Editorials

Last week I was lucky enough to see a production of one of my favorites, The Wiz, at the splendid and amazing East Bay Center for the Performing Arts in Richmond. Actually, the show, which featured students of approximately high school age, offered several of my favorites, since it was a mash-up of tunes from all three versions of the enduring Wizard of Oz story, which has now attained mythic status.

In particular, I was delighted once again to hear once again my favorite journalism theme song of all time, as sung by The Wiz’s wickedest witch, Evillene: Don’t Nobody Never Bring Me No Bad News.

How, you might wonder, does this qualify as a journalism theme? Well, for a start, let’s look at the ongoing controversy about a localized social networking website which tries to bridge the gap between neighborhood gossip and commercial news, nextdoor.com, offering a version of citizen journalism for neighborhoods.

It’s taken a lot of heat lately because it has published, among other things, postings from people who suspect that someone they’ve seen on their street is a bad actor. This has engendered a spate of OMG-ing stories in the conventional press about NextDoor being a tool for racists. 

Here’s an East Bay Express story from last October: 

Racial Profiling Via Nextdoor.com --White Oakland residents are increasingly using the popular social networking site to report "suspicious activity" about their Black neighbors — and families of color fear the consequences could be fatal. 

It’s undeniable that many people, mostly White people but occasionally even people of color, leap to unwarranted conclusions when they see Black people and others of color in neighborhoods where they’re not commonly seen on the street. (Police, of course, can be the worst offenders, because they carry weapons and they use them, too often against people who pose no real risk.) 

It’s particularly offensive when the only characteristic observers are able to report is skin color, which strongly suggests racial profiling which stereotypes African-Americans in particular as potential criminals. 

But here’s the thing: don’t blame the messenger. Some complaints have suggested that Nextdoor should not allow users to submit “suspicious person” descriptions which mention race. 

That’s just wrong. If there are racists out there, especially the dangerous variety who don’t even know they’re racists, it’s a lot better to know about it than to hide it. 

Nextdoor took the very effective initial step of requiring posters to use their real names. People behave a lot better when they have to answer for their opinions. This is way preferable to the kind of local blogs which publish endless dogwhistlish racist comments under pseudonyms (and if you don’t know how dogwhistle is used in this context, google it.) The sites which put a lot of effort into screening them and deleting the ones the editors don’t approve of are just dull most of the time. 

I myself seldom read anonymous comments because they’re most likely to be either toxic or boring.  

Allowing the fearful to articulate their presuppositions in signed letters gives more thoughtful readers the chance to set them straight. My Elmwood Nextdoor crowd is way too PC to be overtly racist, of course, but when comments from elsewhere in the Berkeley/Oakland area have been published I’ve seen posts that surely offend people of color and might even endanger them. But almost immediately such posts have been countered by intelligent articulate explanations of why it’s wrong to jump to conclusions based on the race of the new person you see on your block.  

In some places the voices of reason do seem to be absent from the discourse, but if you are unlucky enough to live in one of these places, better you should know that.  

My favorite mantra about what to do about speech that offends you comes from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his famous 1927 Whitney v. California opinion : "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."  

It’s just possible that the offensive posters might learn something this way, and at least with their names in print dark-skinned neighbors know who to watch out for. 

Nextdoor is not a charitable institution or a non-profit. It’s backed by a ton of venture capital, and according to press reports Founder Nirav Tolia wants to do the right thing in this matter. His announced efforts to find a way of flagging offensive comments and reproving inappropriate commenters seem to be sincere. 

From his pictures and his name we can surmise that he’s not a classic Northern-European-American, but more likely of South Asian heritage, and has perhaps not always escaped profiling himself—but there we go, stereotyping again.  

His Nextdoor product is unpretentious and useful, especially for small domestic matters. When my 60-year-old couch collapsed hours before a large party at Christmas, I noticed a much nicer leather one being given away a few blocks from home, and it was delivered by the donor, completely free, within hours, just in time for the guests. Last week I picked up cuttings from a plant I’ve always admired and got to know the amazing gardener who offered it in the process. A woman who dropped her apartment key while jogging through the neighborhood got it back after posting on Nextdoor, saving herself a $60 replacement fee. Lost dogs have been found, by the dozens. This is all good. 

Sometimes good is the use of Nextdoor for civic messages that might be called political. I’ve often learned from Nextdoor about controversial city meetings that somehow weren’t reported to the Planet by city-paid press agents (I wonder why…).  

But I hear from a couple of my more pungent correspondents that they think they’ve been banned from Nextdoor by the local moderators, who volunteer in each Nextdoor-designated neighborhood. I haven’t confirmed this myself. I do however hear from other equally pungent political types that their Nextdoor-delivered agit-prop has been welcome and influential in other neighborhoods, so it might be that some local moderators are over-zealous. 

Despite criticism, I think it would be a great mistake to try to bully Nextdoor into adopting the Evillene stance and banning bad news. Here in Berkeley at least we have a plentiful supply of Good News reporting, but except for police reports we hear comparatively little about the neighborhood nastiness which exists just under the surface, yes, even here in Lotusland.  

There are efforts underway to tell people how to report suspicious people without stereotyping. These suggest using more complete descriptions than just race, but that doesn’t address the flawed emotional processes which prompt such reports in the first place. Those of us who use and appreciate Nextdoor should take advantage of the opportunity it offers to bring such feelings into the light of day so that they can be countered by reason. 

If the lady down the block freaks out when she sees a Black face, my African-American house painter needs to know that for his own protection, not to mention my own family members and friends who are people of color. But not only that, if she uses the Nextdoor site where she is required to sign her name, it gives others the opportunity (and the responsibility) to explain to her, calmly and in a non-crisis situation, that she’s overreacting. Responding in writing on the Nextdoor site can be, and should be, non-confrontational, and it might actually change some minds for the better.