The Root is a four-month-old website brought to you by Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive publishing. It aims to take “an unprecedented departure from traditional American journalism [by] raising the profile of black voices in mainstream media…”
“Mainstream?” ”
What’s the point?”
Yes but merely the aspiration to make a black version of Slate, that most mainstream of Web news commentary sites (also owned by Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive), seems a tipping-point kind of sign.
In its slickness and its ideology, The Root manages mostly to point to the broad river of “upwardly mobile” consumer culture that gushes through the middle of our culture, where all of our dreams and aspirations aim to ride. The Root is a Cosby Show of a news site, everything about it evoking a well-adjusted, materially ambitious editorial family.
So far, The Root excels at the personal-political essay. Two favorites: “Black Immersion Therapy” and “Why I Don’t Like StuffWhitePeopleLike.” In the first, a professor tries to exclusively interact with black TV, books, film, music, etc, for half a year, with limited success. In the second, writer Gary Dauphin skewers Christian Lander’s popular race-ironic website, calling it a lazy and insulting con job.
These expressions of mainstream black American interaction with the larger mainstream American culture are informative and funny on a basic level that our culture has done without for far too long. And that’s not to say the writing is basic. It’s just to say the insights and ideology they contain are obviously part of an immensely familiar line of popular American commentary. In other words, the writers at The Root seem to be people in nice sweaters and suit coats, composing their pieces in cafes or on fairly plush living room sofas, typing into late-model laptops– people very much a part of and invested in the culture they are critiquing. Which of course is good and bad.
It’s good in that The Root on some level broadens mainstream perspectives. These are voices echoing from “within” and so, if not exploding, at least complicating the stereotypes about black Americans that our culture holds so dear. Black online magazine writers? Who knew?
It’s bad, maybe, in that we have come to expect and demand — always demand –more of our black folk. If our black folk aren’t our tortured artists and poets and radical espousers of liberation philosophy, who will do those things for us? Who will be our beautiful victims? Who will write our best most gritty music? Who will write our urban experimental poetry? Who will force our language to run ahead of its conventions? Who will demonstrate to the world the passion and strength that our intensely competitive and violent culture produces? We want our black folk to stay in that box. We don’t need black people to aspire to JCrew kind of lives. Mainstream America can afford to aspire to that level of boring because it has the rest of the culture doing the exciting stuff for it.
The video introduction to The Root by Editor-in-Chief and well-known Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates engenders the same ambivalent response as does the site– and so a brilliant opening. I for one have been trying to decide which column it falls into: Bad, as in clumsy and a little embarrassing and so mainstream bad? Or bad as in clumsy and a little embarrassing and so good for being revealing and human and not polished beyond life?
Prof. Gates as site introducer comes off a guy none too familiar with the web. He is reading not talking, for one, which is lame in a two-minute spot in which he’s supposedly discussing a passion project. Also, he keeps referring to the site the way parents refer to anything on the web, still unnecessarily putting the “dotcom” at the back of the title. The man is speaking to us from the website itself, but seemingly clueless to the fact that if we’re watching him we know the damned thing is a dotcom. Someone tell Gates: “Your website is called ‘The Root’ not ‘The Root DotCom!’”
I know it’s a silly thing to even mention. I justify it, though, by telling myself that if I weren’t looking at merely a black version of Slate, I would have never noticed anything like a bad introduction video!
Tags: henry louis gates jr, mainstream black culture, the root
I will be very curious to see the long-term health of The Root. As you say, there are interesting pieces here. You write that “the writers at The Root seem to be people in sweaters or suit coats, composing their pieces in cafes or on fairly plush living room sofas, typing into late-model laptops, people very much a part of and invested in the culture they are critiquing.” While this is true, and perfectly normal, it does often read like a “separate but equal” Slate as often as it does something attempting a new voice for a middle-class black audience.
Gates (who seems to have offered his name and little else to this enterprise) is well aware of W.E.B. DuBois dictum regarding Afro-American double consciousness–being both of the mainstream and apart from it.
To date, the mainstream press has been all about the “apart from,” presenting blacks as dangerous or alluring exotics of one sort or another. Now Root is all about the “of the mainstream”–presenting us as self-involved smartasses just like the writers at Slate. I just think it’s too bad that the publication has not yet found a voice through which to revel in the duBois’ duality itself.
Of course, that may be too much to ask from one publication. But The Root has taken that burden upon itself, since it bills itself as a revolutionary voice for black America (despite its mainstream corporate pedigree: HBO, Washington Post). Right now, we’re seeing a lot of that corporate pedigree, and not too much of that distinctive voice. The site is new, and it will grow and mature.
The process will be interesting to watch.
full agreement. I’m compelled the projet if not always the material.
I just saw that the version previously published was the draft version. The real version just got posted.