Cord Jefferson says that on the Internet, society’s most intractable issues with race and class are increasingly prominent.
For an example of where the Internet has gone tragically wrong, one need only look to the strange rise of Antoine Dodson. On July 28 of this year, a man broke into Dodson’s Huntsville, Alabama, housing-project apartment and climbed into bed with Dodson’s sister, Kelly. She screamed, at which point Dodson, 24, rushed into her room to fight off the assailant, who fled through a window. With his sister safe and the police on the scene, Dodson, who is gay and black, gave an interview to NBC affiliate WAFF-48’s news crew. Visibly upset, the young man screamed into the camera that he was going to catch the potential rapist, and he warned people to “hide your kids, hide your wife, hide your husbands, because they’re raping everybody out here.”