Recent statistics from Nielsen NetRatings cite BET’s own site, Bet.com—along with AOL’s Black Voices channel and social networking destination BlackPlanet.com—among the places that African-Americans visit the most. Those sites aren’t exactly hotbeds of savvy, clearheaded commentary, though. One place that is: Racialicious.com, a blog dedicated to the discussion of race in pop culture, headed by Carmen Van Kerckhove. Launched in 2004, the site covers everything from the subtext of the Resident Evil 5 video-game trailer (white guy shooting his way through hordes of black zombies) to German UNICEF ads that put cute Teutonic moppets in blackface. Van Kerckhove’s umbrella company, New Demographic, also publishes the Anti-Racist Parent blog collective (which features Meera Bowman-Johnson, a columnist for timeoutkids.com) and produces the weekly Addicted to Race podcast.

Van Kerckhove says that Internet anonymity—in which screen names can obscure the identities of folks creating content or commenting—has helped the multiethnic strata of the blogosphere to grow. “On the one hand, not knowing the race of a writer or commenter can be a positive thing when it comes to talking about race, because readers aren’t immediately making snap judgments about that person’s perspective,” she observes. “But a lot of the people who read my blog do end up identifying themselves racially, and it gives people a richer context to the different kinds of experiences that individuals who identify as African-Americans can have.”

Bloggers live or die by RSS feeds and links, so when asked where she clicks through to, Van Kerckhove mentions MultiCultClassics (multicultclassics.blogspot.com), Too Sense (halfricanrevolution.blogspot.com) and Negrophile (negrophile.com). The last boasts a mighty list of more than 1,000 links, making it the closest thing to a clearinghouse of black culture that can be found on the Web.

George Kelly, Negrophile’s founder, says that a dearth of comprehensive news linkage inspired him to launch the site. “If my sites promote racial awareness and dialogue, it’s inadvertent,” Kelly states. “I see them as less about promotion and more about personal commitment­—sorting through things and knowing my mind over time.”

Kelly says he’s witnessed more than his share of eye-melting comment threads, too. “From what I’ve seen on forums, the mention of race discomfits commenters,” he says. “One common attitude is that the blogosphere is an exalted zone where race shouldn’t matter.”

Flawed logic like that is one reason bloggers such as Marc Lamont Hill, professor of Urban Education and American Studies at Temple University, want the conversations that proliferate on the Web to find their way back to the real world. “[African-Americans] would sit and talk in barbershops, churches and community centers about these things outside the reach of the bourgeois mainstream,” he notes. His award-wining BarbershopNotebooks.com takes its inspirations from such places.

Yet when it comes to dialogues on the Web, Hill has a warning, noting that the transparency of Net-centric discourse can complicate things. “The Web creates only the illusion of [private] space,” says Hill. “Meanings can get lost when ideas are hashed out in full public view. If white people click onto a thread where black people are discussing the level of Obama’s blackness, it could sound like we’re revoking his ‘black people’ pass, but it’s really a criticism of his politics.”

In other words, the misinterpretation of black thought by outside groups may be a danger even greater than Charlie Murphy presiding over women in hot pants. “People get instant access to the conversation, but they don’t get access to the nuanced perspectives, to the institutional history and cultural memory,” says Hill. “It takes an investment in time to develop an understanding of these kinds of race matters. ” Somebody get this man a TV show.