10.18 - Black Momentum

I’m sitting here in my room, with its shitty WiFi speed, watching the tabs I’ve just tried to open fail to open. They’re trying, believe that. But I noticed something just now that I’ve never noticed before. Something that I’m sure was the subject of a lot of discussions at Google HQ when Chrome was being developed. It’s that the circle that shows the progress of my new page being loaded in the new tab decelerates as it continually fails to connect.

So when you open a page in a new tab, and there’s very low connectivity, what you’ll see is a new tab spring up. Instantly, joyfully, almost. It moves every other tab over and pops up, right at the end, cognizant of its place in the hierarchy, everything you’d want out of a good God-fearing browser tab. And its little progress circle: man. It is zooming. It’s so enthusiastic about loading the next page at first. Over time it realizes that its connectivity isn’t that fast, and it starts to slow down. Eventually, it reaches a speed below which the Google designers must have felt there was no psychological benefit to displaying, but you can tell that the tab is struggling to get the content open. It may open eventually, but it’ll be after a long time of this slow connectivity. Struggle, basically.

I read Ta-Nahesi Coates’s book recently in which he does nothing but lament the plight of black people in this country. And moving as it was, and agree with him as I do on the culpability of whites in the present day, I thought it was unconstructively pessimistic. This may be the case TODAY, but what are you recommending to get beyond today, was my sentiment. And that’s an easy sentiment for me to have, Conquerer/Master as I am.

But watching this little Chrome tab struggle to open, it’s made me think again. Google tells us proudly that it returns results in 0.0008 or whatever seconds, out of billions of indexed pages. That’s the speed at which computers move. And this tab is taking 40 human seconds to load. This is not years in computer time; this is centuries. Possibly glacial eras. For this thing to load. And the circle slows down, but it just keeps spinning.

People who come to the United States from other countries/cultures generally sort of hit the ground running. They know what gets them success, and they do that. They imitate what’s necessary and do what they should. But that’s not really the case for black people. They’ve BEEN here for a long time. And at every turn of possibility, they’ve been ground down into dust for trying to extend beyond their positions. Their connectivity to the Dream is lost, to put it in that book’s terms. So their little loading circle slows. To me, it seems obvious: gain speed. The Mexicans and other Latinos are doing it way faster than you; every other immigrant class is. They’ve got the right idea; you don’t. But that’s not how it works. They’ve gone thorough the phase of doing everything the society tells them. None of it paid off. Now, they’re stuck in a holding pattern, grinding slowly. Equality - the end of race-based prejudice - is going to load one day. But it takes a long time for those whose connection has slowed.