Do we really want to go there? Twitter's Trending Topic of #White people stink

Twenty five percent of Twitter users are Black people. We know there is no digital divide, with Black people having equal or greater access to technology and Internet, using it for purposes other then accessing M.I.T's OpenCourseWare class material (even being your teacher wouldn't improve Black test scores in science).

No amount of Right Guard can help white people

We already know that Black people use Twitter in an interesting manner, as this article posted on Salon illustrated:

Nevertheless, Brendan Meeder thinks he's got a good hypothesis about what's going on. Meeder, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, has downloaded the tweets of more than 100 million users. (Twitter gave him special permission to do so for research purposes.) He's been probing this collection to see how Twitter users interact with one another; he's particularly interested in how trends begin and spread through a social network. While analyzing his database a few months ago, Meeder noticed something strange—he found a cluster of hundreds of users whose profiles were connected to one another. When he looked up the users, he noticed that a lot of them were black. It's in exactly these kinds of tight-knit groups that Twitter memes flourish, Meeder says. "It's my impression that these hashtags start in dense communities—people who are highly connected to each other," Meeder says. "If you have 50 of these people talking about it, think about the number of outsiders who follow at least one of those 50—it's pretty high at that point. So you can actually get a pretty big network effect by having high density." 

Not only are the people who start these trends more tightly clustered on the network, they're also using the network differently. Most people on Twitter have fewer followers than the number of people they're following—that is, they're following celebrities, journalists, news organizations, and other big institutions that aren't following them back. But according to Meeder, the users who initiate blacktags seem to have more reciprocal relationships—they're following everyone who follows them. Tigress_Lee, the user who helped spark #wordsthatleadtotrouble, has 1,825 followers, and she's following 1,873. BigJamaal has 11,962 followers, and he's following 11,203. These patterns suggest that the black people who start these tags "are using Twitter as a social tool," Meeder says. "They're using Twitter like a public instant messenger"—using the service to talk to one another rather than broadcast a message to the world.

Now for the caveats. There is an obvious problem with talking about how black people use Twitter, as many of the black Twitter users I spoke to took pains to point out: Not all black people on the service are participating in these hashtags, and there are probably a great many who are indifferent to or actively dislike the tags. "It's the same issue I have with certain black comedy shows," says Elon James White, a comedian who runs the site This Week in Blackness. "They put out these ideas of blackness that—if it were someone of another race saying them—you'd go, 'Whoa, that's racist!' I remember when #ifsantawasblack hit, I lost my shit. I was freaking out. It was literally a game of, What's the most racist thing we can say? And it was black people saying it!"

Which brings us to the latest trending topic on Twitter courtesy of Black,  #white people stink:

In today's episode of When Social Networking Goes Wrong, #White People Stink is a trending topic on Twitter.  

The multicultural makeup and quasi-anonymity of the site make it a breeding ground for discussions of themes with a racial slant. Some are uncomfortable but funny, some are controversial but thought provoking, and then, on days like today, there are those that have no redeeming qualities.

 Whether the origin of this latest offensive hashtag can actually be blamed on "Black Twitter," you can guess where the backlash has been directed.

Check out some recent responses below:

The "White people stink" trend on twitter is bringing out a lot of racism ... on both sides ... *feels uncomfortable*

"White People Stink." is trending. If it was "Black People Stink." the whole world would be in uproar.

White people stink. Asian people think. Funny people joke cause the black people broke ..

if White People Stink the stench is from money #Inheritance lol

Now that white people stink is trending, a whole lot of white people are having fun saying nigger

White people stink? Knowing that birth control and the Pill has been shown to alter the olfactory senses of females, theories that different racial groups consider the odors emanating from a member of a different racial group's body to be offensive or disagreeable could have some validity. Thomas Jefferson certainly thought so.

Apparently the barbaric hordes of white people exude a most malodorous air, a veritable symphony of aromatic displeasure to Black people. This vexing problem caused by the persistent and odoriferous perspiration of white people  is worthy of a trending topic on Twitter. Anything less would uncivilized, right?

The only Old Spice Guy in our book: Ash

It's good that important topics such as the bizarre scent of white people are of extreme interest on Twitter and we are hopeful that a nosegay can be located to protect Black people from this offensive deluge of unwanted odors.

Old Spice once utilized Bruce Campbell as the paragon of manliness, cleanliness and the gentlemen whose aroma the ladies found most alluring in its advertisements. He was replaced with the Old Spice Guy, Isaiah Mustafa. From a marketing standpoint, both ad campaigns have been interesting, though the quintessential deodorant commercials will always be the Right Guard campaign from the early 1990s.

What's the point of all this? If you bathe regularly, shower and use soap, shampoo and a good cologne, the chances of a member of your race or another racial group finding your body odor will decrease exponentially.

We have no idea if racial groups smell differently to other racial groups, nor do we propose any scholarly attempts at proving this theory through the scientific method (though taking a Flip cam onto MARTA, the D.C. Metro or the 7 Train in New York and doing this experiment would provide hilarious video).

Stuff Black People Don't Like finds the entire debate absolutely hilarious, that Black people would even spend time discussing the lamentable hygiene of white people when the vast majority of Blacks in America rarely encounter white people.

White people go out of there way to live in cities with a dearth of Black people, not because they smell bad, but because white people don't want to live around Black people.Same goes with Asians and increasingly Hispanics.

White people don't even want to be around them in cyberspace.

In summation: Black people saying that white people stink is pretty funny. How often do Black people really encounter white people in real life?

Cleanliness is next to Godliness. This is a truth that everyone should hold dearly, yet Black people find the scent of white people most egregious to their persons.

Of course this Twitter Trending Topic was just a joke, but sometimes the best jokes ask questions that were never intended to be answered.

Do white people smell different to Asians and Black people? Is that a question we really want to pursue? All thanks to Black people utilizing social networking in an odd manner.