Letter from a poor black kid. My response to the dumbest article ever at Forbes

UPDATE 2x:

I've created PoorBlackKid.com. Yep.

UPDATE:

Gene Marks' response: http://blackte.am/tTrP0L

ORIGINAL

I blame Jacquetta Szathmari. I was minding my business, not being offended by truly idiotic ideas, when I saw her facebook post and then blog post about this Forbes article by Gene Marks. I decided not to respond. Today, I broke my silence and posted a few tweets like this

Shorter: If I Were A Poor Black Kid, I wouldn't be a poor black kid #dumbestshitihavereadallyear

— Baratunde (@baratunde) December 14, 2011

and this

If I were a shitty writer, I would write "If I Were A Black Kid" #HowToBeDumb

— Baratunde (@baratunde) December 14, 2011

and this

#IfIWereAPoorBlackKid I would invent cold fusion.

— Baratunde (@baratunde) December 14, 2011

But I thought that would be the end of it. Then I got a request from CNN.com to write something about this nonsense, and so I thought about how I might take on this dumbshitteryTM (h/t, Elon James White). I opted to fight something that originally sounded like satire with satire. The full piece is over at CNN. Here's the setup

The following letter is a response from a hypothetical child to Gene Marks' article in Forbes, titled "If I Were A Poor Black Kid." While completely fabricated, the letter below has a stronger basis in reality than does Marks'. In his article, Marks, a business and technology contributor to Forbes, argues poorly that poor black children should use technology to improve their station in life. The article is terrible.

Looking for group texting service to help school serving underperforming students

Hey folks, a friend of mine is working on a research project trying to connect students to their teachers, parents, and other community members via texting. Here is his description of the use cases. BTW, his name is Uche Amaechi, and he lives in Somerville, MA.

The usecases I see are:

1. Teacher sends message to all kids reminding them of homework, field trips, events etc.

• 1.1 Kids can respond directly to teacher
• 1.2 Kids can respond to the group

2. Teacher sends message to individual kid about whatever

• Kid can respond directly to teacher

3. Teacher sends messages to set group of kids (or kids and adults)

• 3.1 Kid can respond to teacher
• 3.2 Kid can respond to group
• 3.3 Kid can respond to individual kids in the receiving group

General question: What's the easiest and fastest way to do this given:

1. That most of these kids might not have smart phones, although the teacher presumably does
2. Many of these kids will not have computers @ home
3. We want to give teachers (and students) the ability to disconnect from the group
4. We want the receiving parties to be able to see who else is receiving the particular message
5. We'd like to be able to track the conversations. So we can track the conversations that come through the teacher, but what about point to point communications.

The only group SMS service I've heard about is tatango, but that seems to be focused on one-to-many broadcast, not many-to-many or one-to-one, at least. Any others come close to covering all the needs above?

Incredible Mashup Of Palin...

I don't want to give the punchline away. You gotta see it for yourselves.

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