The Birthday Present Experiment
One misplaced gift idea for the mother of my second child was this book, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. It got misplaced years ago when it ‘fell’ into the depths of some Outlook folder. So, in my smart-ass way, the idea is to post the gift that I will get for her on my Blog—so that someone with a greasy hand in Sydney using Google to look up “ass bandit” will know what she is getting for her birthday—but she will never know what she’s getting. It will be a complete surprise. My swaggering, bulky arrogance ambles to the conclusion that she will never see this entry in my Blog because she does not read my Blog. Plod. Plod.
Getting beyond petty, egocentric fantasies of infighting and drama, what can be seen here is a larger issue that surely many other brothers from the ’hood share: your Black friends over 30 really don’t use computers in an effective manner. Specifically, the concept of the news feed (let alone instant messaging) is still lost under the preference for email. This issue was bothering me in an earlier post, the reference to Black Enterprise Magazine. In my early 20s, my statement regarding this “digital divide” would have strongly suggested that Euro Americans are doing just fine with computers while, somehow, African Americans are not. My Black life in corporate America comes with a completely different story: my Black friends are really no different from Euro Americans (and, in fact, having a Black friend can be just like having a “white friend” because only ignorant-ass racists underestimate the power of assimilation). One real difference between these two political groups is that some Black people proudly announce that we don’t know (or care to know) about some technical morsel of nerdom, while your properly assimilated cat will hang on in quiet desperation and try to at least get a C+ in the imaginary class.
So what do you get the Black woman who has everything? My meager contribution to this success is Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. It will be a complete surprise. What will not be a surprise for me is that, when Microsoft finally releases Internet Explorer 7, the use of news feeds will skyrocket—for all people of all cultures under the captivating dominance of Redmond.