Berkeley Scanner Ignores Reemajah Pollard’s Blackness In Story Of Death Of Cal Student – Part Two – Vlog

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1mabGCNHBA

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Berkeley Scanner Ignores Reemajah Pollard’s Blackness In Story Of Death Of Cal Student – Part Two

. A vlog by the YouTube channel named in the video’s upper left corner and serves as the original blog post for this content.

Berkeley Scanner Ignores Reemajah Pollard’s Blackness In Story Of Death Of Cal Student – Part Two

Ok, this now has me really pissed off. Two days ago, a publication called “The Berkeley Scanner”, and its reporter, and as it turns out, founder, or “Editor-in-chief: Award-winning veteran news reporter Emilie Raguso”, wrote an entire story about 20-year-old Reemajah Pollard that was a tear-jerker. To summarize, Reemajah Pollard was a Berkeley high school student who grew up as many black men do, in a less-than-ideal family situation. With assistance from teachers and program leaders, Pollard was acccepted at my grad-school alma mater, Cal. Then, either by suicide or heart attack, the young man was found dead.

What got me about Raguso’s account was she wrote about his reported isolation, but did not even bother to explain how his being African American played a key role in his Cal experience. I talked about this in my first video-blog, only to see some of the dumbest, coldest, and idotic comments I’ve ever seen in my life about any subject. Here’s a taste:

“Help me out, why is his face important to the story the scanner wrote?”

“You don’t think the photos spoke for itself?”

Then, I had someone who claims to be black (I don’t believe it) and named Sauce Castillo actually have the nerve to ask me why I should expect the Berkeley Scanner to write about the problems black folks have at Cal. No black person actually wrote that. Not buying it.

Ok, Cal’s track record at having “us” as black folks involved in anything is so bad that I was recruited to be on the Cal Alumni Board in 1998, and by a group of African American alumns who read my column in The Montclarion. So, as a black man who has grown up comfortable in “white” circles, I have seen the problem of racism against us from a unique perspective that’s less so, today.

Today, the problem is that in the Oakland, California and SF Bay Area Region, a number of black folks can think they have white friends, but then realize that they’re not included when it matters most: for good jobs and important gatherings. It goes a long way toward explaining why the Bay Area Media itself is overwhemlingly white. And that unberable whiteness has come to be reflected in the Berkeley Scanner’s post on Reemajah Pollard.

What is worse, is many younger African Americans do nothing to fix the problem and are more content to just go along to get along, or get crumbs. That dynamic is what dooms the very existence of black media in Oakland and the SF Bay Area – the desire to basically leave it to white folks rather than build black-ran-and-owned media organizations.

One can count the number of black media companies focused on Oakland on one hand, and with two fingers: The Post News Group and Zennie62Media, Inc. By contrast, the white media organizations focused on Oakland literally surround us, and include TV stations and radio, too. That has to change.

To me, it’s clear that a white-owned-and-ran media organization just doesn’t want to tell the black story today. That’s not true in history, but the fact is if blacks anywhere expect the black story to be told, they must own the media that tells it.

Stay tuned.

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Zennie62Blog.com : this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a YouTube channel. When the video is “liked” by Zennie62 YouTube, then it is automatically uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Zennie62Blog.com site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective here, on top of our is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours – is the use of the existing YouTube social graph on any subject in the World. Now, news is reported with a smartphone and also by promoting current content on YouTube: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary, or having a camera crew to shoot what is already on YouTube. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.