Things White People Care About

One of most prominent features of hyper-local-something new blog TBD.com is the "Near You" widget, which allows you to filter your news by zipcode. Its default is 20005; I keep mine set to 20001, which is where I live. My boyfriend sets his to 20032, the zipcode for Congress Heights, which is where he teaches, and where all his students live.

Anyhoo so one fun social experiment is to flip back and forth between the news for "20001" and "20032." A few weeks ago, for example, the lead headline for 20001 was "CUPCAKE PLACE GIVING AWAY FREE CUPCAKES." In 20032, the lead headline was about a shooting that had taken place the previous day. I am not making this up. We are living in A Tale of Two Cities.

Ok so everyone knows that life is very different for white people living in 20001 and for black people living in 20032. White people, for example, are voting to reelect Fenty and black people are voting for Grey. White people care about cupcakes and black people care about the shooting that happened yesterday.

But why are we encouraging this? To me, something like a zipcode news filter ends up dividing a city even more than it already is. News outlets should inform people about the wider web of their communities – not just spoon feed them snippets of information about restaurants. While we’re at it, can we PUH-LEASE cool it with the food worship? I know white people are shallow, hedonistic, and childish, but seriously…. let’s grow up just a little bit and put the cupcakes away.

Book burning, Florida style

I almost always take issue with the "breaking newsworthiness" (ok, not a word) of the Washington Post's email news alerts and afternoon updates. To me, breaking news alerts should be reserved for things like Dick Cheney is dead or a tiger escaped from the National Zoo and is on a murderous rampage through Adams Morgan. Once-in-a-blue moon type deals. Yet whenever I get a Washington Post breaking news alert, it's always something wonky like "Housing prices fell slightly less than originally anticipated, the Obama administration announced last week," or "Someone you've never heard of is retiring from ABC News today -- retirement not to go into effect for three years." The sort of news items that literally 4 people care about -- and I guarantee you that those four people read the same news someplace else first.

But that's really a separate issue from my frustration with today's Washington Post Afternoon Update: Petraeus condemns Fla. church's plan to burn Korans.

At the outset, this could seem like a legitimate news item. You have the top US commander in Afghanistan commenting on a hot domestic issue -- Christians' demonstrative hatred of Muslims. But read past the opening lede and you find out, just who are these people who I'm sure we'll hear all about on Meet the Press for the next three weeks? How widespread must this movement be to warrant such urgent condemnation from the TOP US COMMANDER IN AFGHANISTAN?

The Dove World Outreach Center, a 50-member evangelical Christian church in Gainesville, Fla., announced plans to burn the Islamic holy books on Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. At the Kabul protest, residents burned an effigy of Dove World pastor Terry Jones.

FIFTY PEOPLE? Why do we give a rat's ass what 50 crazy people are doing this weekend? You can't walk through downtown DC with finding 50 crazy people. What about that crazy lady who's been literally camped out in front of the White House for the past 20 years? I don't see her on the front page of the Washington Post -- and she lives in Barack Obama's front freakin yard!

As a side note I find it laughable that people in Kabul had ever even heard of the Dove World pastor Terry Jones, much less knew what he looked like well enough to make an effigy of him. Although I'm sure his ridiculous facial hair would make it fairly easy.