What Happens Nextdoor is Racist! (and White Girl Bleed a Lot)

There are a lot of people who are not, by self-description, “Alt Right”, who nevertheless are kindred spirits. They search for truth. And because the truth simply is, there may be disagreements over what exactly it means, but at least they live in the same world, and not one of lies and delusion that we children of the 70’s were raised in.

Some are aggressive, others take a more passive approach, staking out their territory and saying “here I stand, this is true.” One of the latter well worth paying attention to is Colin Flaherty, author of the books White Girl Bleed a Lot, and Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry. The former is also the name of his podcast on iTunes and stitcher, and he has a YouTube channel.

His most recent episode on Aug 28th with Willie Shield covers a lot of the usual ground, but also delves into the phenomenon of “neighborhood” social networks and crime tracking apps, and how racist they are for making clear the disparity in white and black crime.

The app/ network in question is “Nextdoor.com” – a geographically based social media app for communities. The people programming the app noticed a “disturbing” pattern – people reporting crimes would often report the skin color of the suspect, and of course, all to very frequently, the color was black. So the creators took it upon themselves to help guide us to a more tolerant future –  by making it more difficult to describe the suspect.

Per an interview, they decided to add a new feature. If you describe the skin color of a suspect when reporting a crime, it will automatically ask you to provide several more pieces of information such as height, clothes, etc. On the one hand, they’re not preventing you from completely describing a suspect, but they’re also making it more difficult to report it by upping the level of friction.  Not because a more complete descrition is inherently better when available, but because criminals are more than their skin color.