Q: (calgal@slate) Did you get into it with the goal of using the Internet to further racial progress, or did that come later? or does your perspective as a black man in the us and your socio-political views mean that all of your activities are engaged in with that as an ultimate goal?
A: I was never really interested in race-relations, per se. as far as I was concerned, blacks and whites who wanted to get along would do so with no further assistance from me. my original artistic motivation was to 'save hiphop'. At the outset, I imagined that CMC would provide a new media which would extend the hiphop aesthetic to sampling multimedia, especially historical texts. I was very excited by the possibility of hyperlinking very dense lyrics a la public enemy to a kind of chomskyesque deconstruction. for me it was experimenting with writing and creating a new style. I thought of it as a mix of Cornel west crossed with Spaulding Gray crossed with George Clinton with a sprinkling of Rudy ray Moore. that was the artistic side.
The other side was the grass roots organization side which could be described in the dynamic we call the 'hookup'. Coming out of the guerrilla video / self-representation school, I thought it absolutely critical that black communities have their own public backchannel which would correct mainstream media distortions as well as directly inform blackfolks everywhere of models of success. Specifically, I believed that every black community organization which would consider publishing a newsletter would publish to the web. that was my webmaster/political angle. the bottom line impetus for that was the misrepresentations of the la riots, American provinciality and what I call the "semiotic swamp". Here is my original working document which outlines The Melioration Project.
It turned out that only a very few places on the Internet sustained the kind of bandwidth for the interactive hiphop provocation, and very few grassroots organizations were ready willing or able to get online. This was 1993, so I waited.
As I wandered the Internet deserts looking for fertile soil I ran smack into any number of hostile tribes. their hostility was often born of ignorance, and direct resistance to bringing the stochastic subjects of race to the sweet determinism of Internet purity. in the end, I found all of my more elevated sensibilities about black cultural production falling on deaf and/or intentionally plugged ears. So I needed to create a website.
I ultimately got hooked into anti-racist politics as a means to enabling all Americans to understand the context for why anyone would be purposefully black, as boohab is. Anti-racist activism has its own intrinsic value in the context of a democracy, and it is certainly a compelling thing to do, but in one way I got into it because I couldn't get a broad enough cross section of people to understand the context of my project to extend hiphop. Furthermore hiphop hit rock bottom, and Cornel West published 'Race Matters'. I felt that the opportunity to do in cyberspace what Spike Lee had done in film or what Anna Devere Smith had done in the theater was still there, but would not reach a critical mass who could comprehend the flavor.
My perspective as a black man is deeply rooted in the prerogatives of the group formerly known as the talented tenth and the post-soul generation. I am very much a part of a part of African American culture which is rarely ever shown to, much less understood by the American mainstream. I despair of its representation, even though there are some artistic works that come close to describing the flavor. but what I do in cyberspace is not about me, all my net writing is a creation, a pedagogical device; it's all purposefully lowercase. so in creating boohab, I try never to get personal or to personalize. it means nothing to me, as a black man, to be understood/accepted. boohab is pure politics, but with some artistic flavor. boohab in that respect represents the public citizen in me - it allows me to be 'derrick bell' without putting my name in jeopardy, sort of like 'TRB'. boohab rarely engages outside of the subjects of race. I have disciplined my whole reason for being in cyberspace to continue the work of boohab, which will (with any luck) soon come to a close.