Will the Real Jeff Brandon Please Stand Up
Digital Presence
This picture I took one time on vacation, is part of mine:
It is featured here so this post doesn’t spoil itself with its own featured image.
Establishing narrative context
I have a Google alert set for my name. I don’t really know why, other than vanity. I am not particularly notable, people don’t write about me, and I have a pretty low public profile. Is it a bit narcissistic? You bet. I’m not delusional. As unlikely as it may be for me to rise to some level of notoriety, if something like that were to happen, I think it would be interesting to watch it unfold in pseudo-real time.
As fate would have it, I am blessed with what many would call “two first names.” I am in good company, with the likes of Bob Ross, Tony Scott, and Missy Elliot, each of us with a double helping of “given-name.” It certainly makes for an above average false positivity rate when it comes to string-matching based alerts like Google uses. The “proper” notifications usually relate to a corporate real-estate agent so I am accustomed to ignoring most of what pops up in that feed. Recently, however, a misspelling yielded a false positive I wanted to know more about. Rather than click the link directly, I indulged my vanity and googled myself. It is not something I do frequently, it seems like everyone google-able knows that it is not a good idea to get into a habit of egosurfing. It was not something I had done since at least February of 2019. What I found was, at best, very disappointing.
Before diving into that mess though, I’d like to talk a little about digital presence. I think of digital presence as the sum of all the smaller digital footprints an individual leaves behind on their adventures through the internettm. This is by no means a perfect metaphor. Some “footprints” are quite large like a social media profile, others are much smaller like an individual post on a forum; made in an attempt to gain unknowable wisdom, apparently sought by none before. Traces of online activity get much smaller than that too. If it can be linked back to you, it is part of your digital presence. All that said, a largely important facet of a person’s digital presence is the search results produced by Google when searching that person’s name. It is likely to be the first stop on anyone’s journey to know more about a person of interest.
So what happens when you search for Jeff Brandon anyway?1
I type my name into the magical search machine and what do I see:
It would appear that someone has (self) published a book under my name. It would appear that this book is almost certainly problematic racist. I asked a friend to search for me too, in order to rule out some kind of personalized search result. Laughter from the other room suggested, he too, saw the same hit. A short while later he repeated the experiment2 by asking his partner to repeat the query, and she also confirmed the top result. Documentarians managed to capture my reaction as I realized that this would likely be what people3 see when they try to look me up:
Like it or not this was now a part of my digital presence. At this point I started to wonder if a former colleague or classmate had been silently pranking me for over a year, but I quickly dismissed that notion since no one cares that much about me4. No, this was more likely a coincidence than a drawn out, high-cost social engineering attack against me. Maybe it wasn’t even that bad? It could be that despite the questionable wording of the title, the content of the book was a wholesome and intersectional look at what it means to be in a black/white interracial relationship in this day and age. The text being only thirty-some pages long, and available with a free trial of kindle unlimited, I decided to dive in and do my due diligence.5 Optimistically, I thought there might even be some nuggets of information I could apply to my own dating life …
It is not great. I’d even go so far as to call it bad. Oh yeah, it is definitely racist too. After leaving a thoughtful review I decided I would like to know more about the author. This proved to be tricky because I already knew what happens when plugging his name into Google. He has yet to publish any other works. He did, however, have a website associated with his diatribe of a book. With this, I have the first digital footprint pointing me in the direction of my eponymous6 other.
It is confusing to refer to the author of this steaming pile as “Jeff Brandon,” so I am going to come up with another name to help nip that confusion in the bud. Using a fair random-name-generator I have come up with an alternate name I will refer to the author by henceforth: “Richard Cheddar,” or Dick for short7. Since we share a decent portion of our identity, I feel comfortable being more familiar with Dick than I would with any other stranger.
What we can do about it
The simple solution
I could start going by “Jeffrey” or my middle name, either of these would solve my problem, but why should I have to change, he is the one who sucks. I could also get out in front of the issue by telling everyone who learns my full name to be aware that I am not self publishing literature on any platforms, especially not Amazon. That would probably just bring more attention to my dilemma though. On to complicated and arguably more fun solutions!
Social Engineering
Social engineering has gained some popularity over the years. A subreddit or two exist which tout how far one can get simply by “acting like you belong” or wearing a high-vis vest. The basic idea is that if it seems like you should be there, most people probably will not question your being there. A social engineering attack combines this notion with an intended target in mind. There was a video that made its way around the internet a while back that demonstrates what it is far better than I could explain. An attack is usually crafted with publicly available information, another reason to be wary of what shows up when you look yourself up online. Social engineering often veers into moral grey areas and it is not something I would do under normal circumstances, but with the goal of learning more about my new friend Dick in mind, it seemed like it might be a decent tactic.
Dick’s website is my biggest clue to his true identity so that is where I started my information gathering.
whois
This tool tells us public information about websites. It isn’t installed on windows by default, but it can be downloaded for free here. Drag the executable into sytem32 and we are ready to go. On linux distros it should be available from your package manager of choice. On ubuntu it might look like:
sudo apt-get install whois
It is a common enough utility, it may be installed by default. Once installed, open your shell of choice (I’d recommend powershell on windows) and run:
whois therightblackwoman.com
the output might read something like this. Now there is a lot of information in there, lots of it irrelevant and repeated, but there are a couple juicy nuggets:
Registry Expiry Date: 2021-09-24T04:51:37Z. This could be useful if we wanted to take over the domain. The problems here are that it doesn’t expire until September, and if the owner pays their bill it will auto-renew without a chance for us to swoop in and snatch it out from under their nose. These things do happen though, see: 1 and 2.
DNSSEC: unsigned. If we want to get fancy we might be able to hijack the site’s traffic. That’s probably more complex than I’m willing to investigate for now, but worth noting.
Registry Registrant ID: Not Available From Registry
Registrant Name: Registration Private
Registrant Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC
This is somewhat interesting, Dick registered the site through a service that bills itself as a domain name registry that protects the site owner’s identity. Godaddy offers this through their registry, but it does cost extra. This is not something that happened by accident. It begs the question: why would someone protect their identity when registering a website, and then proceed to put their name on it? At this point I’m beginning to think the site’s owner chose my name by coincidence, as a pen name8. Looks like we won’t be getting more info on his identity directly from whois data.
The next thing to investigate is the provided email: therightblackwoman.com@domainsbyproxy.com, whether it’s hooked up to anything is another question entirely. If I am lucky I might be able to phish out some information indirectly from someone on the other end of that address.
Not wanting to tip my hand, I used a burner email that hopefully will not raise suspicions9. In case the email on the website and the one listed in the whois dump are managed by the same person, I emailed the contact info listed on the website first. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, it was not a functioning email. All I got back was a “failure to deliver” message. That is a dead end. With only the whois provided email left to try, I typed up my query, posing as a new fan who had enjoyed the book, I sent out my last ditch effort to get in touch with someone responsible for this content. And then I waited for a reply that probably would never come.
One other thing we can do is attempt to claim the knowledge panel we saw in the results. I am at an advantage here because I do possess government issued identification stating that I am indeed Jeff Brandon, and I also have multiple web presences which I can prove I have the capability to edit. The one problem, and likely barrier to success on this route, is that I cannot prove I can edit the website affiliated with the book in question. Either way I filled out and submitted the form and gave it a shot. Unsurprisingly, I was notified months later that my request to claim the panel was not successful.
Be the most relevant Jeff Brandon
It stands to reason that this book appears first in search results because Google thinks it is the most likely thing people would be looking for when they search “Jeff Brandon.” That would mean that all I need to do to usurp the top spot is become more relevant! Unfortunately that is no easy feat. Writing this blog post, peppering it with instances of “Jeff Brandon” may move the needle but it is wishful thinking at this point. What if I got my wallet involved though?
I would rather not pay to cleanse my online persona, but as it stands taking out an ad on my own name could aid the situation by advertising that I am not, in fact, the same Dick that published a book. There are also some similar domains I could purchase and set to point at some better content on race relations.
Speaking of which…
My opinions on American race relations in 2020
Since my name has been associated with opinions I do not hold or care to be associated with, I thought I would take this opportunity to express my opinions for the sake of the record even though no one asked.
A number of protests occurred in the last 12 months in the wake of the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derrick Chauvin. It was another data point in the United States’ long history of state sanctioned violence against black people and other minorities. The protests took place in cities all over the world marking global dissatisfaction in the way that minorities, statistically, are treated differently than white people in every step of the judicial system. There is a lot of change that still needs to happen on this front, however, a silver lining (if you squint and try really hard to find one) is that these events sparked interest in and kicked off discussions around race in America. Sadly, that is what it took to inspire many, myself included, to make a concerted effort to further educate themselves on the issue. At the end of the day I am just another cis-white-male and my perspective is bound to be limited on matters like this so I defer to the experts. If you want to learn more about this yourself, I recommend White Fragility by Dr. Robin DiAngelo and So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo10. If you consider buying these or other books on this topic, I would highly encourage you to support your local black-owned bookstore. If you do not have one locally, here is mine.
A friend of mine from high school and college is very into statistics and data. He is, among other things, a pollster who has worked on ABC/Washington Post’s presidential polls, and I think it’s fair to say he has some subject matter expertise when it comes to data. In July of 2020 he wrote a thorough blog post on racism in the American criminal justice system that I think is worth your time.11
If reading is not your cup-o-tea then you could look into Dear White People and Who Killed Malcolm X? on Netflix, or 13th, and LA 92 are both available for free on YouTube.
Note: Since I originally wrote this article in the end of 2020, and am now revising and publishing it in March 2021, I’d also add Judas and the Black Messiah to the list of relevant resources to improve understanding of and contextualize American race relations through history, that I personally can recommend.
Having done this cursory level of research into the subject does, however, give me a bit more confidence in critiquing Dick’s prose. To be clear, I think anyone should be encouraged to date and marry whomever they please, but the book is problematic.
The greatest element I found lacking from this book about interracial relationships was context. Race is a touchy subject. For whatever reason, people do not really like acknowledging that their place in society may not be owed entirely to their own hard work, and in part should be credited to the historical owning of other people, aka slavery, which still affects how people view each other today.
People do generally agree that slavery was bad, where people disagree is on its lasting effects on people who were not themselves slaves. Many still argue that slavery is a problem of the past that was essentially resolved by the emancipation proclamation made by then President, Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Allow me to take a moment to point out that as part of the racial awareness awakening collectively taking place in the summer of 2020, many Americans learned, for the first time, about Juneteenth; a holiday commemorating when the news that “slavery has ended” reached the last plantations in Texas. As the name suggests, word did not reach Texas until June. What is less obvious is that it was a two and a half year wait, people remained in slavery for two and a half years until June 19, 1865.12 To state my opinion clearly and concisely: I think that the ripple effects of slavery are affecting Americans in 2020 and that racial injustice should be actively combated.
TW: Sexual abuse, skip the next block of text to avoid.
From the Americas colonial origins until 1865, horrendous acts of violence were committed against slaves including the rape of black women at the hands of slave owners and plantation workers. It goes without saying that white men were the primary perpetrators of these acts of violence.
The book mentions none of this. I have no real personal experience in this area but I imagine that if I were in a relationship with a black woman, these subjects would come up at some point, and knowing how to respectfully engage and acknowledge them would be some really useful advice. As far as Dick is concerned, it is unclear if he knows of slavery’s role in American history. It does not come up in his writing. He does however state that one might have better luck dating international black women (who have not been corrupted by the media) if one’s romantic partner begins to point out their racist behavior. Look for this and more in “Chapter 5: Wait a Minute, Now She Thinks I’m a Racist Monster.”
Instead of insight into the nuances of this type of relationship, readers are given helpful tips for dealing with being the only white person at social gatherings and advice on not trying too hard to impress family and friends that are not on-board with the relationship.
This overall lack of context exhibited by the author makes it easier to understand how they hold such strong opinions about “the media bias against white men.”
Wrapping up
I do not know if I will be able to solve my problem with this blog or some other method, but I do know my problem pales in comparison to so many issues others face in this country right now. I wanted to show up here as my “Jeff Brandon,” the one that is real to me, to contrast the fake one in the search results.
I considered doing a chapter by chapter review of the “cursed text,” but decided to leave it for a follow up if there is interest in that. There is not much value in it if it only matters to me. Leave a comment, let me know what you think.
Email correspondence update
I ended up being wrong, I did get a response. We corresponded briefly, but long enough to ask about and learn that he was still in the dating pool.13 He asked about which chapter I liked the most, how the weather was in my neck of the woods, and followed up a few days later to wish me a merry Christmas. At this point I dropped the ball on the conversation.
Even in this situation I found it very strange to pretend to be someone I am not. It may or may not have helped me to get a response but I did choose a name that could plausibly, but not necessarily, belong to a black woman. It feels kind of icky to me, but I want to tell this story as accurately as possible.
I’ve been waiting on the resolution of that conversation before publishing this, but it’s March of 2021 now and I did try following up after months of radio silence on my end. I want to be done with this for now. I’ll write more when I feel like there’s more to say.
IRL this usually leads to disappointment. ↩︎
I didn’t even have to ask him, what a good friend? Right? ↩︎
Future employers, would be romantic interests, family members that wonder what I’ve been up to… the list goes on. ↩︎
Joking, not joking. ↩︎
This blog is not in any way affiliated with Amazon… yet (sponsor me) ↩︎
Eponymous generally refers to a namesake, or something explicitly named after something else, because we were named independently of each other, I propose coining the term eponyganger: a clumsy portmanteau of “eponym” and “doppelganger.” Is it obvious how much I’d like to distance myself from my eponyganger? ↩︎
Emphasis on short, am I right? ↩︎
How lucky for me! ↩︎
I, for one, would raise my eyebrows at an email from someone with my (assumed) name. ↩︎
Oluo has a new book on White Mediocrity that I am in the middle of reading. ↩︎
Wyatt Bush also is one of the hosts of an independent podcast Nobody Expects the Dismal Science. If you found his blog interesting and would enjoy hearing a reformed-libertarian/neoliberal perspective on current events and issues of our time, I suggest you give it a listen. #listenWhereverYouGetYourPodcasts ↩︎
Not to brag, but I learned about Juneteenth when Google began highlighting it on their calendar app and I looked in to what it was all about. So +1 for Google doing something good in the world. The point remains that this particular historical tidbit is omitted from most American’s education. ↩︎
Shocker, I know. ↩︎
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