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Enlightened Racism in MMORPG’s
Posted by: | CommentsMassively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), like World of Warcraft (WOW) and Modern Warfare 2, are becoming more popular than ever before. Accurate statistics are difficult to come by, but the top game (World of Warcraft) reportedly has over 10 million subscribers. These numbers reflect a global ‘audience’ of participants because players are not just located in the U.S., but are located throughout the world. While the fantasy and the disappearing of race in online gaming has been the focus of some scholarship, until now no one has taken up the practice of “griefing.” Griefing – or pranking – is a practice of disrupting online games that dominates MMORPG’s. In another context like a basketball court of a baseball field, this is known as “trash talking.” It’s a way to distract other players and disrupt the game to one’s own advantage. What seems to be unique about the online games is the way that griefing has become thoroughly racialized.
Here, in a talk delivered recently at the Berkman Center at Harvard University, Lisa Nakamura recaps the history of racist griefing online and links the current crisis in racial discourse in the US with this practice, exploring the implications for digital games as a public sphere. Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program, and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and the author of the book, Digitizing Race.
A few words of context is necessary for this video, especially if you’re new to, or unfamiliar with, Internet culture. In the first part of the talk, Nakamura spends some time referring to ‘ROFLcon’ which is a biennial convention of Internet memes that takes place at MIT. Throughout, she also refers to 4Chan. 4chan users have been responsible for the formation or popularization of Internet memes such as lolcats (and the endless variety of ‘I can haz cheezeburger’ images) and Rickrolling, in which Internet destination was hijacked for a prank, so that images of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up” appeared instead of the page that was searched for. She spends all this time talking about these humorous Internet memes because two of her main points in this discussion are that “racism is a meme” and that “being funny is the real currency of the popular Internet.” Here’s the talk, which is on the long side (1:10), but worth it:
To explain racist griefing, Nakamura poses the concept of “enlightened racism.” For this concept, she draws on the work of Susan Douglas’ Enlightened Sexism, which Douglas defines as a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that full equality has now been achieved so it’s now ok, even amusing to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women. Quoting Douglas, Nakamura says, “Enlightened sexism takes the gains of the women’s movement as a given and uses them as permission to resurrect retrograde images of girls and women as sex objects, bimbos and hoochie mamas still defined by their appearance and biological destiny.”
Similarly, then, she argues that “Enlightened racism is a form of racist behavior and speech only available to those who are known, or assumed known, not to be racist.” In many ways, I think this concept is part of what is going on with the “ghetto parties” at college campuses and the young people painting themselves with blackface for Facebook photos, that we’ve talked about here, and the “hipster” racism some have mentioned elsewhere online. The racist griefing that she is addressing in online gaming often makes explicit use of racist epithets, which she explains this way: “The n-word is funny because it is so extreme that no one could really mean it. And humor is all about ‘not meaning it.’ If you take humor and the n-word, you get enlightened racism online and attention.”
Nakamura goes on to argue that paradoxically, “the worse the racism and sexism are, the more extreme and cartoonish it is, the harder it is to take seriously, and the harder it is to call it out.” She points out, quite astutely I think, that for those within gaming culture, calling out racism in this context signals you as someone “not of the gaming culture” and thus, as someone who is taking racism “too seriously” and doesn’t have a good sense of humor. Yet, this sort of
humor is a “confusing discursive mode for young people,” she observes, because they are “unable to separate enlightened racism from regular racism.” And, indeed, I think this is a real problem here. As Nakamura notes, the image of the “humorless feminist” is now joined with the image of a “humorless” old(er) person who takes race too seriously.
As usual, I find Nakamura’s work compelling and provocative, although I do have a couple of points of criticism. While I realize this was just a luncheon talk and as such is work that’s in a formative stage, I was surprised that she didn’t mention the work of Doug Thomas who has written on racism in MMORPG’s. Of course, I’m also not convinced that everyone in our society has moved on to “enlightened” racism, as I point out at some length in Cyber Racism. But, I get the appeal of studying this form of racism and acknowledge that this is certainly the more popularized form of racism.
I’m also a bit surprised that she would use the term ‘enlightened racism’ and not make reference to the book by this same name, written by Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis (about audiences watching the Cosby Show). Although Jhally & Lewis’ work is 18 years old now, I think there are some relevant insights from this work that might inform our understanding of racist expressions in a supposedly post-racial era. Much like people today look to the election of President Barack Obama as a marker of the ‘end of racism,’ so too did many people took the success of the Huxtables, the fictional family on The Cosby Show, as evidence of racial progress. In their research, Jhally & Lewis interviewed racially diverse audiences to find out how they viewed and interpreted The Cosby Show. Part of their purpose was to see if watching the show diminished racist attitudes, which was an explicit goal of the show’s producers. Instead, what they found was that the show actually confirmed people’s racist attitudes because they took the Huxtable/Cosby’s success as evidence that there were no barriers to blacks’ success in this society, so any failing must be due to individual characteristics. While what constitutes ‘an audience’ is certainly changing in the digital era, I think this kind of research with people who are actually involved in MMORPG’s would be a useful way to explore the latest iteration of ‘enlightened racism.’
Social Media and America’s Conversation on Race
Posted by: | CommentsRecently, a furor erupted when a private email by a Harvard law student (and editor of the Harvard Law Review) was made public by the recipient. The gist of her argument is captured in the following quote:
“I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African-Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent.’’
While this revival of the early 20th century discourses which notoriously legitimated eugenics projects has undoubtedly outraged all who have experienced or are aware of institutional racism, it is not the specific content of these emails that I want to focus on. Instead, I want to consider how this event is representative of the historical moment in which our culture finds itself.
We are witnessing the unfolding of two largely interrelated processes: 1.) an implosion of the private sphere into the public sphere and 2.) the emergence of a new dialectic between the top-down racial discourses of the mass media and a wide breadth of localized racial discourses that have only recently been amplified or made visible through the power of the Internet (specifically, social media). Put simply, the Internet is a powerful tool that, for the first time, has provided (at least some) everyday people with the ability to project their voices loud enough to compete with all the machinery of the media industry.
In recent decades, the mass media has worked tirelessly to rebrand America as “de-segregated,” “tolerant,” “post-Civil Rights era,” and now “post-racial” (for example, see Crockett, Marketing blackness: How advertisers use race to sell products, Journal of Consumer Culture, July 1, 2008, Vol. 8(2): 245 – 268). Empirically speaking, of course, none of these descriptions are tenable, but the dominance of such vocabulary has had a two-fold effect on our society: On the one hand, these discourses have obscured very real and persistent structural inequalities, leading to a new form of “color-blind” racism. On the other hand, they have established a new pattern for normative behavior, purging the most overt and outrageous forms of racism from the public sphere – at least until recently.
The Internet is a game-changer for racial discourse in America. It has enabled many people to scale the walls barring entry to the public sphere. No longer is overt racism confined to conversations held behind closed doors or even to websites owned and operated by racist organizations. Today, racist discourses are flourishing in blogs, on users’ public profiles for social-networking sites, and in the comment sections of even the most mundane websites. Moreover, supposedly private communications are only a click away from becoming public – as the previously mentioned Harvard law student discovered.
The most significant consequence of the proliferation of public and overtly racist discourses through social media (“cyber-racism 2.0” ?) is that the facade of a color-blind society is rapidly deteriorating. Like a pair of stage curtains, the superficial media-fabricated discourse of a post-racial America is splitting apart to reveal something far more complex in the backstage.
This new world where overtly racist language is again part of our everyday lives is, of course, no Utopia. However, it does offer an opportunity for scholars and activists alike. The reemergence of overtly racist discourses means that race can no longer be blithely ignored in the public sphere. Just as the Internet has amplified the voices of the racists over the silence of the mass media, it also provides an opportunity for progressives to project a racial discourse that is neither racist nor blind, but, instead, seriously addresses the problem of systemic racial inequality.
~ PJ Rey, PhD Candidate, Sociology Department, University of Maryland, College Park.
Cyber Racism on College Campuses
Posted by: | CommentsRacism on college campuses these days often spreads through email or via popular social networking sites, such as Facebook. This new medium for racist expression is forcing universities to reconsider what it means to provide a safe space on campus for all students. My research on cyber racism indicates that this is a growing problem in the U.S., and a recent incident at the University of Minnesota-Duluth (UM-D) illustrates a few of the relevant issues.
photo credit: Chris Campbell
Here’s what happened at UM-D. Two first year students, self-described white girls, began a Facebook wall conversation after an African-American classmate entered the room where they were studying. More on what they typed to each other via the local news in Duluth:
One of the posts read, “ewww a obabacare (sic) is in the room, i feel dirty, and unsafe. keep a eye on all of your valuables and dont make direct eye contact….i just threw up in my mouth right now …”
In another post, one of the women wrote, “were two white girls..she already has her (N-word) instinct to kill us and use us to her pleasure …”
In the past, this sort of conversation between two white students might have happened in handwritten notes passed in class. While some may view such overt expressions of racism a thing of the past, overtly racist comments often occur – even today – in the “backstage” (white-only space), as research by Leslie Pouts-Hicca and Joe Feagin demonstrates. Social media has changed all that now. As more white people spend time online, they forget that the comments they think they’re making in the “backstage” (white-only spaces) are easily made public and shared in the “frontstage” by people who do not share their views (or, have other agendas). As more of these expressions of overt racism come to light, it forces all of us to decide again and again what is socially acceptable and what isn’t, especially on college campuses. The question for colleges and universities is also what can and should be done about incidents like this one?
Many people, like the young man quoted in this article, think that: “If you really do believe in free speech, they shouldn’t be punished.” But “free speech” is not that simple. There are a couple of issues here.
First, the UM-D has an “anti-hate” policy which the white girls clearly violated.
Second, the framers of the U.S. Constitution didn’t have Facebook in mind when they were drafting the First Amendment to protect free speech. No one has a constitutionally protected right to be on Facebook. If you use Facebook, you have to abide by their Terms of Service (TOS) agreement which prohibits overtly racist speech (although it’s only sporadically enforced). If ‘we’ – all of us, users of Facebook – allow it there, we’re condoning a return to overt racism of Jim Crow.
In my view, the white girls at UM-D who racially harassed their African American classmate deserve some kind of punishment from the university. To address this sort of behavior, I want to suggest that ‘human rights’ is a better, more useful frame for dealing with cyber racism than ‘censorship’ and ‘free speech.’
There are no reports that I’ve been able to find (interesting fact in itself) about what the African American student who was the target of this racism has to say. I’ll bet that her experience of college life (+ life in general) has been damaged in some way by this run-in with her two white ‘friends.’ At the very least, she has a new awareness of that her college campus is just a little less ‘safe’ from racism than it was before. In some ways, it’s not surprising that this African American student’s story is not being reported. As critical race scholars have pointed out, the ‘victims’ story is almost never told. Our understanding of “free speech” shifts when we listen to these stories.
In 2003, the Supreme Court of the U.S. ruled that a burning cross is *NOT* protected speech (Virginia v. Black). Part of that ruling declared that a “burning cross has no value in a democracy” because it is not meant to be a discussion, but it’s a symbol meant to racially terrorize a group of people. (Today, 14 states have anti-cross burning laws.) So, not all speech counts as “protected speech,” and the Supreme Court has already ruled that racist speech in the form of a burning cross, can be ruled illegal. Given the rise of social media, the question becomes: what constitutes a burning cross in the digital era?
I think what those white girls did on FB was akin to cross burning in the digital era. That kind of speech is harmful and it has no value for democracy.
There are real, material consequences from racism. Children who experience racial discrimination feel psychological stress that may lead to depression. Likewise, there are real, material consequences from actions that seem to be exclusively digital. The tragic case of Phoebe Prince, who was harassed online and offline (and called an “Irish slut”) and then took her own life is a case in point. Perhaps not surprisingly, minority college students report more experiences of online bias than do whites.
Yet, whites like these two white college students at UM-D, say overtly racist online and very few step up to challenge them because of misplaced belief in what kind of speech the First Amendment protects. Americans are quick to say “free speech” (1st amendment) is an ideal that trumps equal protection under the law (14th amendment), but most other democracies see “speech” and “equal protection” as two values that always need to be balanced against each other. I discuss this argument at length in my book Cyber Racism – which I wrote in many ways as challenge to (white) liberal friends who often seem hamstrung by misunderstandings of the first amendment and free speech. The solution is not to abandon free speech as principle, but to shift the discussion to a consideration for how we balance the 1st and 14th amendments, balance between free speech and equal protection.
Given this re-framing of “free speech,” it seems clear to me that a college campus should be a place where we want to protect all of our students from the intentional infliction of emotional distress at the same time we encourage a lively exchange of ideas.
Racism in International Context: Nigerian “Scam Baiters”
Posted by: | CommentsAs I’ve written about here before, the contours of racism in a global, networked society are changing. Old forms of overt racism now exist alongside emergent new forms of cyber racism. One of those new forms of cyber racism is the phenomena of white Americans pursuing Nigerian email scammers, a practice known as “scam baiting.” If you’re not familiar with this practice, there have been a couple of stories in the news recently that shed a some light on this new form of vigilantism. Here’s a brief description from a recent piece at CNN/Money.com:
These self-described Web vigilantes go after alleged e-mail scammers claiming to be Nigerian princes, U.S. soldiers in Iraq or Chinese businessmen. They say they need your help (i.e. your money) to access fake multi-million dollar accounts or palaces full of gold. Most people recognize these e-mails for what they are and delete them without replying, but enough victims actually fall for these scams to keep them coming. And then there are the scambaiters who answer the e-mails and feign genuine interest in sending money, as a ploy to send the scammers on a wild goose chase. Mike Sodini, a firearms importer and owner of the Web site ebolamonkeyman.com, says he started scambaiting in 2001, when he worked at an Internet real estate marketing firm that got inundated with scam e-mails. Sodini started writing back out of curiosity “to see how the operation would go” and he said it soon became a hit with his co-workers, who would gather around his computer to read his farcical dialogue. “I started it to make my friends laugh and see what was going on,” he says. “I didn’t have a motive of, ‘Let’s get these guys.”
Sodini and other “scam baiters” like “Rover,” a scam baiter since the 1990s who owns the scambaiting site 419eater.com, get alleged scammers to make fools of themselves by posing in photos and holding signs with offensive statements. He says he would get them to do this by claiming it was “for tax purposes,” which was a ruse, since he never intended to send them money. He says he’d also convince them to make numerous trips to airports and Western Unions, lured by the promise of money packages that never arrived.
These photos are called “trophies” in the parlance of the scam baiters, and in many ways are reminiscent of the photographs of lynchings that were once popular in the U.S. The radio show This American Life did an episode about the men (yes, they’re all men) who do this. Perhaps not surprisingly, neither the CNN/Money.com report nor the This American Life episode mention race as even a factor at play in, if not an underlying motive for, these transnational vigilantes. Certainly none of the reporting that’s been done about this to date mentions any similarity with lynching photography.
My colleague at John Jay-CUNY, Dara N. Byrne, is doing some really interesting work on this phenomenon. Combining the concept of “vigilante” with the digital era, she examines a range of what she calls “digilantism.” Dara presented a paper called, “Digilante Culture: The Rhetorical Performance of Justice and Punishment on the Wild Wild Web,” at the eastern regional sociology meetings (ESS) in Boston on a panel I helped organize. Here’s the abstract:
This paper focuses on the rhetorical performance of justice and punishment in digilante culture. Digilantism is the term I use to refer to the growing practice amongst some netizens, mostly based in the United States and the United Kingdom, who mete out extrajudicial punishment to cyber-criminals such as scammers, hackers, and pedophiles. Although digilantism is a growing internet subculture, short of legal research on cyber-crime, little attention has been paid to the rhetorical, cultural, and socio-historical dimension of this widely practiced do-it-yourself form of justice. The paucity of digital media research is particularly surprising given the explosion of popular and scholarly rhetoric on cyber-terrorism, digital surveillance, and internet security and safety. The purpose of my paper then is to address this gap by developing a typology of digilante justice. I focus on responses to real cyber-crimes on a range of sites, including Nigerian 419 and Russian romance scam-baiting sites, pedophile watchdog sites, and texasborderwatch discussion groups.
So, in trying to understand ‘racism in an international context’ as we’ve been doing here this week, one of the things to keep in mind is that the international context has changed with the digital era. While in the early days of the digital era, there was much speculation by respected sociologists that nation-states would lose control because the Internet, along with globalization, would undermine sovereignty. More recently, however, other scholars have argued that it is an illusion to think that we are living in a borderless world and that nation-states do still matter very much, despite trends of globalization and the Internet. The rise of scam baiters and this particular expression of cross-border digilantism – with its echoes of lynching photography – point out one of the ways that old forms of overt racism are re-mixed with new forms of racism in our globally networked society.
Man Arrested for Threats on White Supremacist Website
Posted by: | CommentsA man has been arrested for making threats on a white supremacist website against the President and First Lady (via @BlackInformant). This arrest is good news, in my opinion, although I’m sure that some of first-amendment-absolutists will howl that this is an infringement of free speech. Here’s the story and the screenshot via the Associated Press:
“A Kentucky man has been arrested and charged with posting a poem threatening President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama on a white supremacist Web site.
The U.S. Secret Service said Johnny Logan Spencer Jr. of Louisville wrote and posted the poem, titled “The Sniper,” on a site called NewSaxon.org.
Special Agent Stephan M. Pazenzia (PAH-zen-zee-ah) said the poem describes a gunman shooting and killing a “tyrant,” later identified as the president.
Spencer is scheduled to appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dave Whalin on Friday for a detention hearing. He’s in federal custody charged with making threats against the president and threatening to kill or injure a major candidate for the office of the preside. “
There seems to be some awareness, at least when it comes to the president, that racist language online is not protected speech. A jury in Roanoke, Virginia recently found white supremacist William A. White guilty on four counts of threatening and intimidation via email and online postings (as well as threats made through older technologies such as letters and phone calls) to journalists. When I was finishing my book, I made note of William White for his racist website attacking the young men in Louisiana known as the “Jena 6.” He had posted a website with their addresses and phone numbers suggesting that (white) people take violent action against them, yet he was not arrested for this. While I’m glad to see that White is finally getting his just due (he faces up to 35 years in prison for his recent convictions), it seems like a bit of justice delayed.
This is not the typical view in the U.S. of racist speech online. For the most part, most people believe that anything that’s said online is protected by the First Amendment. As I noted here back in November, the opinion in the U.S. about racist speech online usually follows along the line of this piece in the AtlanticOnline (a mainstream to left publication). In the U.S. is that many people here want to argue that the First Amendment, which is designed to protect dissent against the government, protects all manner of racist speech. This simply isn’t true.
The reality is that there are lots of legal restrictions on speech that apply to speech on the Internet, like threatening the president’s life. We in the U.S. have to begin to think more critically about our notions of “free speech” in the digital era.
HP Webcam: A Case of Cyber Racism?
Posted by: | CommentsIn case you’ve missed it, there’s a lot of discussion whirling around the web these days about a HP-designed webcam that seems to read the faces of white people and not the faces of black folks. Some are accusing HP of racism. Is this a case of cyber racism? It all got started by this, rather funny, video (2:16):
I have to agree with Angry Black Woman (and cross-posted at Alas, a Blog) ~ I see a case of “privilege and blindness” with regard to race rather than intentional racism.
“Guess I’m a Racist” : Anti-Health Care Ad
Posted by: | CommentsIn the last day or two, an “unknown political group” has created a video (and loaded YouTube), called “I’m a Racist,” and it’s been getting a lot of attention. The short description posted with the video states ‘We believe the health care system needs to be fixed. However, government intervention is not the answer, nor should we be called racist for not agreeing with Obama’s health plan!’ Fortunately, Rachel Maddow and Melissa Harris-Lacewell, provide a thorough critique in this clip (8:01):
Harris-Lacewell makes an excellent point here when she points out the way the ad reinforces an individualized notion of racism, as a personal trait, rather than an understanding that racism is systemic.
This “Guess I’m a Racist” meme jumped to Twitter and people began updating using the hashtag #youmightbearacist. (Using hashtags (#) on Twitter is just a way for people to have a conversation around a theme, so on an evening when the BET Awards are on, people might use #BET as a hashtag to talk about the awards. But the racism prompted by that hashtag is another story.)
Some of the updates to Twitter with the #youmightbearacist hashtag were meant to be funny and skewer racism, some were not so funny deeply racist. Almost all reinforced the point that Harris-Lacewell makes about the anti-health care ad, which is that they assume that racism resides in an individual rather than operates systematically.
There are a couple of things that are interesting about all this for me. First, the video opposing health care is a fairly slick politlcal ad yet it’s created by an “unknown” political ad. In this way, it’s similar to the cloaked sites that I’ve written about here (and in my recent book, Cyber Racism) in which people disguise authorship of websites in order to conceal a political agenda. This ad is slightly different because it’s being pretty overt about part of their political agenda (opposing health care reform), but because the identity of the group that created the ad is hidden, we don’t know how their stance on this one issue may (or may not) be part of a larger political agenda.
What intrigues me further about this is the convergence and overlap of media. So, the unknown political group releases a video on YouTube exclusively, and the video quickly goes viral and becomes one of the most viewed videos on YouTube. They do not buy air time on television to get their message out, but they don’t have to, because the video gets picked up by Maddow’s show and she airs the video. Then, the meme travels to Twitter, where people both reinforce and resist (sort of) the notion of what it means to be “a racist.” The political battle over race, and the meaning of racism, has moved into the digital era.
Cyber Hate Divide: Contrasting Responses to Hate Online
Posted by: | CommentsIn the last few days, there have been two stories in the news which highlight the very different approaches to hate online in the U.S. and in the U.K. The story from here in the U.S. involves a racist image of Michelle Obama (drawn to look like an ape). The image first appeared online because someone posted it on their blog (the image has since been removed from the blog). Once the image was online, it quickly appeared at the top of Google’s results when anyone did a Google-image search for “Michelle Obama.” Whether or not this was a result of a “Google bomb” (an intentional manipulation of Google’s algorithm) or just a fluke, remains the subject of some debate. Those on the right in the U.S., such as FoxNews, are pointing out that this Google bomb was quickly diffused, unlike Bush’s Google bomb. For it’s part, Google (the leading search engine company based in California), bought ads warning users about “offensive results” and apologized, yet still claims no responsibility for the images appearing in Google search results.
Mostly, though, opinion in the U.S. about this incident follow along the line of this piece in the AtlanticOnline (a mainstream to left publication). Derek Thompson writes:
The Internet is unwieldy boundlessness of content, some of which is utterly depraved. But that’s to be expected when you’re talking about the sum of all knowledge and information in the world. Racist images aren’t illegal. And researching examples of racism online isn’t only legal, it’s can also be useful for journalists, social academics and anybody trying to piece together fragments of the zeitgeist. Google isn’t the editor in chief of the internet, it’s a curator. It’s job is to organize and I hope it doesn’t delete or de-index content just because it’s offensive — and especially not because it’s offensive to important people.
And, Thompson is correct in his assessment of the U.S. landscape around these issues. The bind, of course, is in the line I’ve highlighted in bold there above: Racist images aren’t illegal here in the U.S. This one fact makes taking other sorts of action difficult, but not impossible. And, the reason these images are not illegal in the U.S. is that many people here want to argue that the First Amendment, which is designed to protect dissent against the government, protects all manner of racist speech. Or, in the line of reasoning above, the Internet simply contains too much information for it to be possible to ever regulate it. But, the right to free speech and being indexed by the search engine Google are two different things. As one of the commenters after that piece at the AtlanticOnline points out: being on the Internet and being indexed by Google are two different things. No one has a constitutionally protected right to have their online content indexed by Google.
Let’s take a look at another example from the U.K. Two men were convicted for publishing racist hate speech, including “Tales of the Holohoax.” These postings of online hate were reported to the police in 2004 after concerned citizens saw them. This action is possible in the U.K. because it is against the law to incite racial hatred either in print or online. The two men were sentenced under U.K. law to four years and two years in Leeds Crown Court in July, 2009. The story is back in the news now because the two men are appealing their convictions saying that the websites, which were hosted on servers in the U.S., would be “entirely lawful” here. And, they’re right. Effectively poinitng out that the U.S. functions as a haven for hate online.
What’s still unclear is how the courts will rule in this case.
