Danielle Belton Is Still 'The Black Snob'

It was Spring (or was it still winter, it's so hard to tell in New York where all springs are false ones), and I was at Dick & Jane's Barroom in Bed-Stuy, having dinner with my friend, Wendy Washington. After moving from Washington, D.C. to Midtown Manhattan to Harlem, I live in Bed-Stuy now, and Wendy is my "let's try a new spot" companion. She's a brilliant woman who runs an experiential marketing and PR agency, This Is Dope — meaning, she knows how to sell things. Masterfully. And at that dinner, she was on a mission to sell me on something.

Bringing back The Black Snob.

The Black Snob was my very popular (ask your Gen X, rich Black auntie because that's what we all are now!), award-winning pop culture and politics blog that I wrote from 2007 until 2012. I came up with it because I missed writing my old newspaper column and blog in The Bakersfield Californian, and thought my punchy takes would translate well online. It was a fun run when I wasn't working myself to death as my own "World's Worst Boss." At the height of the blog, when I was reaching around 100,000 visitors a month, I updated it 6 times a day, 6 days a week for 11 months out of the year. I was exhausted when I finally sunsetted the site in 2012, leaving the blogging world for television to become head writer for BET's late-night talk show, Don't Sleep, hosted by T. J. Holmes.

But the TV thing didn't last. Even though I worked on developing, writing, and promoting the show for more than a year, Don't Sleep was canceled after four measly, intense months. But the blog stayed dormant, as I was ready to move beyond The Black Snob and focus solely on getting back into a full-time role in journalism.

I would go on to join the team at Black news site The Root in 2015 after trying to get a job there since 2009. After a year as a senior editor, I was promoted to managing editor, then editor-in-chief six months later.

The Root was an insane run for me professionally. I grew the site's traffic by 300 percent within my first year in leadership — taking The Root from averaging around 3 million unique visitors a month to 12 million. My team and I did this by changing the site's tone and style completely — moving away from the more traditional way of writing, to essentially creating a politically astute, "rooting for everyone Black" news and humor site. It was like The Chappelle Show meets Gawker with quick-hit news stories and investigative reporting on everything from administrative issues at Morehouse College to whether or not Dr. Umar Johnson really had a PhD.

Then, in 2021, I left The Root to become editor-in-chief of digital news pioneer HuffPost, and I honestly thought I would be there for a decade. Or at least that was my original plan. It's how long I thought I would need to truly create a newsroom that reflected the diversity of the United States, but I didn't factor in the economic downturn, the deprioritization of news by the social networks, the end of search traffic from Google, and advertisers running away from news due to the unpopularity of our now toxic political discourse. When HuffPost's parent company BuzzFeed started to struggle, downsizing became a matter of when, not if, so I left the role in January 2025, hoping to save jobs.

Almost 15-months later, I'm sitting with Wendy, trying to figure out my next move, not knowing she had already planned it for me.

"You gotta bring back The Black Snob!" she said.

Now, Wendy is not the first person to suggest this to me. My best friend Jada Prather has brought it up almost every year since I stopped updating the site. But I had all my usual excuses as to why I couldn't do it —

It was hard, and I had no life when I was The Black Snob.

I attracted a lot of "crazy people," including several stalkers.

It didn't make any money, and I was perpetually broke.

I didn't know how to start a business, and thought I needed the structure and security of a job to be successful.

But Wendy pleaded that yesteryear's drama would not be this year's. I'm older, wiser, have run two news organizations, managed a P&L, and made a lot of money for people who weren't me. Didn't I want to finally use my talents to invest in myself? Didn't I want to try to capitalize on the fact that I was still running into my readers more than a decade since I stopped writing consistently? Didn't I want to do something, considering the world was going to hell, and people still wanted to hear what I had to say about it? That people still needed The Black Snob, she said.

"I'll think about it," I said, which typically means I won't think about it and this will never be addressed again.

But for the first time in a long time, I actually considered it. What would it mean to be The Black Snob again? And who is The Black Snob today? I was only 30 and still struggling — mentally, financially, physically — when I started the blog back in 2007, but next year, I'll be 50. And in some aspects, life has never been better — I lost 70 lbs. I fell in love. I moved to Brooklyn. I have a ton of great, supportive friends. I became half a socialite. I took up Pilates. I finally got my formerly undiagnosed ADHD under control, and I haven't had a hypomanic episode related to my bipolar disorder in a decade or more.

But in other aspects — cough, unemployment, cough — it was kind of wild. Journalism, as a profession, is dying. More than 600,000 Black women were pushed out of the workforce in 2025, and I was one of them. I would go up for jobs, make it far in the process, just to end up passed over for internal hires or ghosted after lofty promises. It was as if the universe kept telling me — "Do your own thing," and I kept going, "SHUT UP, UNIVERSE!"

But the universe has this way of insisting on things. And in this case, the universe was now taking the form of Wendy, telling me I could do this. I could figure out the financial part. I could form an LLC. I could start a consulting business. I could bring back The Black Snob. It was all in me. Because wasn't the real thing driving my apprehension fear? Fear of losing myself to work. Fear of having the crazy people return. Fear of not being able to support myself.

And when did I ever let fear stop me?

I'm someone who has over 16 addresses in pursuit of a career that should have never happened because I was supposed to die in obscurity after losing my mind in my 20s. But the opposite happened. I dug in, got better with the help of friends and family, and lived life fully, like someone who got a second chance.

Because I did.

Still, I fought the obvious. For months, I thought I had a lead on a job. I'd been talking to the organization since November and was a finalist for a CEO role. The money wasn't amazing, but the mission, the work, and the title were all very enticing. But after making it to the end and getting an offer, everything fell apart during contract negotiations that stretched out for two months. We couldn't reach an agreement, so I walked away to focus on growing my media consulting business.

Before that role fell apart, I had already told Wendy and a few other friends that I was bringing back The Black Snob, modernizing the blog to reflect our changing times and how I've changed since 2007. I'm not the same Snob I was when I first had nothing but a blog and a dream. I'm now a well-seasoned, well-traveled person who eventually turned into the very thing I was once doing as an inside joke. I used to write about the Martha's Vineyard discourse without ever being there, and now I'm a regular. I used to cobble together my colorful outfits from Dress Barn and go to the club in D.C. dressed like I had a desk job. Today my drip is pretty nice! I used to be chronically single, as I was determined to die alone with all 15 of my cats in protest of an unjust, sexist world. And now I'm with this guy! I used to make spaghetti with sauce out of a jar. Now I'm a proficient home chef who sometimes cosplays as a party-throwing Megan Markle.

The Black Snob was a joke until I literally became one!

So, now it's back! What does this mean? Well, it means I'll be writing more consistently, as well as doing video content. It also means if you remembered this site as ANTISOCIAL ... well, that's done! I'll still use it as a story tag for things related to technology, socialization, and the loneliness crisis, but I'm returning to the thing that made me a thing, because I think I can make it better this time around. Of course, there will be a few kinks as I get used to a new publishing cadence and start building out my video content, but it'll be fun to dip back into my writerly bag and see if I still have the ability to wax poetic on politics or turn a witty phrase.

So this goes out to everyone who's been waiting for The Snob to return. Especially my friends Wendy, Jada, Cynthia, Christina, and Nicole, who never let the dream die, who never let me forget who I am and what I built. I might not have been there when you all initially called, but I'm always on time.

Welcome back to The Black Snob — Older. Wiser. Snobbier.