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Cyber Racism: Facebook is under fire in Australia for not pulling pages that contain racist rants, and this has led some to push for an overhaul of the cyber-racism laws there.  Just as a reminder, Australia is a democracy and they regulate hate speech. It’s possible to do both.    That’s not happening here in the U.S., so as Geoffery Dunn writing at Huffington Post points out, places like Team Sarah continue to roll out the online racism.

Hate Crimes, Old & New: Brent Staples has a nice column in yesterday’s New York Times about the contemporary exhibition of photographs of lynchings. Staples ponders the ethical dilemmas of showcasing these photographs in a time and place in which the perpetrators may still be alive and amoung the audience.   Curiously, Staples seems to locate “haters” as exclusively in the past.   There are plenty of examples around that suggest otherwise, including this case in Staten Island in which two white teens were arrested for the election night beating of a young black man and a hit-and-run.    And, this incident in which a 12-year-old black girl was pounced on by white officers who assumed she was a “prostitute” because she was wearing “tight shorts,” is just outrageous.    And, this incident reminds me of Judith Butler’s point in Excitable Speech that the State is often the worst perpetrator when it comes to hate-speech-and-acts.  (It’s not quite the same, Butler was referring to speech/acts like the entire criminal justice system and in particular, the death penalty, but the fact these cops were acting in their official capacity as agents of the State seems like a related point.)

South African Racism Persists: The election of Obama has reverberrated around the globe, and people in South Africa are contemplating the implications of his election for the demise of racism.  Back in November, South African novelist and Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer, declared that Obama’s election marks the end of racism.   Chris Mbekela, a PhD student at Rhodes University, takes issue with Gordimer’s assessment.    Writing at the Daily Dispatch Online, Mbekela argues that racism persists globally and in the South African context.

Racism & Homophobia: Irene Monroe takes up the debate about racism and homophobia, and argues persuasively that Gay is Not the New Black (h/t: Adia) and Heather Tirado Gilligan says that we need to work on healing the rifts between us by building coalitions among straight folks and LGBT folks across racial lines (h/t: Joe).  The passage of Prop 8 gives “LGBT advocates the chance to show other minority groups that their causes are interconnected, legally and ethically.” Time to get to work, we’re all community organizers now.

Young people’s use of social networking sites, like Facebook, have quickly become an established feature of youth culture, according to a new report.  Facebook in particular, is proving incredibly popular; and, current estimates are that there are 120 million active users of the social networking site, as this bar graph illustrates (as of 2007, image from here). Yet there’s scant little attention paid to the emergence of new forms of racism that accompany these new forms of media.  Recently, there have been some notable examples of Facebook racism that I want to explore  (H/T Mordy for sending this my way).   As Joe’s been writing here, there’s been a real surge in overt racist actions in the wake of the election, and this incident, as reported by the Houston Chronicle, illustrates how the white racial frame can be used to completely distract from racism (from the top):

A template on facebook.com asks, “What are you doing right now?” An ill-advised response led to Buck Burnette’s expulsion from the University of Texas football team.

What began as a private text-message exchange on Election Night between Burnette and a friend soon became available for anybody with a computer to see.

Burnette, a sophomore offensive lineman from Wimberley, was dismissed from the team Nov. 5 for posting a racially insensitive remark about President-elect Barack Obama on his Facebook page.

“I told (our players) to be careful with Facebook and MySpace,” Texas coach Mack Brown said. “Those things are really dangerous.”

A survey taken during Monday’s Big 12 coaches conference call found most of the league’s coaches are concerned about how much information is available on popular social-networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The major concern: Users can voluntarily provide personal information, and the more popular the athletes, the more contact “with hundreds of people they don’t know,” Iowa State coach Gene Chizik.

“It’s a challenge for coaches, because ultimately we’re responsible,” Chizik said.

In the status update section of his Facebook page, Burnette posted, “All the hunters gather up, we have a (slur) in the White House,” in reference to Obama’s becoming the first African-American elected to the presidency. Burnette said the comment was a text message he received from a friend and that he exercised bad judgment posting it on his page. He later apologized in a written note that was read by Brown during a team meeting.

Apologies for the long quote, but it’s relevant to my point.  The article begins with a discussion about how “dangerous” social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are, but let’s be clear - the danger here as it is being described by this football couch, and reported on without comment by the Chronicle, is to the football player.   The “danger” is that he will post something on his page that’s “Ill-advised” and he will be expelled from the team, which is what happened to Burnette.   This is a rather profound shift away from what’s actually going on here.    What has happened here is that a young, white college student at a top school has threatened the president-elect and referred to him by using a racist slur.   And yet the newspaper article is framed as though there is an inherent “danger” in Facebook.   It seems to me that the danger is in the way that Facebook (and other forms of new media) give rise to heretofore unseen versions of racism that combine new technology with old hatred.  This combination of old and new forms of racism expressed through Internet technology is what I refer to as “cyber racism” (I explore it more depth in my forthcoming book of the same name).

Interestingly, this is not the first time college football players in the U.S. have gotten in trouble for Facebook racism. In 2007, members of the USC football team created a Facebook group called “White Nation,” which featured a graphic with the caption, “arrest black babies before they become criminals.”  The description of the group reads like this:

“This group is not for the faint of heart,” read the group’s description. “All members are athletes of Caucasion (sic) descent. DISCLAIMER: In no way are the following memebers (sic) intolerant of others, we are just doing our duty of protecting the Arian (sic) brotherhood.”

According to the USC college paper, an unnamed source from the athletic department said that the group was “a joke and had no serious purpose.”   While the athletic department may find humor in such antics, the joke is lost on the rest of us.    This sort of Facebook racism is not the sole purview of college athletes.

In 2005, University of Virginia first year student Maryann Li was horrified when she stumbled across a Facebook group that some of her college classmates had created.  The group, called “Asian Fetish,” for those who think “Asian women are truly the most scrumptrillescent delicacy abroad,” and the description of the group’s purpose:  “to bang out Asians. Bang hard or go home. Yes, even the ugly bitches.” The racist and deeply misogynistic group description goes on: “I can’t help it if my dick likes the taste of Teriyaki sauce. Or soy. Or duck for that matter. And when I’m feeling a little risky, wasabi…” it proclaimed. The creator of the Facebook group, white U.Va. sophomore Patrick Gieseke defended his creation of the group, saying that he intended it as satire.   This article quotes Gieseke saying,

“I couldn’t see anyone reading that and being like, ‘Wow, someone really wants to do this to Asian girls.’ I thought it was pretty blatant that it was just a joke,” he said.

So once again, Facebook racism gets dismissed by whites as “just joking” and therefore not something harmful or worth addressing.  Not surprisingly, Asian American students at U.Va. were not amused by Gieseke’s “joke.”   Two students, Elizabeth Chen and Julie Chu, attempted to organize a “Speak Out” to invite students who have faced discrimination to share their stories with the community at U.Va’.s amphitheater but found little interest.   When it comes to race, Chu said, “the majority of white people at U.Va. don’t care.” The emergence of this sort of gendered racism on Facebook is characteristic of the racialized pornography in print-media that Pat Collins talks about in Black Feminist Thought.   The fact that this has now moved to the new media environment of Facebook means that these old versions of racism are being translated into the digital era and some of the centuries old racism remains as it is mashed-up against new forms of social interaction.     

For its part, Facebook has removed the most extreme and offensive racist groups for violation of their terms-of-service (TOS) agreement. This is the right stand for Facebook to take in my view, and it’s one that other sites should follow through on.  But, Facebook did not take this without significant pressure.

The European Parliament lodged the most significant complaint with the California-based Facebook. Martin Schulz, Socialist leader within the EP, said, “The existence of these groups is repulsive.” And, indeed it is. According to this report, the pressure on Facebook came mainly from European sources about Italian neo-Nazi groups.   Still, the “White Nation” group in the USC controversy is still hosted on Facebook (or, it’s a group by the same name with an identical description), and there are over 60 groups that come up if you search using the terms “Asian Fetish.”    So, while Facebook may be responding to pressure from Europeans to remove the most repulsive and extreme groups from the site, apparently there is little or no pressure from people in the U.S.   In my view, it’s time for some of those 120 million active users to step up and put some pressure on Facebook to enforce its terms-of-service agreement by not allowing such groups on the site.

Meanwhile, extremist white supremacist websites have proven so popular in the days since the election that the flood of traffic by white people has crashed the servers at one site.   More about that form of cyber racism in a subsequent post.

Julian Bond, current head of the NAACP, was recently quoted as saying that an Obama win will not end racial injustice. And, indeed, I think that’s increasingly clear given what even “allies” are publishing these days (more on the New Yorker debacle tomorrow). If there’s one place that we should clearly see evidence of a “race-blind” society, it’s the world of the Internet - advocates of such a view contend - because online “there is no race,” as that MCI commercial conjured it. However, the reality is that the Internet is giving way to a new kind of racism that I’ve discussed here before, that I call cyber racism. It’s a blend of centuries-old racist stereotypes with new forms of media and technology.

Here’s one of the most recent examples of cyber racism, and a really cogent analysis to go with it. First, a little about the backstory. A videoblogger and fellow New Yorker by the name of Loren Feldman owns a company called 1938 Media which, according to the description on their site, the firm “produces video for the web and mobile devices.” About a year ago, Feldman produced a series of videos for the web that caused the Silicon Valley Wag to call him the “Don Imus of Silicon Valley,” and lots of others to call him a racist. Still others (including himself) call him an artist. The controversy stems from the overtly racist language that Feldman uses in his video series. It starts with a video titled “Where are the Black Tech Bloggers?” and in this video, after explaining his question (”I mean black guys love technology. Car stereos, cell phones…”), there is a white man dressed as a caricature of a do-rag-wearing, pot-smoking black gangster hosting a site called “TechNigga.” Following the release of this video, people were (understandably) upset and then Feldman goes on to enact a sort of disingenuous drama in which he supposedly apologizes, goes to rehab and gets out (recounted in great detail here). None of that actually happened, it was all an elaborate fabrication, and, as Feldman explains in his “Official Statement” about the incident on his website, he is a comic and “the tone of my work is similar to South Park, Ali G, SNL and many other artists…” Feldman goes on in the statement to explain his actions saying:

The web is about freedom. Freedom of ideas, freedom of code, freedom to make a choice, freedom of not being afraid to tell a joke, freedom to fail. Freedom to look at the reflection that we cast as a group.

You might think that sometimes I’m too mean or not funny. Ok. Am I so different than you?

TechNigga was part of a weeklong project that reflected on numerous issues in our culture. Across the series I make fun of jews, psychologists, scientologists, celebrity rehab, nerds, nazis, tech culture, 70s movies and, yes, black people.

Interesting take on “freedom” by Feldman here, but not anything cyber libertarians haven’t already said. Nothing much happened about this until Verizon pulled a deal with Feldman (to develop mobile video) after people protested the company’s association with him. Ok, that’s all by way of backstory. Now, for the cogent analysis on all this, from a blogger and entrepreneur named Hank Williams. Williams, another New Yorker, has quite a different perspective on “freedom” than does Feldman. In this excellent post by Williams, he situates his analysis in his own lived experience, which he describes thus:

I was born in Harlem, in the midst of the civil rights movement. My father was an active participant in that movement. His best friend was Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, to whom he served as counselor. So as a child I was present as amazing things were happening. I observed as great people planned and fought so that I would have opportunities that they did not. Not that I fully understood what was going on, but it was happening all around me, and I could not miss its import. They fought the evil ideas, and the evil people. And they won. And in so doing they helped to change the country.

Admittedly and thankfully, this country is far, far better today. And the reason my father was able to start as a mail sorter and end up a judge, and the reason that I can write this blog and do the work I do, is because of the many great people, white and black, who protested, boycotted, and resisted. Peaceful resistance and dissent, is not only a right, but a responsibility for those of us who value decency and democracy.

To suggest that the right thing to do is to be silent in the face of racist words, or that protesting or boycotting is wrong, wipes away the part of American history that has made my life possible — peaceful protest.

And to suggest that we should just ignore racist bile like Tech Nigga is wrong. Words matter.

This is just the kind of thing that Pat Collins talks about when she discusses linking “epistemology” and judgments about knowledge claims. Here, Feldman and Williams have two, very different views of what “freedom” means and the value of words. For Feldman (who is white decidedly not concerned with social justice), the “web is a place for freedom.” He uses that “freedom” to make fun of people, an activity he sees as harmless. For Williams (who is black and steeped in the civil rights struggle), he sees the performance of Feldman’s “Tech Nigga” as wrong, and, he also calls out the people who do nothing, remain silent, in the face of racism. These are not only “differences of opinion,” they are rooted in different epistemologies, different ways of knowing. For Feldman, he’s calling on the rules-of-the-Internet-as-he-knows them, e.g., “the web is about freedom.” And, you can’t really blame him. After all, that’s what the dominant, mainstream culture, says again and again about the Internet. It’s also what pundits and libertarians like John Perry Barlow say over and over.

Williams has a different epistemology. His is rooted in an experience of discrimination and inequality, and struggle and triumph over that. And, his analysis reflects this. Here’s Williams at the end of that post, describing what racism is like in 2008:

In 2008, racism is appeasing the evildoers. It is making jokes that no one finds funny, or ones that a few misguided people do. It is categorizing large swaths of people with words and language that hurt them, even if you have no idea why. It is questioning the morals of people when they stand up to defend themselves against language that seeks to further diminish an already weak social standing. And, yes, racism is doing nothing when you could be doing something. I know racism when I see it, and I hope you do too. What are you going to do about it?

Well said, Mr. Williams. Indeed, what are you going to do about it?

The Washington Post is reporting that the traffic is up at white supremacist sites (hat tip to Bryan for letting me know about this article). The drive behind this increased interest in the white supremacist message seems to be Sen. Obama’s historic victories in the Democratic primaries. Estimating the number of hate groups and hate sites is always difficult, and now, that number is an ever-moving target. One of the experts interviewed for the article, Deborah Lauter, civil rights director for the Anti-Defamation League, observes:

“The truth is, we’re finding an explosion in these kinds of hateful sentiments on the Net, and it’s a growing problem,” said , which monitors hate group activity. “There are probably thousands of Web sites that do this now. I couldn’t even tell you how many are out there because it’s growing so fast.”

While there’s little to suggest that the white supremacist sites are going to launch a serious political challenge to Obama’s candidacy, but you can be sure that the struggle over race, racism and white supremacy has shifted to the Internet. Indeed, as the Washington Post article notes, earlier this month, Obama’s campaign launched its own site to refute the rumors that hate-mongers spread on the Internet. The site lists a series of myths and lies about Obama — that he is Muslim; that his books contain racist passages; that his wife, Michelle, used the word “whitey” — and debunks them.

At the same time, white supremacists are also engaged in a struggle over racial truths and myths online, according to the article:

Don Black spends 16 hours each day on his laptop computer reading hundreds of derogatory Obama comments posted on Stormfront.org, a Web site with the motto “white pride world wide.” A site that drew a few thousand visitors per day in 2002 has expanded into Black’s full-time job, attracting more than 40,000 unique users each day who can post on 54 different message boards…

The article goes on to note that “almost all” white supremacist websites are reporting an increase in traffic. In my new book, Cyber Racism, I explore what the real threat of these sites might be. I argue that there are three main threats, including: 1) easy access and global linkages (white supremacist discourse is easier to access because of the Internet and it’s easier for white supremacists to connect with each other); 2) harm in real life (sometimes, white supremacists take violent action against people based on their beliefs); and 3) cultural values (in other words, these sites represent a threat to the way we acquire and produce knowledge about race, racism and civil rights in the digital era). To illustrate that third threat, about how racism online threatens cultural values and our ways of knowing, let me share a quote with you from David Duke, another white supremacist who is quite active online:

“The Internet gives millions access to the truth that many didn’t even know existed. Never in the history of man can powerful information travel so fast and so far. I believe that the Internet will begin a chain reaction of racial enlightenment that will shake the world by the speed of its intellectual conquest.”

As David Duke suggests in this quote, his goal in bringing white supremacy to the Internet is “racial enlightenment” by making “the truth” available to millions via the Internet. Duke’s brand of white supremacy seeks to undermine hard-won political battles for racial and ethnic equality by rearticulating an essentialist notion of white racial purity using the rhetoric of “civil rights.”

From my perspective, Duke represents an example of the epistemology of white supremacy. The epistemology of white supremacy is, as philosopher Charles W. Mills has noted, “an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance,” which produces the ironic outcome that whites in general, are “unable to understand the world that they themselves have made.” The epistemology of white supremacy reinforces the white racial frame by allowing whites to retreat from pluralistic civic engagement and into a whites-only digital space where they can question the cultural values of tolerance and racial equality unchallenged by anyone outside that frame.

As the lived experience of the civil rights movement fades with time, hard-won political truths about racial equality slide into the realm of mere opinion, open to multiple interpretations. In my book, I discuss at length what’s at stake here with cyber racism, but for now, let me just share a couple of brief examples. In interviews I conducted with young people as they surf the Internet for information about “civil rights,” I asked them how they interpreted the sites they were reading. In the first example, a young (teen-aged) woman reads a cloaked white supremacist site describing American slavery as a “sanitary, humane, relaxed” institution, and remarks, “well, I guess there’s two sides to everything.”

In another example, a different young woman, reading a legitimate civil rights site associated with The King Center in Atlanta, questions the site’s validity because, “it’s created by his widow, so it could be biased.” The two sites, and the two misinterpretations of them, suggest that the very ideas of “civil rights” and “racial equality” become eroded within a digital media landscape that renders all websites more or less equivalent. While the cloaked site and the King Center site both present information from differing points-of-view, just saying that each is “biased” is to misunderstand the larger meaning here. It’s precisely taking into account the standpoint of the site and the reader — whether situated in the white supremacist movement or in struggle for civil rights and against racism — that facilitates the more accurate reading.

As white supremacists shape the online struggle for definitions about race, racism, civil rights, indeed for “truth” shifts in the new digital landscape, we need more and better critical thinking about race, that is informed by standpoint theory.

Participatory online media, often referred to as Web 2.0, refers to technology - like this blog - where anyone can contribute content to a website. In the early days of Web 2.0, there was a lot of talk about how new media technology would facilitate democracy. And yet, the reality of Web 2.0 at all sorts of sites where people are encouraged to post their reactions to current events, suggests that the technology is allowing white people to vent racism that might otherwise remain hidden. Here’s just one recent example, in which MediaTakeOut.com points out the way (competitor) TMZ.com approves racist comments on the site, allegedly to increase traffic to their site. (I say “allegedly” because we don’t know the motives of the people approving the comments at TMZ.com.) What seems clear is that all sorts of places online have become venues for whites to display racism that is usually reserved for the whites-only backstage, as I noted some months ago about Facebook.


This sort of cyber racism seems particularly pronounced at YouTube, the popular video sharing site, as this blogger notes. In a recent Sociology honors thesis submitted for his degree at UC-Berkeley, undergraduate Albert Wang conducted a content analysis of hate speech on YouTube. Wang screened 10,579 English-language comments posted to 45 videos, of which 599 comments met my criteria for hate speech and were thus included in his sample. Of these 599, most dealt with blacks, who were targeted by 209 hate comments, and women, who were the targets of 190. Sixty-one more comments targeted Muslims, forty-eight targeted whites and twenty-nine targeted Jews. The remaining biased comments targeted Hispanics, homosexuals, men and a variety of ethnicities and nationalities, such as the Japanese and the Turks; some also attacked non-whites in general. In all, 271 comments targeted race, 197 gender, 93 religion, 22 nationality, 9 sexuality and 7 ethnicity.  Among those that targeted race, Blacks were the most frequently targeted group.


Wang also attempted to interview people who posted hate speech on YouTube. to hate occur on YouTube.  The conclusion he reaches based on the larger quantitative analysis and his small sample of interviews (7 responded out of 34 requested interviews) with posters is that hate speech online exists in a variety of forms (e.g., most frequent targets are Blacks, women, Jews and Muslims), and the reasons for it range from resentment of what is viewed as the liberal establishment to anger at racial tension. Wang identified two important similarities. First, hate comments are an inherently online form of discourse as people take advantage of the Internet’s anonymity and the relative ease of posting comments online. Second, online hate speech does not appear to present any new ideas but instead rehashes long-standing stereotypes and malice.


Wang’s research is consistent with my own research in my new book, Cyber Racism, which looks at the way white supremacists have translated their rhetoric into the digital era. Central to my argument in this book is that white supremacy has entered the digital era and old forms of racism are being adapted to new technologies.  Avowed white supremacist extremists, such as David Duke, were early adopters  of digital media technologies; they were among the first to create, publish and maintain web pages on the Internet.   The reality that David Duke and other white supremacists were early adopters of digital media, runs counter to two prevailing notions: one, about who white supremacists are, and the other, about the Internet.  The first is that white supremacists are gap-toothed, ignorant, unsophisticated and uneducated; the second is that the Internet is a place without “race.”   In fact, neither of these notions is supported by the empirical evidence.  White supremacists have customized Internet technologies in ways that are innovative, sophisticated and cunning.   And, the Internet is an increasingly important site for political struggle where meanings of race, racism and civil rights are contested. The emergence of cloaked websites illustrates a central feature of propaganda and cyber racism in the digital era: the use of difficult-to-detect authorship and hidden agendas intended to accomplish political goals, including white supremacy.


Of course, there is also important, progressive organizing that simultaneously happens online.   Democratic movements, organized at the grassroots by people of goodwill with Internet-enabled mobile phones, have transformed elections.    Cyberactivists organized the march of nearly 10,000 people against a white supremacist judicial system in Jena, Louisiana through email, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.    And, almost ten years earlier,  Black women excluded by the white-dominated mainstream media and male-dominated African American press, took advantage of the participatory quality of Internet technologies to organize the Million Woman March.    Yet, some take these encouraging signs about the use of the Internet to mean that the technology itself is inherently democratizing.    Still others see the presence of white supremacy online as evidence that the Internet is an inherently dangerous place.   What we need is a more nuanced analysis enables a way to rethink our ways of knowing about racial equality and civil rights in the digital era.

Slate.com has posted scanned copies of the racist emails the Secret Service has finally turned over to a judge in the long-running lawsuit filed by African American employees. This batch of emails sent in recent years (several date from 2003) by at least 20 high-ranking supervisors in the Secret Serviceare excellent examples of two-faced racism. As blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, many of the emails seem fixated on Jesse Jackson and the jokes in the emails focus obsessively on sexual innuendos about black men’s bodies. The majority of the racist emails posted at Slate.com take the form of jokes of the sort that many whites use to bond with each other in whites-only private, backstage spaces. One of the emails is noteworthy because it departs from this pattern. Instead, it’s more of a general rant that encapsulates much of the white racial frame. What’s especially interesting about this rant is that the middle-class, college educated, well-employed, white, male, heterosexual, author of the email characterizes himself as such a victim of the current cultural milieu of “reverse racism.” Here’s part of what the (very long) email says:

“Reverse racism and political correctness are destroying virtually every aspect of American life. We’re completely surrounded by illegal aliens (who even illegally vote in our elections…) suck up our welfare dollars, steal public educations, commit massive amounts of crimes to include rape and murder, and refuse to learn English (why the @#^* should I have to choose which language I want to use at the ATM? It wastes my time and disgusts me.) …”

Interestingly, part of what the author of this racist email is complaining about is the technology of ATM’s - many of which offer built-in options for selecting different languages.   These kinds of options that build racial or ethnic identity into the machine is what Lisa Nakamura has referred to as “menu driven” racial identity in the digital era.  While some writers have suggested that cyberspace offers there are new, liberating possibilities for moving away from old forms oppression tied to modernity, the actual picture is more complex.    What used to be an ‘old media’ form of racism, shared either face-to-face, written on the back of lynching postcards, or via telephone, today takes on a slightly new twist when some of these old forms of backstage communication make the transition to digital media and such messages are now sent between whites via email. In this instance, the emergence of cyber racism opens up the possibility of disrupting old patterns through the mechanism of forwarding email. What was once only said in private can now, through forwarded email, move beyond the private whites-only space for which such communication was intended. However, such a possibility was not sufficient to lead to an actual interruption in the transmission of white supremacy.  Note that in this instance, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a single white ally within the Secret Service who would ‘break rank’ and forward these racist emails outside the white-only intended audience.  Instead, what it took to wrest these emails from the backstage and bring them into the frontstage for all to scrutinize was it always takes to change entrenched forms of oppression:  political action.   In this instance, that took the form of a lawsuit by African American employees of the Secret Service.


The rest of the email quoted above goes on to make the case for the importance of intersectionality in discussions of racism.  He goes on to include elements of gender and sexuality in the latter part of his rant:

“I’m not even going to start on partial birth abortions and selling baby parts to heal old people (Are the Nazis back in power doing experiments?).  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the two lesbians down the street from me…with their adopted Korean SON, menorahs in the front window….are a typical American family.   And I’m the sicko nut because I think they’re about as far from what God intended a normal family to look like as giant grasshoppers playing croquet on my front lawn.  But I’m the one with the screwed up view of reality.”

Screwed up, that’s one interpretation.   With this last, broad rhetorical swipe, the author pulls together themes of reproductive and sexual politics, homophobia, antisemitism, and combines it with yet more racism - this time against the adopted child of his lesbian neighbors.   The views he expresses here are indistinguishable from the overt white supremacist websites that I examine in my work.   Yet, people in power and the vast majority of whites in this country, continue to maintain that we have moved”beyond” racism.   Emails like the one discussed here suggest a far different reality.

On Sunday, I caught one of the featured panels at the Margaret Mead Film Festival, which I wrote a little about here. The panel featured several people involved creating “user-generated content” including the engaging cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch (from Kansas State University), who created the mesmerizing and wildly popular Web 2.0 video; Sara Pollack, YouTube’s film manager; Sameer Padania from Witness, introducing the new participatory online video site for human rights organizations The Hub; and Michael Smolens, founder and CEO of dotSUB, a sort of wikipedia-like translation site for films; and, Jenny Douglas, introducing her new site called KarmaTube. While the panelists tended to focus on the democratizing and emancipatory potential of digital video and video sharing sites, in the Q&A afterward there seemed to be some desire to talk about the negative potential of the medium. For example, Sameer Padania screened a horrific video of police brutality from Egypt that is intended to highlight human rights abuses and prompt action by people opposed to such abuses. I wondered about the people who click on such horrific videos to enjoy them or laugh at them; and, I wondered about the ways that seemingly straightforward “video evidence” like the Rodney King video, get discredited by oppressive political regimes, like the Egyptian police or LAPD. This view was certainly not well-represented on the panel, but to be fair, that wasn’t the intention.

Despite the up-with-people quality of a lot of discussion about digital video, the reality is that there’s no shortage of people using these sorts of digital video sharing sites for nefarious ends, among them neo-Nazis, skinheads and white supremacists who want to use digital video to spread racist propaganda. For example, CurrentTV (Al Gore’s venture and my current default cable channel) is running a video “pod” (their term for a short digital video segment) called “From Russia With Hate,” about neo-Nazis in Russia who are filming racist attacks on immigrants, then posting these digital videos online. (I’m posting the link but not the video because it contains violent scenes that I don’t want to reproduce here.) This is a well-done bit of investigative journalism by the reporter Christof Putzel, and while these are quite disturbing to watch, the intention of the filmmaker is clearly to be critical of the neo-Nazis. The CurrentTV site shows that approximately a month after posting, the video has received 3,844 views and there are 32 comments. All the comments are supportive of the filmmaker’s point of view, and several even remarking on their “unease” with voting “for” the video on the website as they fear this implicates them somehow in the neo-Nazi violence.

I raise this example here to address some of the nuances of online video for addressing racism in the digital era and offer some complexity to the panel presentation from Sunday. On the one hand, Putzel’s investigative journalism and digital video distributed through cable networks and online via CurrentTV offer support for the argument about the democratizing and emancipatory potential of online digital video. This approach both highlights the problem of racist violence and offers people an opportunity to take some, albeit limited, action by posting comments in support of the critique of neo-Nazism. And, as Putzel mentions near the end of the report, one of the central figures he interviews is later arrested for “inciting ethnic hatred,” so there is some material result of his reporting in the effort to stop neo-Nazi violence.

On the other hand, there is a way in which the very possibility of digital video and the presence of digital video cameras gives rise to racist violence. Several of the scenes that are shown in Putzel’s piece have clearly been staged for the (neo-Nazi’s) digital camera. In one scene of racist violence on a train, the digital camera operator is already in place near the (eventual) victim of the violence, and stands waiting, filming both the unsuspecting victim and the approaching gang of neo-Nazis. While it is possible that this violence might have happened without the presence of the camera (or the potential to upload it), the fact that the violence happens in such a seemingly staged manner implicates the digital video in the violence. And, in the gravest negative consequence, after the arrest of one of the figures in Putzel’s piece, another neo-Nazi video is released in which two immigrants are killed on camera and this is uploaded to the web. No one has been arrested for these murders; and, to date, no one knows who made the digital video of these racist murders.

Several of the panelists on Sunday mentioned that we are still in the early days, indeed “way before the beginning,” of the convergence of digital video, Internet and television. I couldn’t agree more. And, what this means in terms of racism, and resisting racism, is still unfolding.

(This is a reblog from Thinking at the Interface.)


Linda Beyerstein at Majikthise (and via Alternet) and Katherine Zeleski at The Huffington Post are bringing attention to a website that they are referring to as a “hoax” site, but that I would argue is a “cloaked” site. And, I would argue that this is one of the prime examples of why the term “hoax” is inadequate and less accurate than “cloaked.” Let me explain the story in question and then make I’ll make my case for the term “cloaked.” Here’s the story, first reported by Zeleski (Oct.26):

At first look, “Separatists Claim Responsibility For California Wildfires” appears to be like any other story on CNN.com. The article claims that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger confirmed a radical Hispanic organization has taken responsibility for the fires that raged through southern California this week. The article even says there’s photographic proof “of individuals holding Molotov cocktails, then throwing them into dry brush.”


After the initial shock of the report, it then becomes obvious that it’s a hoax. To start with, the site’s URL is http://www.cnnheadlienews.com (note the headlie instead of headline). CNN’s url is cnn.com and the url for its sister network, Headline News, is http://www.cnn.com/HLN/.


Anti-immigrant websites picked up on the story and ran it as fact (follow this url). Before realizing it was a hoax, the author of the site “Americanandproud” declared, “I am going to wait until all the facts are in, but it appears the first major shot of the next Mexican/American war has just been fired.”


A domain name search for “cnnheadlienews” shows the site is registered to a company with a Nashville, Tennessee address called Bleachboy Heavy Manufacturing Concern. The website associated with Bleachboy, BBoy.net, is a homepage that cycles through four different logos. There’s no other information on the site except for a warning on sweatshop products, a note that says “thank you for the traffic,” and the ever-banal phrase, “spring is in the air.”

While this story, like Beyerstein’s, is useful for tipping off the unsuspecting to the disguised URL and the untruth of the story there, by calling it a “hoax” it relegates it to the universe of “fake news” and “truthiness” created by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and misses the hidden political agenda of such a site. As I’ve defined it, a cloaked website is:

“published by individuals or groups who conceal authorship in order to deliberately disguise a hidden political agenda.”

Although it’s not clear who the owner of “Bleachboy” and the fake “cnn” site, by choosing to target MECHA, a Hispanic group, I would argue that the creators of the site had a hidden white supremacist agenda. Using the term “hoax” doesn’t adequately describe this kind of deception, and therefore I think “cloaked” is a better, more accurate term.


These kinds of sites are even more disturbing when you look at them in light of some of the cognitive research on how people remember (or misremember) facts. Researchers found that false claims, if repeated, are remembered as true. (While there is some difference in this by age, the overall pattern seems to hold up.) This has tremendous implications for studying cloaked sites such as this one that publish false claims that are then repeated through the reverb chamber that is the blogosphere.

The folks at Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), where I did my dissertation research, do good work in my opinion. And, their website is a rich resource for those of us interested in issues of race and racism. Recent discussion here about the think tanks and scientific racism got me wondering about how scientific racism is presented on the web. What would the search terms be for someone looking for this information? I thought “race and IQ” might be likely terms, and I typed those in. This SPLC page on “IQ and Race: The Websites” came up. These are an interesting case of cyber racism and they seem to fall somewhere between the overt extremists, such as Tom Metzger’s on the one hand, and the cloaked sites that I’ve written about elsewhere. Given that research with adolescents who were mostly unable to distinguish the cloaked sites from legitimate civil rights sites, the SPLC page made me wonder how adolescents, or anyone really, might make sense of those “race” and IQ sites. All Friday morning randomness.

A couple of days ago, a few places around the web have been mentioning the use of mobile digital technology by some white college students from Louisiana to “parody” (their word) the Jena 6. Here’s how LAist described it:

In the wake of the Jena 6 marches that have been happening all over the country, this group of students decided to dress in blackface and reenact the Jena 6 assault, and post the photos and video clip on a Facebook album entitles “The Jena 6 on the River.” The video, which can be seen on The Smoking Gun website, shows the students giggling as they cover themselves in mud (blackface and all), and “attack” one of the students…

This is part of what I’ve written about in my work on “cyber racism,” or put another way, white supremacy in the digital era. The fact is, new digital technologies (e.g., camera phones) along with social networking sites (e.g., Facebook) not only open up new possibilities for “participatory democracy” (as I believe they do), and, they also make possible new forms of white supremacy that are a blend of the old and the new.
The fact is, I also think we need new ways to think about civil rights in the digital era. Is the kind of “speech” these students are engaging in “protected” ? Most of the first amendment absolutists would argue that it is. I tend to disagree. I’d be interested in thoughts from anyone here, reading along.