americans. Sure, it’s natural to pay more attention to issues that affect your own community. But if we are serious about creating real change, we need to adopt a truly anti-racist perspective. That means protesting racism wherever it exists, not only when it oppresses us personally.