A Black Man and a White Man Discuss Race

Today I did something that I very, very rarely do - I confronted a friend about race on Facebook. This wasn't just any friend, either. This was a person who used to be one of my closest friends - someone who Kristi and I both have known and loved for a long time. In fact, it's fair to say that without this person Kristi and I may never have gotten married. But now this is someone whom I'm considering unfriending.

So yeah - this hurts.

This friend is a black man and has long been a voice for inclusion and diversity. He celebrated his blackness, and that was pretty cool. But lately, his posts have become more polarizing and less inclusive. He's always been focused on race, but usually in a very educational and philosophical manner. But then something happened. His posts started to get more confrontational and one-sided and divisive. But he's my friend and he's entitled to his opinion.

But today he linked to a story about some New Jersey teens who did a great thing the right thing and paid for some merchandise, even though the store was closed. Great story. But he interjected race into it and it just made my blood boil. I am firmly of the belief that there's enough racial tension in this country and that inserting race into everything is one of the things that's tearing out country apart.  So I called him on it. This is that conversation: (click on the image to enlarge it)

...and that's where I left it.

I don't mind having an honest conversation about just about any topic, but what infuriated me was his complete unwillingness to even slightly admit that he might be wrong in interjecting race into this. Well, that and his condescension.

Friends, I meant everything I said in the discussion. If we want to live in a world where race doesn't matter, then let's all let it not matter... together.

And for my friend, I pray that someday you'll see how hurtful you've been and how you're actively involved in setting the clock backwards on race relations, especially since you're in a position to influence young minds.

Open Letter to Facebook

From Facebook, via e-mail:

Hi James,

We're trying out a new feature to reduce the amount of email you receive from Facebook. Starting today, we are turning off most individual email notifications and instead, we'll send you a summary only if there are popular stories you may have missed.

You can turn individual emails back on and restore all your original settings at any time.

Thanks, The Facebook Team Dear Facebook, QUIT MESSING AROUND WITH MY SETTING, ESPECIALLY MY PRIVACY AND NOTIFICATION SETTINGS!!!  It turns out that I LIKE getting e-mail when people send me messages or respond to my posts.  It lets me know that I need to go out to Facebook to interact (because, no, I don't spend all day wasting time on your site.)  You just keep disregarding the my preferences... I REALLY hate it when you change my feed to "Top Stories" instead of "Most Recent" without my knowledge.  I despise it when, after I've gotten my privacy setting JUST the way I want them, you come along and start turning things back on again because you changed your privacy policy or added a new feature. And per your e-mail this morning, I don't want to have to go and turn things BACK ON.  I want you to respect the settings that I've already chosen. Please leave your interface alone for awhile.  Having to learn a new interface three or four times a year is REALLY annoying.  I don't want you to put a chat bar on the left side of my screen.  The old chat wasn't broken.  I don't want lists on the right side of my screen. I hate having to search for my own photos.  Change your interface maybe once a year, if then.  I think you've got a pretty good interface going, but you keep monkeying with it, and most times I don't understand why.  For instance, six months ago, when I clicked on a friend's photo, it took me to a photo page that looked like the rest of the site.  Then about three months ago, when I clicked on the same photo, a black popup screen came up containing the photo.  And now it's a white pop-up screen. And the worst part is that each of those three pages acts COMPLETELY differently.  Ugh! I've been teetering on the edge of quitting you anyway.  All these interface changes may just push me over the edge.  No website should require this much work on my part.  No website is worth the amount of energy I have to expend to keep trying to figure you out.  I suppose you're trying to "stay fresh" and to innovate.  Fine.  Innovate, but please keep it to once a year or so.  This constant monkeying is really pissing me off. -James [Edit 1] - Now I have to be on the lookout for little blue triangles????!!!??  What is this - an episode of Dora the Explorer?  Oh, you DO know how to get at me, don't you? AND HOW THE HELL DO YOU GET BACK TO "MOST RECENT?"   AAAAAAAARGH!!!! [Edit 2] - And so now I have to click somewhere just to bring up a text box so I can post a status?  There's no box waiting there, wondering what I'm thinking?  WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT, FACEBOOK?!?!?!

Unfriended

Here's what's wrong with all the "I'm cleaning out my Facebook friends list, so if I don't hear from you, then you'll be unfriended" type posts I've been seeing a lot on Facebook:

A lot of people don't check Facebook every minute of every day. In fact, some people go days or weeks (and sometimes months) between Facbook sessions. Those people won't see your ultimatum in time and will just get the "unfriended" boot. And then, one day, they will realize that they haven't been seeing your posts lately and look you up, only to find that they've been unfriended. There are not many ways to hurt someone quicker than finding out that you're no longer someone's friend. It feels like you've been cut out of their life, culled.

I've been unfriended a couple of times by a couple of people I thought were my friends. I'll be honest - it hurt. A lot. And it turns out that one of them unfriended everyone from work. It's not that they didn't want to be Facebook friends with me, it's just that they cut everyone in a particular category out with the intention of adding them back in later one at a time. It was a shotgun approach to weed out a couple of bad "friends." But imagine my shock when a friend - both on Facebook and off - said in a passive aggressive way "you don't have value to me anymore, at least not enough to be a friend on Facebook." And that's the only conclusion I could reach because I wasn't given any notice of what this person's true intentions were. It was just one day - gone.

And here's the thing: Facebook is the perfect place to have casual friends. In fact, it's what it was built for. It's a great place to passively keep up with an acquaintance or someone you met at a conference or a long-ago friend from high school or someone at work who works on the other side of the building who you know from running into them in the break room. Facebook doesn't require an active connection.

So feel free to clean out your friends list. But PLEASE just go through and weed out the random contacts and people you really only intend to never hear from or speak to again. If someone is - or has ever been - a real-life friend, then leave them on. It's not hurting anything or anyone (unless it's a college friend who's gone freaking nuts and is just really annoying). But please try to think of the real-world equivalent of your Facebook "un-friend."

In the real world, if you told someone that you didn't want to be their friend, it's a pretty hurtful thing. You would never do it casually. So don't do it on Facebook, either.