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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Since the early days of the internet, there have been questions about how emerging technologies might one day liberate or further harm communities of color that already face structural inequalities of racism. As reliance on computing technologies increases, it is also important to address questions about racial bias in the design of digital platforms, labor inequalities in tech industries, and digital surveillance on Black and Brown communities.
This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the theory and research on race and digital media. Focusing on the experiences of people of color in the United States, it explores the various ways that racism and white supremacy have shaped aspects of our digital world ‒ from the infrastructures and policies that support technological development, to algorithms and the collection of data, to the interfaces that shape engagement. Yet it also reveals how communities of color have deployed digital media in ways that expand the public sphere, contest the status quo, and give voice to creativity and joy.
Race and Digital Media provides an essential resource for students of communication, media, technology, and society. It shows how to make sense of our ever-changing digital media landscape in a way that centers the continued impact of institutionalized racism and the potential for anti-racist futures.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
Key terms
Race: a social construction
Science and the biology of race
Racism: a structuring discourse
Responses to racism
Overview of the book
2 The Early Internet
Key terms
Introduction
Dreams for cyberrace
Identity tourism
Unequal access and digital participation
Racially specific websites and homepages
The rise of Web 2.0
Online racism
Conclusion
3 Labor
Key terms
Introduction
Histories of Silicon Valley
Female computers and other misremembered histories
Immigrant labor and racialized policy
Racism in labor pipelines, recruitment, and hiring policies
Toxic workplace environments
The horrors of invisible digital labor
Creative labor
Conclusion
4 Infrastructures
Key terms
Introduction
Technology and our lived environments
Building an Indigenous internet
Code and built digital environments
Platformed racism
Algorithms and navigating the internet
Conclusion
5 Artificial Intelligence
Key terms
Introduction
Can computers be intelligent?
Anthropomorphizing the machine
Supervising machine learning
Big data
Anti-racist machines
Conclusion
6 Surveillance
Key terms
Introduction
Power and visibility
Racial hypervisibility
Racial invisibility
Surveillance as security
Controlling the border
Exposing and resisting surveillance
Conclusion
7 Tech Policy
Key terms
Introduction
Public policy
Privacy and consent
Data sovereignty
Corporate self-regulation
Ethical codes
Conclusion
8 Activism
Key terms
Introduction
Black Lives Matter
Documenting Black death
The power of hashtag activism
Impacts of online activism
Risks of online vs offline activism
Digital storytelling
Meme activism
Conclusion
9 Games
Key terms
Introduction
Racist representations in video games
Racist and sexist gaming communities
Activism and diverse solutions
Education and serious games
Indigenous video games
Virtual reality
Conclusion
10 Communities
Key terms
Introduction
Online publics and counterpublics
Joy and humor
Diasporic connections through food
Cultural sustenance
Support for intersectional narratives
Literature, art, poetry, and memory
Conclusion
11 Into the Future
Key terms
Introduction
Futures erased
Afrofuturism
Latinx futurisms and Indigenous futurisms
Designing for the future
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Race and Digital Media
An Introduction
Lori Kido Lopez
polity
Copyright © Lori Kido Lopez 2023
The right of Lori Kido Lopez to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4694-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022937026
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I must acknowledge the scholars at the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies whose brilliant research inspired this book. Thanks also to the students in my Race and Technology course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who helped explore these ideas with me in the spring of 2020, even as our semester was massively disrupted by a global pandemic. Indeed, for a book that was written entirely during the social distancing times wrought by COVID-19, I am so thankful for everyone who helped me survive and even thrive. That begins with Jason and Boba, who spent every moment of the pandemic by my side and it was the very best. Also podfam: the weekly human connection and laughter shared with Abby, Monica, and Jonathan brought a sense of normalcy back to an abnormal world. I’m also grateful to Jeremy Morris and Timothy Yu for finding ways to stay connected through it all. Thanks to my colleagues who have provided robust support via Teams and Zoom – Derek Johnson, Elaine Klein, DeVon Wilson, and Theresa Pesavento. Mary Savigar and Stephanie Homer at Polity have done a wonderful job supporting this project and easing the process of publication. And finally, as always, thanks to all of my beloved family cheering for me from Oregon and California – especially my amazing Mom and Dad.
1Introduction
Key terms
race and ethnicity
scientific racism
DNA testing
racialization
racism
critical race theory
intersectionality
colorblindness
postracism
AS protestors took to the streets in the summer of 2020 to condemn the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other African Americans, they ignited a sense of urgency about the inextricably bound relationship between race and technology. Amidst a global pandemic that had forced millions of people to work from home, citizens were already fervently tuning in to all forms of digital media for information, entertainment, and social interaction. Yet in this moment, discussions about COVID-19 had been completely replaced with stories about Black activists and their supporters marching across previously empty city streets to demand justice and equality. The Movement for Black Lives had always been a digital movement that relied on hashtags, cell phone videos, mobile apps, and social media networks to grow support and organize collective responses. At the same time, it was also clear that technology played a critical role in exacerbating racial inequities – police had long used algorithms and big data in service of over-policing communities of color, and were now using surveillance technologies and social media data to identify and target activists.
This book affirms that such questions and issues have long been recognized as urgent by scholars of race and digital media, and sets out to provide an introduction to the key concepts that animate research in this area. It begins with the invention of the World Wide Web, addressing the different ways that the rise of the internet was predicted to shape our understandings of race, and the actual realities that followed. Indeed, digital media have always provided both new opportunities and threats to communities of color and others who are systematically marginalized and overlooked. The power dynamics that shape our lives have followed us into the digital world, impacting everything from the workers who control the development of technologies, to the decisions made about their design, the policies that regulate their use, the companies that profit from them, and the many different ways that they are used. This book provides an introduction to scholarship from communication and media studies on the meaning of technology and digital media by specifically centering inquiries about race and the experiences of people of color. It reveals the racial histories and systems of oppression that have continued to harm and limit opportunities for people of color in their relationship to digital media, but also points to the many ways that communities of color have deployed digital media to express themselves, create new modes of communication, and collectively challenge the status quo.
This opening chapter begins by addressing fundamental questions about how to define race and racism. It builds from scholarship by critical race theorists on the salience of both biological and social understandings of race while also explaining how to interpret the increasing use of DNA tests to determine racial heritage. These definitions of race are connected to histories of racism and the rise of global racial discourses – including the institutionalized racism of the transatlantic slave trade, settler colonialism, imperialism, and restrictive citizenship policies. While there have been many strides forward due to anti-racist activism such as the Civil Rights Movement, intersectional feminism, and the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, it is also important to stay attuned to the ways that racism itself changes form and remains hegemonic amidst social change.
Race: a social construction
In some ways, it can be productive to think of race in very simple terms – for instance, to acknowledge that the experiences of a Black person living in the United States are fundamentally different from the experiences of a white person. Yet race is also an extremely complex process of categorization that has significantly changed over time, and increases in complexity when considered alongside other identities such as gender, class, sexuality, and nation. Race is often distinguished from ethnicity in that racial categories such as “Asian” and “Black” are quite broad and simplified categories, while ethnicity refers to cultural, linguistic, and sometimes national affiliations. Yet even the distinction between race and ethnicity can be tricky to untangle, as both race and ethnicity refer to symbolic categories and social taxonomies whose overlapping boundaries are constantly being rewritten.
To make sense of these distinctions, we can begin by acknowledging the fact that although racial categories are broadly rooted in phenotype and ancestry, race itself is a social construction. Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2009) specifically define race as a set of categories that have been misrecognized as natural, when in fact they have been actively created and recreated by human beings. This means that it was not inevitable that we would come to understand a person with brown skin and textured hair as categorically different from a person with pink skin and yellowish hair. Rather, these are differences that have become meaningful through our participation in society, and through the multiple ways that our understanding of important social categories of any kind are upheld – including media representations, education, laws, and cultural customs. Even the use of the term “people of color” to describe non-white peoples is a relatively recent linguistic turn starting in the late 1970s. The deliberate use of this term designates a shift away from seeing what were previously pejoratively labeled “colored people” as inferior, instead embracing the power of solidarity that can be created through non-white people coming together as an identity formation. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1986) have theorized, “race is a master category – a fundamental concept that has profoundly shaped, and continues to shape, the history, polity, economic structure, and culture of the United States” (106).
Race gives meaning to human bodies and experiences, shaping how they are understood, what power they can have, what opportunities are made available to them.
Yet this is only possible because it has become deeply embedded within the social structures and institutions that organize our lives, and we have come to accept it as such.
Understandings of race as a social construction make logical sense when we probe more deeply into the imprecision and outright absurdity of existing racial categories as they have come to be understood in the United States. Let us begin with the category of “Asian,” and the question of which parts of the Asian continent are even included within this racial designation. Indeed, there are 48 different nations encompassed by the massive geopolitical region known as Asia, but the many nations comprising West Asia (including the Middle East and the Arab world) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) are typically excluded from the racial category of “Asian.” To understand why this is so, we must return to the fact that categories like “Asianness” and “whiteness” cannot be directly traced to geopolitical categories such as national origin. Rather, they are extremely malleable categories that respond to factors such as immigration, foreign policy, and military engagements. The notion of a singular “Asian race” should also be disconcerting given the extreme heterogeneity included within the continent, including the thousands of ethnic groups within each country. In the United States, those who identify racially as Asian might also identify ethnically as Japanese American, Thai American, or Sri Lankan American. At a global level, there is even greater ethnic diversity; for instance, there are 56 different ethnic groups in China, the Philippines can be divided into 175 ethnolinguistic groups, and in India there are over 1,500 different groups that can be divided by language, caste, and tribe. The notion that there is any single quality shared by these different groups is simply nonsensical. While the “Asian race” is typically signified by straight black hair and monolidded eyes (amongst other phenotypical traits), these certainly do not align with all Asians.
The shifting racial categorizations ascribed to Latinidad are also reflective of the fact that race is socially constructed, rather than naturally occurring or biological. Just like the groups of individuals who fall into the category of Asian American, those who are encompassed by the category of “Hispanic” or “Latin American” are also very diverse. While they are colloquially referred to as “Brown,” and often share a darker skin tone, eye color, and hair color, these are by no means necessary traits. In recognition of this heterogeneity, the US Census does not recognize Hispanic or Latino as a race, but treats it as an ethnicity that is separate from the category of race. Since the 2010 US Census, those who identify as Hispanic first indicate that they are “Mexican/Mexican American/Chicano,” “Puerto Rican,” “Cuban,” or “Another Hispanic, Latino, Spanish origin,” and then they move on to a separate question about race. Those with roots in Hispanic and Latin American countries may identify as white, Black, Asian, American Indian, or another race. This is why Census-based data on race uses terms like “non-Hispanic white” and “Hispanic white” or “non-Hispanic Black” and “Hispanic Black.” Even the disparity between the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” calls attention to the ineffectiveness of such categories. The term “Hispanic” refers to those from Spain and Spanish-speaking countries in Central America and South America, while “Latino” and “Latin American” refers to the geographic region of Latin America so it includes non-Spanish-speaking countries like Brazil and French Guiana but not Spain. Other terms like Latinx are now being introduced as a way to contest the upholding of the gender binary in terms like Latino and Latina.
Finally, we must recognize that there are many individuals across the globe who do not fit into any standard racial categorizations. While in the United States we have typically settled upon the five racial groups of white, Black, Asian, Latino/Hispanic, and Indigenous,* over one million Americans with heritage in the Middle East and North Africa do not fit comfortably into any of these racial formations. As with the previously discussed racial categories, individuals from Middle Eastern and Northern African regions of the world can share any combination of phenotypes, and the geopolitical boundaries that might define their regions of the world are constantly changing in response to political negotiations. While there was a push to add the category of the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) to the US Census in 2020, these attempts were unsuccessful and individuals from these regions must still check the boxes “white” or “other” (Maghbouleh 2020). Indeed, fluctuating membership within the category of “white” itself is yet another way that it becomes clear that race is a social construction with very little bearing on bodily or biological realities.
Science and the biology of race
Yet we also cannot deny that there are biological components to understanding heritage and ancestry, and that body types and forms have shaped understandings and experiences of race. While race may not be a fixed and essential component of one’s body, it is clear that physical traits and phenotypes such as skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and notions of biological lineage have become indelibly associated with race. This means that despite any recognition of race as a social construct, the reality is that racial identification consistently occurs at the level of the visible. To make sense of this phenomenon and contradiction, let us examine more deeply the specific ways that biological understandings of race have been shaped and deployed. We can begin with the reality that science has historically been deployed as an instrument of racism, starting in the late eighteenth century. Scientific racism refers to the racial hierarchies invented by white intellectuals under the guise of scientific enlightenment to posit that darkerskinned races were less evolved, as well as more primitive and savage than white races. This was connected to the idea that “culture,” understood as refined values around art and literature and intellectual accomplishment, was presumed to be something only civilized white people could possess. In this way of thinking, Indigenous and non-European peoples were then clearly judged as inferior. When coupled with insidious stereotypes about the criminality, hypersexuality, and violence inherent to darker races, these assumptions about evolution contributed to cementing racial hierarchies. Yet this was nothing more than pseudoscience, premised on falsified facts and biased logic that masqueraded as real knowledge (Saini 2019).
While communities of color have historically been oppressed by scientific racism and the discourses that are connected to this way of thinking, there are other ways in which science has appeared to uphold understandings of race as a genetic property (rather than merely a social construct). In particular, there has been considerable debate around the science of DNA testing alongside the rise of direct-to-consumer genetic tests as a potential way to learn about one’s racial or ethnic heritage. Companies like 23andMe, AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, and FamilyTreeDNA take swabs of saliva or cheek samples and process them to identify genetic information and match them against the other samples in their database. This service can result in many different kinds of information about one’s family roots, including identifying close family members from their database, as well as offering information about the location of one’s ancestors. Such tests are often enthusiastically supported by people of color who are interested in their own ancestral lineage and biology. Alondra Nelson (2016) has studied the different companies that focus specifically on African American DNA, as well as the many lively online communities of Black participants focused on discussing their results. She points to the fact that there are many reasons for the optimism and excitement of African American consumers for genetic testing. African Americans are amongst the many disenfranchised populations in the United States whose history has been systematically destroyed, and scientific knowledge offers a possible opportunity for finally gaining access to their familial histories. As Nelson argues, genetic tests have also played a key role in the rise of discourse around claiming reparations for the descendants of slaves. If the US government were to provide financial reparations to African Americans for the injustices of slavery, DNA tests could be useful in determining who fits into this category.
This question of how DNA tests could be used to help provide certain forms of equality and justice to historically disempowered communities can also be seen in Native American political struggles. Governmentally instituted practices of blood quantum have historically used lineage and ancestry to determine the distribution of land to Native Americans. The term blood quantum describes the practice of measuring exactly what fraction of “Indian blood” one possesses, based on how many parents or other ancestors are documented as fully Native American. Since the US government had a vested interested in limiting Native American resources and access, it was productive to require individuals to prove that they possessed a certain percentage of tribal ancestry. That idea became more complicated over time, as tribal sovereignty granted tribes the ability to decide for themselves how to determine citizenship and belonging. The metaphor of “blood” as identity is still powerful for Native Americans, both culturally and because it is through ancestral heritage that sovereignty and citizenship are designated (TallBear 2013).
But what is it that genetic tests can actually tell an individual about their racial or ethnic heritage? Despite these different situations in which it might be beneficial for people of color to learn more about their ancestry or document it in an official capacity, the reality is that DNA tests are extremely limited in their efficacy when it comes to racial identification. First, the outcome of the tests is dependent on the size and depth of each company’s own databases, which are proprietary and not shared with other companies. Since white people with European ancestors have traditionally been the most interested in genealogy, genomic databases are most accurate for that population and have significantly less data about African, Latin American, Asian, and Indigenous populations (Chow-White and Duster 2011). Moreover, the kinds of information that can be gleaned from a genetic test are partial and incomplete, as the tests examine only a very small percentage of one’s total ancestry. Because of this testing limitation, it is possible for a direct descendant of Native American ancestors to take a DNA test and receive results saying that there is no evidence of such heritage.
This is why the technology of DNA tests must be understood as harmful in how they have contributed to problematic understandings of race. Not only do they promote the idea that race is present in our genetic code, but they can also potentially promote a return to scientific racism. The reality is that all human beings share nearly all of our DNA; it is less than one-tenth of 1 percent variation in our genetic code that leads to perceived differences in our bodies. Since Africa is the most genetically diverse continent on the planet, there is actually more genetic variation within the continent of Africa than between African Americans and those who are presumed to be of a different race, such as Europeans and Asians (Yu et al. 2002). Together these findings help us to see that there are biological components to race, but they are far less significant than the impact of biology on our understanding of race and its relationship to histories of racism.
Racism: a structuring discourse
To understand the structuring impact of racism throughout western society, we must acknowledge that race itself was created through racial hatred. Prior to the colonization of the new world in the sixteenth century, group identities were often connected to attributes like language, nationality, or tribe, rather than broader notions of race. But as European settlers started invading the New World in search of resources, ideologies of racial superiority could be deployed as justification for claiming the lands of what were considered “uncivilized” Indigenous peoples. In North America, there was an opportunity to do more than extract resources and goods for the benefit of European markets – under logics of settler colonialism, these were new lands that European colonizers decided to make their own, if they could only remove or exterminate the Indigenous owners who currently populated it. In framing Indigenous communities as less than human, the hostile occupying forces could then deny their rights to their own land and sovereignty. As Natsu Taylor Saito argues, we must understand settler colonialism as inherently connected to all racial inequities because it stems from the same impulse: “People of color have been racialized in ways that facilitate strategies intended to eliminate them, physically and conceptually, to exploit their labor, to contain and control them, and to force them into an assimilationist paradigm that nullifies their extant identities, thereby preempting them from exercising their inherent right to self-determination” (Saito 2020: 54). The genocide of Indigenous peoples paved the way for the creation of a settler class that naturalized the racial dominance of white colonizers.
Following the elimination and removal of a significant number of Indigenous peoples, settler occupants then faced the need for a labor force to work their newly seized land. The transatlantic slave trade was used as a mechanism for bringing millions of African captives to the Americas for the economic benefit of white landowners. Along with native peoples, racial hierarchies justified the deployment of this unpaid labor force and the complete dehumanization of an entire population of enslaved Africans. Given the power of the church in Western Europe, religious leaders had already long maintained their dominance through preaching that Christianity was a superior belief system to the indigenous religions of Africa and Indigenous peoples. These beliefs were then strengthened through racial taxonomies designed to prove that the white race was distinct and superior in every way (Fredrickson 1989). These logics of racial superiority were easily transferable to other groups white settlers sought to subdue and disempower to maintain their dominance.
For instance, the racialization of Latinos and Latinas was connected to territorial disputes between the United States and Mexico. Racialization is the process of creating race or ascribing a racial identity to something that might not naturally be distinguished by race. After the Mexican‒American War led to the territorial expansion of the United States into Mexican territory in 1848, it was in the interest of the United States to frame Mexicans and other Latinos as violent threats to be overpowered. That is, it made sense to fundamentally distinguish white Americans from these newly created Mexican Americans, and race provided the mechanism for creating that distinction. While the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave access to citizenship for Mexicans living in the territory awarded to the United States following the Mexican‒American War, this does not mean that they were protected or given equal access to benefits like land ownership. As part of the process of racialization, Mexicans were stereotyped as inassimilable and lazy workers who posed a threat to white jobs. Worse yet, they were also subject to physical attacks and violence. Between 1848 and 1928, thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in the Southwest were lynched amidst outbreaks of monstrous mob violence and vigilantism (Carrigan and Webb 2013). Then in the 1930s as fears during the Great Depression morphed into scapegoating Mexican American communities, nearly one million Mexican Americans and Mexicans living in the United States were deported to Mexico (Balderrama and Rodríguez 1995).
Through this history and many others, we can see that the fear of non-white foreigners has been central to the concept of the United States for hundreds of years.
The very first immigration law, the Nationality Act of 1790, states that citizenship by naturalization was a benefit restricted to free white persons. This policy was designed to exclude non-white immigrants, in addition to Native Americans and free Black people. But such policies are also connected to race-based restrictions on land ownership, voting rights, access to employment, opportunities to grow one’s family, and other important necessities. These are some of the many ways that racism can be understood as indigenous to the United States. Racism is a term often used to describe an interpersonal conflict initiated by an individual person who hates, fears or otherwise devalues people of other races. While this kind of racism does exist, these histories show us why it is important to understand that racism is actually structural, created through the policies, practices, and institutions that serve to maintain racial hierarchies and contribute to racial inequalities for generations.
Responses to racism
It is also important to recognize that as long as there has been racism, there has been anti-racism and resistance from people of color. Race may have been created through the desire for white domination and the systematic use of violence and exploitation to maintain it, but oppressed peoples have always fought for their freedom and autonomy. Anti-racism is more than an abstract belief that racism is wrong; it is a rigorous political tradition that has been taken up through direct engagement designed to confront every form of racism (Zamalin 2019). Enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples organized rebellions and fought to liberate themselves, with abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and fugitive slave Harriet Tubman opposing slavery in the early days of the United States. Following Reconstruction and the unfinished project of granting African American civil liberties, Black activists fought for voting rights and an end to the laws that perpetuated racial violence. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter movement starting in 2013 are all part of the strong force of opposition mounted by anti-racist activists and community organizers.
An important academic theory that calls attention to this understanding of racism and anti-racism is critical race theory. Originally developed by legal scholars 1970s, critical race theory emerged as a response to the way that racism was becoming more covert and misunderstood under the guise of racial progress. Scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado put forward a school of thought that argued that racism must be recognized as an ordinary aspect of our society because it has become so deeply institutionalized within law, policy, and other social structures. In its efforts to expose the truth about race as endemic to our society, critical race theory is deeply interested in strengthening opposition to racism. It points to how race is a social construct that gains meaning through processes of racialization, but also through its relation to other axes of identity like gender, class, and sexuality. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality specifically highlights the way that individuals can face multiple forms of oppression due to their different social identities. Indeed, Black women like abolitionist Sojourner Truth had been calling attention to these realities for over a century. For instance, a Black woman could face discrimination due to her race, her gender, or the combination of both and others that exacerbate one another. This is important, because political struggles for liberation often focus on only one axis of identity at a time, and this limited perspective can neglect the ways that certain communities are being left behind or remain disenfranchised.
The reality is that racism persists, changing form and evolving in our digital era in order to retain its power. Indeed, the theory of hegemony tells us that powerful groups are always under attack, but that they maintain their dominance by shifting slightly without ultimately ceding power. In this case, white supremacy and racism have remained hegemonic in the face of immense gains by communities of color and anti-racist activism. Some major shifts in the discourse surrounding racism have been the rise of colorblindness and postracism. Colorblindness is the philosophy that if we want to do away with racism, the best way to do that is to simply stop acknowledging race itself. It is often troublingly linked to following the words of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who famously stated that he dreamed of living in a society where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” This is taken to mean that we should celebrate the idea of a meritocracy where individuals are judged on their own merits, as if it is possible to remove race from the equation altogether. Some of the practical expressions of colorblindness have been to avoid recording racial demographics on official forms and discontinue race-based programs like affirmative action and other policies designed to remedy the harmful effects of racism. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls colorblindness a new form of racism, or an ideology that maintains the racial order by serving “as the ideological armor for a covert and institutionalized system in the post-civil rights era … Shielded by color-blindness, whites can express resentment toward minorities; criticize their morality, values, and work ethics; and even claim to be victims of ‘reverse racism’” (Bonilla-Silva 2017: 3‒4). Indeed, colorblind ideologies are deeply harmful to people of color since they simultaneously weaken abilities to measure the racial inequities that continue to multiply while also removing the social programs that might alleviate racial injustices and support people of color.
A concomitant ideology about race that has become prevalent is postracism. This refers to the assumption that racism has been solved and we no longer need to focus on the problems of race. The rise of postracial discourse has largely been linked to the election of US President Barack Obama in 2008 since some believed that racism must no longer exist if an African American man can be elected to the highest office in the land (Squires 2014). It is a framework that has come to be infused throughout all aspects of culture, shaping discourses around public policy, media, education, business and industry, and popular culture. Both colorblindness and postracism seem positive in acknowledging that racism is dangerous and racial progress is desirable, but it is clear that they both actually serve to sustain racism and inhibit anti-racist measures and policies. One of the lasting legacies of colorblind and postracial ideologies is to uphold the strength of white privilege and whiteness as the norm, while making it more difficult to truly assess the impact of racial difference. As Sarah Banet-Weiser, Roopali Mukherjee, and Herman Gray argue, “the work of the postracial within racial capitalism is to critique, demonize, and resist, as an instance of race and racial thinking, the notion of a collective commitment to the common good and the role of the state in protecting the common good against rapacious privatized incentives of the market” (Banet-Weiser, Mukherjee, and Gray 2019). This desire to avoid or deliberately disregard the enduring impact of race and racism in our digital world has contributed to many harmful outcomes, and provides a threat to many potentially productive policies and interventions.
In some ways, the fantasy that we have arrived in a postracial America has been resoundingly punctured by the resurgence of explicitly racist forces following the election of President Donald Trump. When faced with the conspicuous rise of neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations, heightened rhetorics around Mexicans as dangerous and threatening enemies, the many highprofile killings of unarmed African Americans by police officers and vigilantes, the institution of anti-Muslim immigration policies, and waves of violence against Asian Americans who were blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems clearer than ever that racism is alive and well. Yet an important component of this new wave of racism is that postracial discourses continue to be actively deployed as a justification for terminating anti-racist programs and activities. For instance, we have seen a wave of legislation attempting to ban diversity trainings and the teaching of critical race theory in schools. Some of the primary justifications for these bills center on the assertion that we have already accomplished racial progress, and we no longer need to learn about or discuss histories of racism or their continuing impact on contemporary US society. This becomes yet another example of how racism evolves in relation to anti-racist activism and education. We must continue to forward a critical historical perspective that calls attention to the persistence of racist projects in all of their many forms and expressions – including the focus of this book, our digital media landscape.
Overview of the book
The goal of this book is to introduce the wide body of scholarly literature and academic theories pertaining to the relationship between race and digital media. It particularly focuses on the specific racial constructions and identity formations that have arisen around race in the United States, as historical and cultural contexts are important when trying to make sense of race. But it also points to broader global issues when possible and is most salient in drawing connections to countries with similar racial dynamics such as Canada and the United Kingdom. The primary questions that the book sets out to answer are as follows: How has the evolution of digital media and technology shaped racial realities? How have people of color shaped digital media? How are racism and white supremacy systematically upheld through digital media? And, what can be done to alleviate the racial inequalities engendered by digital media?
While studies of whiteness and the white actors who have materially benefited from racism are important components of understanding race, this book attempts to most prominently center the experiences and voices of people of color. This approach is not meant to imply that race is a characteristic that only belongs to non-white communities. Rather, it seeks to rectify the problem within digital studies scholarship wherein whiteness has always been centered and the important contributions of scholars of color have so often been minimized and overlooked. This book intentionally calls attention to the interactions between people of color and digital media and, where possible, foregrounds the way that people of color have understood their own minoritized communities. Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of the early internet, highlighting scholarship around the rise of the World Wide Web that theorized how cyberspace might change our relationship to race. It also explores how concerns about digital divides focused on racialized issues of access to digital technologies, and how communities of color were actually engaging in creating some of the first websites and platforms to target minority communities.
Chapters 3 and 4 then move into explorations of the dynamics and processes that undergird media technologies – the way that they are created, the infrastructures that support them, and the actual communities that labor behind the scenes. Chapter 3 begins with the rise of Silicon Valley and points to histories of women, people of color, and other marginalized communities who have been employed to support technology development. It also considers the harm of tech industries on physical environments and global communities of color. These questions are also taken up in chapter 4, which focuses on race and media infrastructures, or the environmental and sociopolitical conditions that shape the material stuff of digital media. This includes physical components like cables, data centers, and satellite dishes, as well as digital architectures such as interfaces, platforms, and code.
Chapters 5 and 6 examine the impact of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning on communities of color. This begins with an exploration of algorithmic bias in cases where computational logics are used for decision making in ways that can have uneven social consequences. Chapter 6 specifically focuses on the use of digital technologies for increased surveillance and the way that communities of color face simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility as a result. It looks at how technologies like facial recognition, biometrics, visual sensors, and other forms of surveillance have systematically harmed people of color. This becomes particularly dangerous when these tools are applied in areas like border security and policing, which already have troubled relationships to Black and Brown communities.
Chapter 7 takes these numerous concerns about how digital technologies can be harmful and asks what can be done to regulate or otherwise guide their development and usage. This includes the potential for governmental policy to be wielded as a form of citizen protection, but also for corporations to engage in self-regulation through the use of codes, initiatives, and programs designed to mitigate harm. Chapter 8 continues this transition away from the harms of technology toward the solutions engendered by communities of color, exploring the many different forms of activism that have been facilitated through digital media. It looks at the Black Lives Matter movement, the use of Twitter hashtags for social justice, digital testimonio and storytelling through YouTube, meme activism, and other uses of technology focused on bringing about social change. Chapter 9 focuses specifically on digital games as a venue for this kind of activism, looking at how serious games and virtual reality applications have offered potentially meaningful outlets for using technology to educate and create empathy. While video games and other interactive technologies have long been recognized for their dangerous cultures of toxic masculinity and explicit racial hatred, it is also important to recognize their potential capacity for pro-social impact.
The positive potentials of digital media for people of color are also the focus of chapter 10, which examines the way that digital tools can promote a stronger sense of community and connection. This includes the use of Twitter to create racialized counterpublics where like-minded users can share in humor, pop culture fandom, and other forms of connection that are somewhat shielded from the mainstream. Minority communities have also used digital media to form life-saving connections across diasporas, to document and archive their languages and histories, and to tell culturally specific and resonant stories. Finally, chapter 11 concludes the book by turning to the future, examining the many different expressions of futurism taken up by communities of color – including Afrofuturism, Latinx futurism, and Indigenous futurism. In these and other sci-fi-inspired dreams for the future, we can see the potential for technology to help shape a better, more just world that overcomes many of the limits and shortcomings of our current digital landscape. While much of this book is centrally focused on exposing the harms of racism as expressed and enabled through digital media, perhaps concluding on these hopes for the future can help to set the direction for a better path that is authored and facilitated by those who have been harmed the most.
Key questions
What does it mean to say that race is a social construction, and what are some of the problems that come with how race has been socially constructed?
What are some of the origins of racism as an institutional and structural force throughout history?
How do discourses of colorblindness and postracism serve to uphold the harms of racism?
Further reading
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Mukherjee, Roopali, and Gray, Herman. 2019. Racism Postrace. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Omi, Michael, and Winant, Howard. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge.
Zamalin, Alex. 2019. Antiracism: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press.
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This book capitalizes the terms “Black” and “Indigenous” in recognition of the fact that these racial categories should be respected as proper nouns and important identities that are parallel to “Asian” and “Hispanic,” which have always been capitalized. The term “white” is not capitalized because whiteness is a racial category that is not parallel to the other categories, given the historical context of racialization as a form of racism. It is also important to acknowledge that preferences about capitalization change over time, and that there can be no easy consensus on which system of capitalization is best.
2The Early Internet
Key terms
cyberrace
identity tourism
digital divides
digital media literacy
Web 2.0
online racism
Introduction
TECHNOLOGY is always changing shape – hardware gets upgraded, software gets rewritten, some platforms rise into prominence while others fall into obsolescence, and all the while users are constantly migrating from one form of technology to another. In order to understand where we are today and where we are heading with regard to race and digital media, we must first look backward. Indeed, any writing on technology can only strive to capture the briefest glimpse of the current digital landscape before it appears to grow outdated, succumbing to the allure of the latest bright shiny development. Yet scholars of race and digital media have established a robust foundation of scholarship since the early days of the internet that can help us to better navigate this dynamic terrain. By grounding our understanding within the lessons learned during the arrival of the digital turn, we can be better positioned to make sense of our contemporary media landscape – which we must always understand as tomorrow’s history.
This chapter examines scholarship about the early days of the internet and the World Wide Web in relation to race, including the hopes that its emergence would dramatically shift understandings of race. It asks what the early internet was like and how it has changed over time, connecting imaginings of “cyberrace” to the exploration of identity tourism online. In doing so, this chapter continues to build on fundamental understandings of what race and racial identity mean in the digital age. This chapter also explores some of the first conversations around digital divides and questions about how access to technology has been racialized, in addition to how debates around digital divides and digital literacy have evolved to include more nuanced questions about access and usage. It moves from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and considers the different ways that racial formations and racism have changed shape alongside these technological evolutions, as well as how communities of color have made use of these media along the way.
Dreams for cyberrace
In the early days of the internet, the shifting nature of technology was identified as a potential opportunity to disrupt the logics of racial schemas. To understand this potential, we must first reflect on the birth of the World Wide Web in the 1990s and what its technological innovations offered to users. During the rise of the information superhighway known as the internet, applications were heavily text-based rather than image-based. Users marveled at their ability to visit web pages linked together through the click of a button, arriving via browsers like Mosaic and Netscape to discover catalogues of information and lists of hyperlinks that pointed them to other sites. While traditional forms of media like television, radio, and movies merely presented static content, the internet was premised on a level of interactivity that seemed to promise freedom, personalization, and control (Ankerson 2018). Communication was facilitated through email and email listservs, chatrooms, real-time messaging programs like AOL Instant Messenger, and posting forums such as bulletin boards. Most users accessed the internet through a dial-up connection on their telephone line that limited how much data could be transmitted.
