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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.

There are two hate crimes in very different parts of the world, one in the UK the second in Russia, that have me wondering about how much of American-style racism gets exported overseas ( photo credit: sylvar ).

In Britain recently Nathan Worrell, a neo-Nazi who waged a racist campaign against a mixed-race couple and was stashing loads of bomb-making materials in his flat, was arrested, tried and convicted on charges related to the case.   He was sentenced to seven years in prison on two charges: “possession of material for terrorist purposes,” and “racially aggravated harassment.”   Among the materials found in Worrell’s flat were a video showing how to make a bomb from household items, and what police described as “a significant amount of far-right propaganda, as well as membership cards for groups such as the Ku Klux Klan….”

In Russia, last week Stanley Robinson, an 18-year-old African American exchange student from Providence, Rhode Island, was stabbed by unknown assailants in Volgograd.   Russian n an attack officials say may have been racially motivated.  Robinson remains in grave but stable condition.  According to published accounts, the student’s mother, Tina Robinson said:  “I believe it happened because he is a person of color. It was completely unprovoked.”

Some may chalk up such horrific stories as just another example that “the whole world is full of inequality, injustice… “ [as Robert Berger suggested in his comment on this blog awhile back]; and, others may erroneously suggest that racism is overblown and that efforts to call attention to racism are part of a “racism industry.” I, however, have a different perspective on these incidents.   To me, these suggest that American-style racism may be exported from the U.S. to other countries with deadly consequences.   The fact that Worrell in the UK had propaganda from the KKK, a U.S.-based racist organization, certainly suggests this.   Of course, Worrell also had material from British far-right groups as well and the UK is no Johnny-come-lately to racism.    And yet, the fact that there are materials from the U.S. that are tied to the racist actions of a neo-Nazi in the UK suggest that there are global flows of racism.   Add to that the fact of America’s cultural and political hegemony in the world today (although quickly fading if recent shoe-tossing incidents are any indication of the nation’s standing in the eyes of the world), and it suggests that American-style racism may be seen as the “standard bearer” for racists around the globe.

The second example, of the African American exchange student attacked in Russia, also suggests that the American-style of racist hate crime has been exported to regions far beyond the borders of the U.S.   If, as this young man’s mother suggests, he was in fact a target of a racially-motivated assault this raises some puzzling questions about how this is possible.   Russia is a country with a completely different history than the U.S. when it comes to race and racism.   So, the question becomse, how is it that this young African American teenager is even “seen” as a target of a hate crime?   That he was even fathomable as a target of such an assault suggests that this young man had to first be recognizable as a racial subject.    To put it plainly, he had to be viewed by his attackers as a young black man.   And, his racial subjectivity, his “blackness,” if you will, had to be interpreted through the lens of the white racial frame.   Within this frame, a young black man gets read simultaneously as a dangerous thug and as a racial target.    Without this interpretive lens,  Stanley Robinson would just be another exchange student exploring another culture.   Within the white racial frame, Robinson became a target.

It would be bad enough if America were simply exporting racism if we, as a country, were also doing something in the international community to combat racism.  But, alas, this is not the case.   In forum after forum in the world arena, the U.S. is the notably absent guest not seated at the table to discuss how to resolve racism globally.  Sometimes this is couched as a concern about free speech rights, sometimes in terms of defending the right of the state of Israel to exist, both worthy concerns.  Even so, the point remains that the U.S. is not in involved in these discussions at the same time that the country is exporting American-style racism.    It’s analogous to the U.S. environmental policy in many ways.  As a country, we’re about 4% of the world’s population, yet we’re responsible for something like 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, yet the U.S. government under Bush refused to sign the Kyoto treaty which would have held accountable for reducing those emissions.    Now, I realize that reducing carbon emissions is not going to do anything to eliminate racism,  but it seems to me that part of the change we need to see in the U.S. is to try to rejoin the international community as responsible global citizens.   A big step forward would be to stop exporting American-style racism and sit down at the international table to discuss how to address global racism.

Two men, Jose and Romel Sucuzhanay, brothers and Ecuadorian immigrants were brutally attacked in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn by three men that shouted anti-Latino and anti-gay slurs at them (
photo credit, street art, Bushwick, Brooklyn: hragvartanian).   Today, Jose Sucuzhanay was declared brain dead and he is being kept on life support while his family decides whether to donate his organs.  Sucuzhanay’s death, and the assault of his brother, has everything to do with the intersection of racism, sexism, homophobia and class.  Here’s the account of what happened from the New York Times:

The two brothers from Ecuador had attended a church party and had stopped at a bar afterward. They may have been a bit tipsy as they walked home in the dead of night, arm-in-arm, leaning close to each other, a common tableau of men in Latino cultures, but one easily misinterpreted by the biased mind. (emphasis added)

Suddenly a car drew up. It was 3:30 a.m. Sunday, and the intersection of Bushwick Avenue and Kossuth Place in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a half-block from the brothers’ apartment, was nearly deserted — but not quite. Witnesses, the police said, heard some of what happened next.

Three men came out of the car shouting at the brothers, Jose and Romel Sucuzhanay — something ugly, anti-gay and anti-Latino. Vulgarisms against Hispanics and gay men were heard by witnesses, the police said. One man approached Jose Sucuzhanay, 31, the owner of a real estate agency who has been in New York a decade, and broke a beer bottle over the back of his head. He went down hard.

Romel Sucuzhanay, 38, who is visiting from Ecuador on a two-month visa, bounded over a parked car and ran as the man with the broken bottle came at him. A distance away, he looked back and saw a second assailant beating his prone brother with an aluminum baseball bat, striking him repeatedly on the head and body. The man with the broken bottle turned back and joined the beating and kicking.

“They used a baseball bat,” said Diego Sucuzhanay, another brother. “I guess the goal was to kill him.”

The fact that the suspects in the case are described only as “three black men” by police (they have not been apprehended), does not mean that racism isn’t a factor here, it just means that it’s more complicated than the archetypal white-on-non-white hate crime.

Racism. The leaders of a number of civil rights organization met recently to decry the recent spike in hate crimes, and the vast majority of these kinds of attacks are white-on-non-white.   But not all of them are.  In some hate crimes, like the attack on the Sucuzhanay brothers, the victims of the attacks are immigrants and the attackers are, allegedly, black men.   Although white people are the originators, developers and most frequent perpetrators of hate crimes, they don’t hold exclusive rights to these acts of violence.  As Joe has written about here before, the white racial frame is available to people beyond those who happen to have white skin.  So, if it does turn out that the perpetrators in this case were black, it means that they too have adopted the white racial frame that sees immigrants as interlopers.  The attackers also yelled “anti-Hispanic” slurs and this sort of racism directed toward Latino/as is also characteristic of the white racial frame.  And this white racial frame gets deployed within a particular racialized context, such as Bushwick.  Today the neighborhood is 65% Latino/a and approximately 20% blacks, a demographic profile that emerged after a mass exodus of whites, or “white flight,” in the 1960s and 1970s.

Class. Bushwick is one of the more economically impoverished neighborhoods in the city of New York, and while it’s unlikely that the hate crime against the Sucuzhanay brothers was prompted by class antagonism it occured within a specific class context that it’s important to recognize.   At the same time as the white flight of the 1960s and 1970s occurred, manufacturing jobs left Brooklyn and racially discriminatory red-lining by banks ended virtually all investment in the neighborhood.  The quite predictable result of these practices (white flight) and policies (red-lining) by whites, was that in a five-year period a livable community changed into a desolate, dangerous neighborhood filled with abandoned buildings, empty lots, drugs and arson.    The lingering effects of  Bushwick has a poverty rate around 40%, and close to 75% of the children in Bushwick grow up in poverty, and the high school drop out rate is close to 70%.  More recently,  hipster-whites have begun returning to Bushwick and beginning to drive up property values.   Jose Sucuzhanay may have indirectly benefited from this recent turn in Bushwick’s economy through his small real estate business that he started after several years of working in construction.   According to press reports, he used the small business to help his neighbors and family find housing, as so many immigrant entrepreneurs do.   It’s unlikely that the Sucuzhanays’ attackers knew anything about Jose’s upwardly mobile class trajectory, but may have read them as gay and thus assumed that they were part of the changing hipster demographic in the neighborhood.

Homophobia and Sexism. What most likely sparked the ire of the brothers’ attackers, was a small, tender gesture between the two men.   Following the press accounts of this story, the fact that the men were walking home arm-in-arm, leaning close to each other seems to have been interpreted by their attackers as ‘evidence’ of the men’s (homo)sexuality.    The fact that two men cannot walk arm-in-arm without being assumed to be gay is a testimony not just to cultural norms, but also to sexism.   Suzanne Pharr wrote a book called Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism, and in it she argues that gay men are perceived as a threat to male dominance and control, by “breaking ranks” with male heterosexual solidarity.  Furthermore, homophobia directed toward men is often about punishing any deviation from rigid gender norms, especially ones that contain a hint of the “feminine,” such as two men walking arm-in-arm.   Pharr argues that fierce homophobia expressed toward men is ultimately a mechanism for reinforcing narrow and dehumanizing notions of gender.   The brutality of the attack on the Sucuzhanay brothers suggests just how deeply some people feel about these inelastic gender norms in which a moment of tenderness is punished by a bat to the skull.

The fact that we have another hate crime in the New York area just a month after the murder of Marcelo Lucero suggests that we in the U.S., in the Northeast as well as in the Deep South, have a long way to go before we are living in a “post-racial” society.  The complexities in this case of black-on-Latino racism, of class inequality, and of sexism and homophobia suggests that our thinking about racism has to continually be informed by an understanding of intersectionality.

UPDATE 12/14/08: Jose Sucuzhanay died early this morning, before his mother arrived from Ecuador to say goodbye.

Yesterday, two white teenagers were arrested and charged with a hate-crime after assaulting a black man as they all waited in line to register for classes at Westchester Community College, just north and west of New York City.  The persistence of this sort of racism within educational institutions is consistent with the research evidence on this topic, such as Feagin and colleagues’ The Agony of Education (Routledge, 1996)  and this newly released research by Sarah Stitzlein, Breaking Bad Habits of Race and Gender (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).  That this sort of thing happened in suburban New York, once again underscores that the northeast is not immune from racism because the states in this region of the country happen to be above the Mason-Dixon line or because these white teenagers’ ancestors never owned slaves.  I wonder how the story of the young black man’s educational experience might read if he were to write it down for us?  The legacy of Brown v. Board of Education must sound like a hollow promise to him as he is getting called racial slurs and then pummeled as he tries to register for classes at a community college.

In another suburban community, this one to the east on Long Island, in Suffolk County, is seeing some anti-racism organizing on the part of some residents.   This is a welcome change of tone from Suffolk County, as this is the same county where Ecuadorian immigrant Marcello Lucero was killed by a group of (mostly) white teenagers recently.    (The fact that both these recent attacks were the actions of white male teenagers also speaks to the gendred, and specifically masculine nature of this violent form of white supremacy.)   The Town of Southhampton’s Anti-Bias Task Force met on the steps of Town Hall (photo by Kelly Carroll, Hamptons.com) to voice concern over the issue of hate-crimes against immigrants and against native-born racial/ethnic minorities.   Referring to the murder of Lucero, Lucius Ware, president of the Eastern Long Island NAACP said, “That was a lynching, which is injury by mob violence.  There are still hoods and gowns in some of the closets around here,” a reference to Long Island’s history of KKK activity.

It seems to me that suburban New York in these two events serves as a sort of microcosm for some of the choices we have facing us with regard to racism.   We may engage in overt racist attacks, we may be victims of such attacks, and we all have the option to stand together, across differences, against the legacy of racism.  At the moment, there is no large, anti-racist social movement in the U.S., but there are small groups of concerned people, like these folks in Suffolk County.  Perhaps if more of these small groups can sustain the collective interest in seeing an end to racism, then we could for the first time see a viable anti-racist movement in this country, and really begin to change systemic and entrenched racial inequality.

Jim Brunner, at the Seattle Times, has a story about a top Snohomish County, Washington, Republican Party official apologizing for their group selling at the Evergreen State Fair “$3 bills” that showed Senator Obama in the center in Arab dress and showing a camel. The official blamed a volunteer and said she had the bills removed when she heard about them.

Brunner reports that the $3 bills are sold nationally by an arch-conservative website (which has other racist and vicious attack paraphernalia). The website

feature signatures from “Teddy Kennedy” as chief socialism adviser and Al Sharpton as new spiritual adviser. Obama’s face, in the traditional Arab headgear, is pictured above the words “Da man.”

White racist thinkers and activists love to mock the speech of Americans of color, especially African Americans and Latinos. (Odd too that they clearly cannot hear their own accents since everyone speaks with an accent.) A Democratic Party supporter complained at the Republican booth, but was given a hard time:

The bills offended some passers-by at the fair, including Ronnie Thibault, a Monroe woman who said Republicans at the booth threatened to call security on her after she complained. . . . Susan Ronken, a volunteer at the nearby Democratic Party booth at the fair, also saw the bills, which were present at the booth for at least two days this week. “It was an absolute hate crime,” said Ronken.

Yes, these politicized hate crimes are already spreading like toxic mushrooms across the country. The Republican official was quoted as saying that

hopes the presidential campaign will avoid illegitimate personal attacks — such as insinuations about Obama’s religion or McCain’s age.

Yes, she balances the Muslim attack to an age critique of McCain, but without assessing the point about the former being the kind of hate crime that is often associated with racist violence against Americans of color. The explosion of politicized racist attacks in the next two months, I predict, will be extensive and huge. One can already find many racist political attack sites on the web targeting Obama, several with the N-word as part of their url.

In my view the only way to meet these attacks is openly and assertively, especially by people with influence and power. It is time for our media and our politicians to take these and the many other hate crimes in the US very seriously–as well as the deep white racial frame that makes them possible–and to discuss, counter, and act openly against these political hate crimes. They cannot be swept under the rug without making them much worse.

Ten years after the racist murder of James Byrd by three white men in Jasper, Texas. Today on my local NPR affiliate, WNYC, they aired an interesting interview (available online after 7pmEST) by Michele Norris of two ministers from Jasper who were crucial in creating an environment of racial healing following the murder. Norris talks to Father Ronald Foshage of St. Michael’s Catholic Church and Pastor Kenneth Lyons of Greater New Bethel Baptist Church about how they worked to avert further racism in their community immediately following the murder and in the years that followed. The two ministers reflect on the healing process that took place between blacks and whites in the town and how important the show of a larger number of whites showing up at James Byrd’s funeral was to healing the wounds in that town. They also give praise to the Byrd family for their forgiveness from the very beginning. And, they mention how many whites in Jasper did not want to mark the tenth anniversary of this horrible crime, yet leaders like Father Foshage and Pastor Lyons led the way emphasizing the issue of remembrance for addressing racism. For a good account of this event, see Joyce King’s Hate Crime (Random House, 2002).

Addendum: Here are some details on the lynching of James Byrd, Jr., from my Racist America book (references can be found there):

In June 1998, a black man, James Byrd, Jr., was walking down a Jasper, Texas, road. Three white men, with tattoos suggesting ties to white-supremacist groups, beat him savagely, tied him to a pickup, and dragged him along a road until his head and arms were severed. One man reportedly said to the others, “We’re starting The Turner Diaries early,” referring to violence by white supremacists in that racist novel. The girlfriend of one of the men said that, while she knew he was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood and did not like blacks, she did not see him as a racist. This lynching was not just an isolated incident. Indeed, it brought to national attention the larger social context of antiblack violence. After the lynching a Ku Klux Klan group held a rally for the white supremacist cause in Jasper. In addition, this area of Texas is known to be white supremacist territory. A white militia group has a training facility in the county, and a few Christian Identity churches are in nearby towns. The Jasper lynching triggered copycat crimes in at least two other cities, Belleville, Illinois, and Slidell, Louisiana, where several white men in cars reportedly attacked and injured black men.

The Jasper lynching and similar violent personal attacks on black men and women, as well as such attacks on other Americans of color, are most often carried out by working-class whites. Yet the responses of some elite and middle-class whites to the Jasper lynching revealed a certain indifference to these crimes. For example, the first New York Times article on the Jasper lynching was buried on page 16; the bloody lynching did not rise to the level of a front page story. In addition, one New York Times article spent considerable space on the problems of the black victim himself, describing his alcoholism and unemployment—as if such things mattered in assessing the meaning of his Klan-type lynching.

British Nobel-Prize novelist, Doris Lessing, said that she thinks Senator Barack Obama might be assassinated if elected:

“He would probably not last long, a black man in the position as president. They would kill him.”

She did not indicate who she thought such assassins might be. The public and political reaction has mostly rejected her comments and their implications as “wild” and “fearmongering.”


Lessing probably said what many observers of the revolutionary change of a black man running for U.S. president secretly fear might happen.


Lessing has long been an outspoken feminist and opponent of antiblack racism. She became famous as a fierce critic of European colonialism in Africa, and was attacked for her feminism in her 1960s writings. She was banned as a “prohibited alien” for a long period from South Africa by its apartheid regime.


Her fear that Obama might be targeted is likely conditioned on her awareness of how much violence has targeted U.S. presidents and other U.S. officials in her lifetime.


Her statement seems to many extreme and, as some put it, “fearmongering,” but the U.S. has a four-centuries tradition of whites attacking black Americans. Life under legal segregation for millions of still living African Americans was one of constant white violence (unprosecuted white murderers and other perpetrators are still living too). At least 6,000 lynchings targeting African Americans took place from the 1880s to the present. A large proportion of hate crimes, many violent, each year now target African Americans.


Recall that the 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building was by antigovernment activists who were white supremacists. Months later other bomb plots were uncovered, one targeting federal buildings in Spokane and Austin. Today, numerous antigovernment militia and supremacist groups are made up of white men (and some women) very angry about current societal conditions. In 1998, a black man, James Byrd, Jr., was walking down a Jasper, Texas, road a few miles from where I am now writing. Three white men, with white-supremacist tattoos, beat him savagely and dragged him along a road dismembering him. One reportedly said to the others, “We’re starting The Turner Diaries early,” referring to violence by white supremacists in that racist novel still popular with supremacists. The Jasper lynching triggered copycat crimes in other cities. (See my book Racist America for details.)


In recent years members of white supremacy groups have reportedly stockpiled explosives and prepared bombing ventures.  In 2006, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center there were at least 844 active Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other white supremacist groups. An estimated two hundred thousand whites are active or passive supporters of such groups.  And, there are hundreds of U.S.-based Internet sites disseminating extreme, with tens of thousands of active members, often violent racist diatribes.


It is time to recognize that what Lessing said could really happen at the hands of white supremacists in the United States and to deal with this chilling possibility and its likely white supremacist perpetrators openly and critically in the media and other public discussions, as well as by public safety actions. In my view, we should also provide stepped-up, super-protections for the courageous Senator Obama and his family, especially if he is the Democratic nominee.


As a white researcher who gets death threats now and then just for doing research on racism in the United States, I can personally attest that Lessing’s fears are neither “wild” nor unrealistic.

The BBC reports on the sentences just handed down in the stabbing death of a young man of mixed race, Marlon Moran 21, in south Liverpool (UK). The stabbing took place in May (2007). According to the BBC, Daniel Masher, 18, of Byron Street in Garston, was cleared of murder but found guilty of manslaughter and given an indeterminate sentence. Three other teenagers were cleared of murder at Liverpool Crown Court. There are a few noteworthy items in this story to me, looking at this report from another culture and across a huge bit of geographic distance and through the lens of critical race theory. First, it’s interesting to note the relatively light sentences handed down. Remarkable given that in our country we’re busy handing out life sentences to juveniles.

The other thing that I wanted to remark on is the “visual.” If you check the photo of Michael Moran, who is described as “mixed race,” but to my American-eye, he appears to be “white.” So, is race “visible”? It was certainly “visible” enough to get this young man killed, according to the BBC report. There was in relatively recent U.S. history when immigrant groups we sometimes refer to as “white ethnics” (e.g., Irish, Italians, Jews) were regarded as “non-white.” What transpired over in that cultural transformation? Did people’s appearance change? Or, did the way the rest of society regard their appearance change? What is “visual” about ‘race’ and ‘racism’? Is it what we see, or how we look at those we regard as ‘other’?

Westchester County, an affluent, predominantly white suburb of NYC (where the Clintons, among others reside) was the site of a crossing burning on the night before Thanksgiving.  As of yesterday, a 21-year-old white man has been charged in with a hate crime. The suspect is the older brother of a girl who was involved in a fight at the local high school with a class mate, Timothy Artope, who is African American; the fight apparently included use of a racial epithet. The cross appeared on the Artope family’s lawn just hours after the fight. The report from the local news channel here describes the Westchester D.A.’s response to the family this way:

She praised Wesley and Clara Montague-Artope of Cortlandt for their family’s “dignified and courageous” response to the cross burning.

While I have no doubt that it’s true that these folks have responded with dignity and courage, such reports don’t go far enough to… Continue Reading »

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.