There are many places online and offline that members of this socially and politically conscious group can meet. Online gathering places include discussion boards on AOL Black Voices, the BV Caucus blog, BlackPlanet (a social networking site),Club Black Web, ThinkTank, African America and the list goes on. The group 1,000,000 Black Students links to the Assata Shakur Forum, which discusses issues concerning people throughout the Diaspora, not just blacks in America. A blog, 1,000,000 Black Updates, is also affiliated with this Facebook group.

Offline activities include conferences and events held by organizations like the NAACP and National Urban League. Many universities also have black student unions and other organizations that hold multicultural events and conferences. Dr. Ausetkmt also said her group has organized events to raise awareness about the crisis in Darfur, showing a movie about the genocide at a local theater in Michigan.

Although these activities exist offline, some of the people I spoke to, like Horace Coleman, said there needs to be more conferences and meetings on black-oriented topics and issues. Jason Green echoed these sentiments, saying blacks need to be engaged in more discussion, especially on the Web.

“Marketing of the information they’re[ black websites] providing is not as efficient as the mainstream, like CNN, MSNBC,” Green said. “A lot of black people aren’t even aware of BlackNews.com.”

“When it comes to discussion and not just reading, that’s where the problem is,” Green said.

Ausetkmt said her group is able to spread information more efficiently than even some large media organizations. They frequently communicate with each other via text message.

“We use cell phones,” Ausetkmt said. “You get about 140 characters in cell phone message. Any major news story can be condensed to 140 characters and blasted out to the globe. I sent a news blast to someone in Canada, someone in Jamaica, someone in England and someone in France. Within two hours it came back to me from Switzerland, Belgium and Holland, all from black people. “

Ausetkmt referred to this network as the electronic village, a termed coined by Minister Louis Farrakhan in 1995. She said groups like Club Black Web wouldn’t exist without the Internet.

“Praise the Lord for bloggers and cell phones,” Ausetkmt said. “Yes I am a new disciple of the Church of the Internet.”

The people in this community rely on the mainstream media and a multitude of other news sources to get their information. Some examples include the New York Times, USA Today and the Washington Post. While targeted news sources like Essence magazine and its website, Black America Web, BlackNews.com and AOL Black voices all provide relevant news to African-Americans. The members of my online community are interested in topics such as politics, race relations, criminal and social justice.

Jason Green, creator of the Facebook group 1,000,000 black students, said he started the group after taking a class called “Racism in America” and reading about certain incidents he felt weren’t being publicized by the mainstream media.

“While I was taking that course, I was getting really emotional about things that I wasn’t aware of,” Green said. “At the time, I [also] read a story about a [black] man in Texas who was the victim of a racial beating. He had Down syndrome and he got beat up and it bothered me that nobody knew about that at the time.”

Though Green said he watches CNN, he believes the mainstream media doesn’t do a thorough job of covering issues concerning the black community. He relies on news sources like BET.com, BlackNews.com and Black Enterprise magazine and its website to get news. The creation of 1,000,000 black students was a way to remedy this lack of targeted information.

“Facebook is the perfect way to just network with people and to spread news amongst a large group of people,” Green said. “I thought if you can allow people to see what’s going on in society, they’ll be more aware and more equipped to prevent it from happening again.”

1,000,000 Black Students does not yet have that many members. Almost 118,000 students have joined since Green started the group in March of 2006. Recent postings have addressed the topic of supporting African-American-owned businesses, what they referred to as keeping wealth within the black community. Members have posted videos from YouTube that address this topic. Members have posted over 22,000 discussion topics, some of which include the prevalence of single-parent households in the black community and poverty in urban areas. As can be expected, some people have posted topics that don’t concern a wider audience. One person gave a birthday greeting to a friend and others have used the discussion board to post profanity. Many of the posts do a lot of linking to the original sources of information, so the discussion board serves as means to channel information.

Horace Coleman, moderator for ThinkTank and member of Club Black Web, said both groups are responsible for channeling information that may be ignored otherwise. ThinkTank, which has 129 members and has a mailing list, focuses on general news, politics and health information. Recent postings have focused the Jena 6 case, high mortality rates for cancer, and Barack Obama’s campaign.

Coleman said he tries to examine popular culture issues from a different perspective. One notable example is a posting he wrote about the film American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington. He said the mainstream media glorified the movie about a successful African-American drug dealer without examining how these illicit activities affected the black community.

“I like to find the back story to things, not just things that are in the mainstream media,” Coleman said.” That kind of thing is beyond what they do.”

Ray Ausetkmt, who reads 7,000 RSS Feeds a day, including feeds from papers like the New York Times and USA Today, said she has come to rely on non-traditional news sources–particularly information provided by fellow members of online communities like Club Black Web and ThinkTank. She said recent issues, like violence and Mogadishu, Somalia and almost 500 deaths in Darfur last week, have not been covered extensively by traditional news outlets.

“That’s why groups like Club Black Web and ThinkTank exist,” Ausetkmt said. “We pull in people who can pick up a pen and a piece of paper and say what needs to be said and syndicate it to sources that need to hear it. We don’t care about Reuters and AP.”

“Reuters and AP doesn’t have our type of syndication.”

According to a November report conducted by e-Marketer, a group that conducts market research and trend analysis on the Internet, African-Americans comprise almost 11 percent of Internet users. That figure is expected to increase to almost 12 percent by 2011, making the number of African-Americans online total almost 26 million users. Though the number of whites online more than quadruples the number of black Web users, the latter audience is growing and that means more news and information outlets on the Web need to cater to the black community.

My blog, “Other America,” focuses on issues concerning the black community. Topics include finance, education, politics, and race relations, among others. In recent weeks, I’ve written about the disparities in crack cocaine sentencing, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and high breast cancer mortality rates for black women. My goal was to write about issues that extend beyond popular culture. There are many entertainment sites, such as BET and MTV, which younger African-Americans visit on a regular basis, but sites are scarce that focus on the politically and socially conscious members of this demographic. Dr. Ray Ausetkmt, who is a member of the Yahoo Group Club Black Web and a number of other black online communities, referred to these people as the “black intelligentsia.” Ausetkmt said these people are academic scholars, professors, legislators, college students and others who have been able to share their ideas and mobilize online.

“The Internet changed the reality for black people, globally,” Ausetkmt said. “People are connected together that have never previously known much about each other. There’s an active live connection, a sharing of information, a development of resources, and in some cases, an enlightenment that takes place from one group to another one simply because there is that open sharing permitted by the Internet.”

The term “black intelligentsia” may have certain class implications, but I’m using it in this framework as an expedient way to describe people who use the Internet to gather and organize with others who share a similar consciousness.

Though the black community online and offline is not a monolithic one, it has certain uses for the Internet that are not typical of other online communities. The 2000 Pew Internet and American Life Project found the online behavior of blacks very different from that of whites. Sixty-five percent of blacks use the Internet for school research compared to 54 percent of whites. Thirty-eight percent of blacks use the Internet to chat online versus 23 percent of whites. Sixty percent of blacks have used the Net to play an audio or video clip.

The African-American online community is broad. The people I intended to target range in age from 21 to 40, but anyone above this age range who has similar interests could be a member of this community. I interviewed Dr. Ray Ausetkmt, a 52-year old researcher and Ph.d holder in African religion; Jason B. Green, a 21-year old college senior at Nova Southeastern University and creator of the Facebook group 1,000,000 Black students; and Horace Coleman, a 65-year old Vietnam veteran and moderator of Thinktank, an African-American discussion forum.

Since the 1980’s, sentences for crack cocaine have been harsher than sentences for powder cocaine, but today the Supreme Court voted to allow U.S. judges to impose shorter sentences for people convicted on crack cocaine charges.

Previously, someone arrested in possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine would get the same sentence as someone arrested with 500 grams of powder. Crack is a cheaper form of the drug and is predominantly used by blacks—more than 80 percent of people imprisoned on crack charges are African-American. Powder cocaine, on the other hand, is predominantly used by whites and Latinos. Many people in the law enforcement community, social activists and others have long thought the laws governing cocaine sentencing are racially and socioeconomically biased.

New guidelines for shorter sentences went into effect on Nov 1st. The Sentencing Commission, the authority that establishes the guidelines, will vote Tuesday about whether to apply the new rules retroactively, a ruling that could mean freedom for almost 20,000 people now imprisoned on crack cocaine charges.

Talk show maven Oprah Winfrey is campaigning today in Iowa for Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

As part of a three-state campaigning blitz, Winfrey will also campaign in New Hampshire and South Carolina, two key states in the Democratic primaries that will help decide whether Obama becomes the party’s presidential candidate.

Political insiders aren’t sure what kind of impact Winfrey will have on the campaign trail, but the American public has already seen the O effect on books, television, publishing and movies. Oprah’s show is viewed by 9 million people every day, most of these people are women and about half are older than 50, a demographic that is very similar to the average Iowa Caucus voter.

People have been abuzz with news of the double O factor. Katharine Q. Seelye of the New York Times asked at the end of November:

“Can the Oprah magic that converts books into best-sellers translate to politics? Will the viewers, mostly women, who follow her advice on daytime television follow it into the voting booth?[Or] Will she alienate her viewers by overtly taking sides in the increasingly intense debate between the man who could become the first black president and the woman who could become the first woman president?”

Robin N. Hamilton of the Huffington Post said Oprah’s presence on the campaign trail could encourage more civic participation from previously uninvolved voters, even if those people don’t end up pulling the lever for Obama.

“What is significant about Oprah is that at the very least, her participation may encourage a sector of the population to engage in political debate, a debate they may otherwise have avoided,” Hamilton said.

But Joe from Vermont, who posted a response to Seelye’s article, said there is one person with even more political clout and power than Oprah.

“As for Oprah and the rest, I don’t think endorsements have much weight,” Joe said. ”I’m sure the crowds will come out to see Oprah and a few will be converted. If you take past campaigns, all the union, press and other endorsements didn’t really change things. It’s the American voter that decides.”

President Bush announced Thursday a two-year hold on mortgage interest rates to help people in danger of losing their homes.

Many of the people who would be helped by the President’s plan used subprime loans to buy homes. Subprime borrowers are typically people with poor credit who otherwise couldn’t afford a home. Those same people may now lose their homes because the rates for subprime loans fluctuate, making mortgage payments substantially increase every month.

However, the plan would only include borrowers who are not late on their current mortgage payments. These people would continue to pay the original interest rate on their loan and not be subject to increased payments when that rate expires.

The current mortgage crisis disproportionately affects minorities, particularly African-Americans. The Federal Reserve released a study in September that showed how the the crisis is affecting this group. According to the study, nearly 53 percent of blacks got a high-rate loan when they refinanced their homes. In comparison, 38 percent of Latinos and about 26 percent of whites received these loans.

The reason blacks get more subprime loans than other groups may be purely economic. Many of them are concentrated in the lower income brackets, which makes it more difficult to get a loan with a cheaper interest rate.

A 2005 study of 331  U.S. metropolitan areas found that 98.5 percent of blacks in these areas took out subprime loans.

Wright Andrews, an attorney who represents the Coalition for Fair and Affordable Lending, a group of subprime lenders, told U.S Today reporters it isn’t startling that minorities take out subprime loans.   

“It’s not at all surprising that, at least in many metropolitan areas, you would have high concentrations of African-Americans and Hispanics getting subprime loans. … African-Americans and Hispanics as a group are more economically disadvantaged.”