Who Played Whom? Gawker Media and Tionna Smalls
by Racialicious Special Correspondent Latoya Peterson
A few weeks ago, while browsing Jimi Izrael’s blog, I came across this piece on Tionna Smalls, former advice columnist for Gawker. Now, I am only passing familiar with Gawker as I am a non-New Yorker, I didn’t really get into the blogosphere until last year, and the content on the main site doesn’t interest me as much as the content on their other blogs (like Jezebel and Kotaku).
So, I read Jimi Izrael’s thoughts on Gawker with some interest:
So, Tionna Smalls was the advice columnist for Gawker.com, the blog ostensibly dedicated to East Coast media. In reality, it’s serviceable hipster prose on the half-shell: heavy reading for guys who light farts at keg parties and the girls—and gays—who love them. The readership are the kind of people who count the mailman as one of their “black friends.” I read it for “Kreepy Kats.” No point, otherwise, becasue it’s not written to pique my intersts. Black people don’t pixelate on the site unless they are shucking, jiving, vogue-ing, rapping or tripping headlong into a stereotype.
Jimi then goes on to explain his take on the situation:
Tionna Smalls of Brooklyn, NY is the kind of woman over-pouring drinks at every inner-city bar in America: all good, all ‘Hood. Like most of us, she’s the kind of black person white folks cross the street to avoid. I’m not sure who thought employing her to dispense advice to white hipsters on Gawker was a good fit, but to be sure, there were signs of trouble from her very first appearance. There was a palpable, disconcerting, colonial casting to it from the curb: the heavy-bottomed Negress as the keeper and comforter of the chilluns’ gathered ‘round marvelin’ at her wisdom…and bra size. With headlines like “You Didn’t Suspect He Had A Little Sugar In His Tank?” , it’s Mae West meets a wildly inappropriate Butterfly McQueen at a frat party, and it’s a fuckin’ freak show, straight out the gate. It didn’t take long for her to become a phenomenon, garnering an average of 10,000 page views and 100 comments per post. Her work was posted raw and unedited by Negrophile editors intent to celebrate its crude, primitive authenticity: slick-sly meta-coonery at its finest.
And he makes a value judgment:
On her first Gawker post, commenter GOBOT asks “Is it exploitation if Tionna doesn’t know she is being exploited?”
Yes, Gobot. Yes it is.
What business is of mine in the first place? I’m a professional writer: I write for money. So I have a stake in the marketplace. I can’t tell you how to sell your wares, but I can tell you how to keep the market vital. And giving hipsters the privilege of using and discarding blackvoice at whim?
Nah. We got to play that smart,and on our own terms.
But maybe Tionna did.
Not surprisingly, Tionna was a bit offended at his characterization of her and her motives, and when Jimi showed her the piece…well, you can go to his site and read it as the exchange is classic and I am not going to quote the whole thing.
However, reading Jimi’s take did raise some questions in my mind.
I talked to Jimi about his post, and he clarified what he was trying to accomplish in the piece:
I think my problem was that Gawker manages to find the most egregious, flagrant colonial stereotypes to put on display and give voice and that’s disturbing. It’s problematic, that they can only deal with blackvoice from a colonial perspective. It all made me sad but it made her angry that posted on it. She was really, really upset. Partially, i think because she wasn’t exactly sure what I was trying to say.
It wasn’t about her being gutter, so much as it was about the dominant culture only sees us when we’re doing what they expect us to be doing.
Fair assessment. But the perspective that was missing from all this was Tionna’s. I emailed her to ask for an interview, and she quickly agreed. I asked everything that was on my mind, and she came back with some very provocative answers.
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Latoya Peterson: First thing’s first – how did you end up working for Gawker media? What made you decide to choose that company?
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