Post-racial America? Forget it

The United States is almost as segregated under Obama as it was in the time of Martin Luther King

As I arrived in New Orleans this summer, there was a juicy racism row blazing across the airwaves and the blogosphere.

Like lots of the juiciest rows, it was over a little thing. The question was, do black people use the social networking site Twitter differently from white people? According to Farhad Manjoo, Slate magazine’s technology correspondent, the answer is yes.

He’d noticed that a group of black Twitter users in America were much more likely to react to particular topics. Some of them were race-based, such as ‘If Santa was black …’; answers included ‘He wouldn’t say ho-ho-ho, he would say yo-yo-yo’. Another topic was ‘ghetto baby names’; ‘Weavequisha’ was the most popular answer to that.

But, according to Manjoo, there were patterns of black Twitter behaviour that went beyond purely racial issues. Black Twitter users tended to be keener on following amusing Twitter threads such as ‘Words that lead to trouble’.