Introduction
An incident concerning race occurred in Berkeley at the end of January 2015. It was a momentary event involving a black man, a white woman, and several truckloads of symbolism. The black man, a Berkeley resident named Kamau Bell, wrote about it in his blog. Then
Berkeleyside wrote an article about the incident (1/29/15). During the following seven days, well over 700 comments appeared in
Berkeleyside -- an average of 100 a day. Those comments are the subject of this article.
Berkeleyside lends itself to this project because it permits anonymous comments; most commenters avail themselves of this anonymity. In this analysis, all the comments will be considered as anonymous, even those that had names. It is in their anonymity that they become cultural expressions, unfettered by any concern with being personally associated with what they have written. For this very reason, however, it remains unknown exactly how many people actually participated in this flood of commentary. If the average thread consisted of roughly five exchanged comments, we can assume that perhaps a total of 140 people were involved in the discussions. The volume of comments thus constitute a database, a motherlode of cultural ore from which certain aspects of what makes this society tick can be refined. Most references will be by paraphrase, but a directly quoted statement will be in quotation marks.
The mass of commentary breaks down into several clear categories: those who attack Bell, those who defend the waitress, those who instruct Bell as to what he should have done, those who suggest what the waitress should have done. Rarely will whole comments be quoted in this article – only what exemplifies the category of comment. A variety of questions concerning racism itself, however, are raised: namely, what racism is, and the relation between white anti-black racism and black anti-white racism.
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