When I left a comfortable job as a columnist at Fortune magazine to join Urban Box Office in March, I knew that I would be stepping into a cauldron. Having one failed start-up under my belt, I came to my new job with a pretty good idea of how hard it is to build a company that works. And no one could deny that UBO’s ambition was very large. In fact, what convinced me to make the leap was the dream: to create a new media company that would give voice and access to talented urban artists and innovators.
But I’ve been baffled by the knee-jerk negativity of my colleagues in the news business to UBO’s goals — and to all the players in the urban Internet space. The same journalists who hyped every dubious deal and every instant millionaire last year have become permanent skeptics since the tech stock crash earlier this year — especially, it seems, when the label “urban” is attached to the venture. They’ve questioned the very existence of an urban Internet audience — and they’ve been willing to embrace any suggestion that we don’t have the competence to make such a business work.
“A Dot-com Disaster” (as it was originally headlined), a polemical piece about UBO by a former employee that Salon published on Sept. 7, is the kind of article that fits into the current journalistic consensus about urban Web sites, and it may explain why Salon chose to run it without checking a single fact with us — or the overarching premise that we’re about to go out of business. Ironically, while Salon’s epitaph for UBO is making the rounds of the Internet, we are in the midst of closing the largest round of financing any consumer-oriented Web site has received this year. Investors, who can’t afford to base their decisions on the opinions of the boys on the press bus, are ready to give our dream their most important vote of confidence: the money to turn our vision into a viable, profitable business.
The article by Nasoan Sheftel-Gomes, one of our former employees, clearly shows her deep disappointment about her experience at UBO. And I can understand her frustrations; she joined the company with high ideals and high expectations and we failed to help her fulfill her dreams. While there were errors of fact in the story as originally published, I would be the first to concede that we made many mistakes and failed to manage UBO as well as we should.
But are our troubles any different from many other Web ventures? As one who has reported on numerous start-ups, I would argue that any company trying to marry a solid business to the fragile technologies of the desktop PC and the Internet is bound to stumble from time to time. Companies as large and successful as AOL, Amazon and IBM have faltered — and recovered. With barely a year under our belt, we think we’re entitled to some benefit of the doubt.
Ms. Sheftel-Gomes was at the heart of our learning process and she wrote from her specific experiences and disappointments. As one of my colleagues put it, she served well in combat, but convinced Salon that she was qualified to write a piece about foreign policy. Her perspective was personal and for the most part true about her own experiences. But she also included foxhole rumors and barracks tales that were absolutely incorrect. And she lacked perspective. Coming from a corporate environment to the dot-com world can be incredibly frustrating. In a start-up there are often no systems, no procedures, no structures. Some people thrive in this environment; others complain.
Putting up one Web site is a challenge for most companies. Our plan to build a network of sites serving overlapping slices of the broad urban audience is incredibly ambitious and we’ve suffered some pain for our mistakes. We underestimated our staff needs, the expertise and the management it would take to make it all work smoothly, and we didn’t handle very well our explosion from five to 350 people in 12 months. But we’ve spent the last six months bringing in the management we need, hiring technology consultants and creating policies and procedures that will help us meet our goals. We’ve signed an agreement to move our entire operation to Harlem next year, where we will be the community’s largest employer.
Most important, our dream remains intact. And it’s a bit baffling my former colleagues in the profession can’t understand the difference between UBO and other sites that wear the “urban” label. Sites as disparate as BlackPlanet, BET.com, 360HipHop and Africana.com have been lumped together into a single, vague — and presumably doomed — category. Our vision of urban is not a pseudonym for “black.” In my very first meeting with the founders, I discovered that I shared a common belief with the late George Jackson — and Adam Kidron, our CEO, and Frank Cooper, our COO — that you can create a first-rate product rooted in the black experience, produced by a diverse staff, and appealing to a broad multiethnic and multiracial audience.
That clearly differentiates us from most of the other “urban” sites. Some are explicitly aimed at a black audience, in the mold of traditional black newspapers and magazines. They have decided to be racially exclusive, which enables them to speak intimately to their audiences. Robert Johnson, the chairman of Black Entertainment Television, makes no bones about his goal. “I’m not interested in ‘urban,’” he once told me. “There’s too much competition there; I’m happy with ‘black.’” He’s entitled to that exclusionary approach — and so far it has made him fabulously rich. Others are exclusively focused on hip-hop; for us, hip-hop is just one of several important cultural trends we want to build on.
We didn’t invent the inclusionary urban model. Give credit to the trans-racial market created by hip-hop and to magazines like Vibe and the Source (and to companies like Motown three decades ago). The raw, uncompromising work of rap artists sold to a predominantly white audience and opened a market larger than any had dreamed possible. On the Internet, there are even greater possibilities for inclusion. It’s already a truism that the Web eliminated the boundaries created by geography and distribution, but not a lot of people have given much thought to how it works ethnically; while you can target a black audience by selling a paper or magazine at certain newsstands or particular neighborhoods, the Web makes such boundaries unnecessary — unless you choose to be exclusive.
So while we may all use the term “urban,” UBO and BET and BlackPlanet and Africana.com have fundamentally different visions of their market — and fundamentally different strategies. Yet my fellow journalists prefer to lump us all together into a neat little stereotype that can’t possibly succeed when “broader” content plays are failing. If they ever bothered to ask, we could tell them that UBO is launching broad sites that are consumer-oriented and vertical sites focused on business-to-business components; that the uniqueness of our original content — including serial animated and video dramas and news from an urban perspective — puts us in a different universe from sites that are regurgitating what is already widely available in mass media; and that we’ve never seen UBO as a pure Internet play.
In the eyes of our founders, who came from the entertainment industry, the Internet is just our development platform; when we have a successful property, we will try to exploit the options in film, television, wireless and, yes, even print. We believe that by serving this hip, young, international audience, one that is exciting and attractive to major advertisers and sponsors, we can build a profitable business. It’s a unique strategy and our investors have shown their confidence in the ultimate fashion. We’re just disappointed that our journalist friends lack the curiosity to figure out why.
NEW YORK — It’s a troubling measure of race relations in this city that two cases involving immigrant victims have brought legitimacy to the issue of police brutality. First, there was the case of Abner Louima, a Haitian-American, who was reportedly sodomized with a broom handle in a Brooklyn station house last year. Now there is the case of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from the West African nation of Guinea, killed by a volley of 41 police shots in a Bronx hallway.
The truth is that immigrants are far less likely to have unpleasant encounters with the police than native-born blacks. But there is so much tension and racial weariness between blacks and whites in this city (and elsewhere) that a case involving an African-American doesn’t cause the same immediate outrage — not the shooting of Eleanor Bumpers, an elderly woman wielding a knife in her kitchen 10 years ago, not the death a few years later of a slight young artist, beaten so badly that his own parents didn’t recognize him.
Just as African-Americans bear the burden of presumed criminality in the eyes of police (and the news media), immigrants have their own positive stereotypes. They are everything African-Americans are presumed not to be: hard-working, respectful, law-abiding. So when an immigrant gets the short end of police justice, even when that immigrant is black, the event has added weight, and it is harder to dismiss the complaints as more whining by blacks.
Not surprisingly, the messengers of rage have leaped into the breach. The Rev. Al Sharpton seems to have hijacked the Diallos’ grief, appearing at a press conference with the dead man’s mother, urging her to reject Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s offer of financial aid. The NAACP’s Kweisi Mfume helped raise the issue to the national level by urging a federal investigation. But the city’s black elected officials, often too willing to yield the stage to Sharpton, have begun to speak out on the brutality issue. They, too, understand, that a dead immigrant gives legitimacy to an issue they have raised for years — to no avail.
All this racial solidarity is ironic because black immigrants often work hard to distance themselves from African-Americans. It doesn’t take them long to understand — and to want to escape — the second-class status that shrouds black Americans. When the Louima case broke, I said to some Haitian immigrants that Louima was proof the Haitian-American strategy of escaping through exoticism had failed. They bristled, but some conceded that they had never had as much contact with American blacks until the Louima case. And they were as surprised as white suburbanites to discover that there were responsible and competent black lawyers, doctors and ministers in the communities they had shared for years.
It may be months before the circumstances of the shooting become clear. But only the most pessimistic believe Diallo’s death was a cold-blooded execution. More likely, it was the tragic confluence of circumstances and conditions that the Giuliani administration (and, to be fair, its predecessors in New York City) has never been willing to address. It has to do with the risk of arming young, white men from the suburbs — the vast majority of the NYPD — and turning them loose in an inner city they loathe and fear. It has to do with the inability of many white officers to tell the difference between a black man going about his business and a criminal who needs to be controlled.
It also has do with an authoritarian machismo that is very much part of the New York police culture. In the Louima case, one apparent reason for the brutal act was that one of the cops had dropped his gun belt and then lost a fistfight with a man he believed to be Louima. In the case of Diallo, the poor African had apparently never heard Richard Pryor’s famous routine about a black motorist stopped by the police: “I … am … taking … out … my … wallet,” says Pryor in a slow, deliberate way. The humor comes from the unstated knowledge that one false move can turn a routine traffic stop into a summary execution.
This is the second time, too, that the foundation of Mayor Giuliani’s credibility as a national Republican candidate has been shaken by immigrant outrage. His frequently stated list of accomplishments includes the city’s startling reduction in crime. He likes to note that fewer blacks are dying because the city’s murder rate has plummeted during his five years in office — a citation that is intended to offset his almost complete absence of a relationship with the city’s black population.
Maybe lower crime rates are like a good economy. No one wants to rock the boat. So what if the cops get a little rough with those people? You can take your kids to the park, go to the grocery at night, spend $200 for dinner in a smart new restaurant and then walk home. We all know, although we don’t often discuss it, that controlling minorities has long been an unofficial role of the police, even in “liberal” cities like New York. That’s why black men get stopped for Driving While Black, or why middle-class black kids coming home from private schools are asked where they’re going. Or why an immigrant vendor on his way to dinner goes home to Guinea in a box, leaving behind a sense of outrage and alienation that he would not even have understood.
Black people must be stupid. That’s the conclusion implied by David Horowitz’s “Baa Baa Black Sheep” column following the November elections. Horowitz is baffled that blacks continue to vote for Democrats in majorities “like the populations of communist countries.” He complains that Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., won 94 percent of the vote in his Harlem district and suggests there would be uproar if a white candidate defeated a black candidate because more than 90 percent of whites voted for the white candidate.
Horowitz follows in a long tradition of lamenting the willingness of black people to vote their interests. I can understand why he’s upset: Unusually high black turnouts in key races had a lot to do with upsetting the Republican apple cart in November. Until the day after the election, the impact of black voters was barely discussed on the talk shows, a state of affairs reflected on election night, when being white seemed to be the primary qualification for on-air pundits.
Lamentations about black voters are often thinly disguised efforts to set them aside. In 1984, after Ronald Reagan won reelection with majorities among all constituencies except African-Americans, a number of political experts suggested that blacks were isolated because of their unwillingness to join the coronation. Yet within weeks, this same “isolated” group launched protests that would force a change in the Reagan administration’s “constructive engagement” policy toward South Africa — protests that eventually helped end apartheid and free Nelson Mandela.
One of the favorite devices of conservatives is the mythical “double standard.” Blacks get away with behavior that would not be acceptable among whites because of white guilt. “Black Sheep” is full of such insinuations. Massive black support for black candidates is one example. Yet in races involving black candidates who are not incumbents, 80 percent of the white vote usually goes to the white candidate — no matter how qualified the black candidate. Even Andrew Young, that paragon of integration and moderation, could barely gather 15 percent of the white vote when he first ran for Congress in 1972.
The red herring of the double standard is actually a cover for another favorite conservative hot button: moral equivalency. The fact that most black people only got the right to vote in the last 30 years; that they represent just 12 percent of the population; or that they are the only ethnic group whose rights were specifically limited by this nation from its inception seem not to matter to critics like Horowitz. So 90 percent of blacks voting as a bloc is rendered equal to 90 percent of whites voting to maintain their dominance.
While Horowitz laments the refusal of blacks to vote for most Republican candidates (strange that he doesn’t mention the Govs. Bush), he ignores the GOP’s long history of race baiting and appealing to white interests. In fact, Republican gains in the South are largely the result of thinly veiled appeals to white voters who feared black political gains. From Richard Nixon’s 1968 “Southern strategy” through Willie Horton to anti-affirmative action appeals in this last election, the message to white voters has been clear: Let’s keep them under control. In other words, white voters are asked to vote their interests, although white voters’ interests are usually equated with everyone’s interests. Once again, black voters just don’t seem to understand.
Horowitz cites welfare reform as an example of Republican policies that have helped blacks, but even many who favored ending the old dependencies warn that an unusually long economic boom may have masked the long-term effects of throwing tens of thousands off the rolls with little or no safety net. One of the issues he and other conservatives ignore is that African-Americans have been among the chief critics of the damaging effects of welfare. But blacks favored a more gradual, well-planned process to avoid the chaos that could hit many cities in an economic downturn — cities still viewed as alien territory among suburban white voters.
Why is it that white conservatives use black conservatives to support their arguments? If their ideas can stand on their own merits, why must they drag in blacks making the same arguments? It suggests that for all the posturing about merit, white conservatives feel they need someone with a different skin color to make their positions more credible. Horowitz laments the harsh criticism of black conservatives like Larry Elder, Clarence Thomas, Ward Connerly and others by mainstream blacks. But isn’t the wholesale rejection of their arguments by African-Americans a sign of maturity? Blacks have looked beyond the color of their skin to the content of their character, and rejected their positions.
As one who has closely followed the arguments of conservatives of all colors for years, I think one of the problems with many of these black conservatives is that they simply restate old arguments made by white conservatives. When black conservatives try to make more nuanced arguments — such as economist Glenn Loury’s complaint that white conservatives offer no constructive alternatives to the programs they don’t like — they are expelled from the circles that initially welcomed them.
Conservatives like Horowitz cannot admit that black people have enemies. They are willing to give every opponent of affirmative action, set-asides and minority election districts the benefit of the doubt: that they are really taking positions because they have the best interests of black people at heart. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t bring up the cynical Republican strategy in the first part of this decade to push blacks into majority-minority districts — so Republicans could win all-white suburban districts.
And like most conservatives — and a lot of liberals — Horowitz is willing to dismiss the worldview of the black majority as simply wrong. African-Americans live in a world more finely nuanced than conservative ideology can comfortably embrace. Polls show that black people believe they have friends and enemies in all colors. Black people feel they still need affirmative action because of their real experiences with white people. That is why middle-class black people are more ardent supporters of affirmative action than poor blacks. They find that even the most well-meaning whites cannot always overcome hundreds of years of legislated and implied superiority. Just as African-Americans see real progress, they also see continuing obstacles, slights, unintended insults and exclusions. And that is why they won’t embrace the Larry Elders and Clarence Thomases as heroes, no matter how often they get called black sheep.
