Loading ...Archive for cyber racism
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.
Racism in Virtual Worlds
Posted by: | CommentsTwo social psychologists from Northwestern University conducted one of the first experimental field studies in a virtual, online world and found racial biases operate in much the same ways that they do in the material, offline world. The study’s co-investigators are Northwestern’s Paul W. Eastwick, a doctoral student in psychology, and Wendi L. Gardner, associate professor of psychology and member of Northwestern’s Center for Technology and Social Behavior. The study was conducted in There.com, which is similar to Second Life, and offers users a relatively unstructured online virtual world where people choose avatars – or human-looking graphics – to navigate and interact.
This next bit gets a little technical, so bear with me.
The experiemental study design is referred to as a “door in the face” (DITF) and it works like this: the experimenter (in this case an avatar) first makes an unreasonably large request to which the responder is expected to say no, followed by a more moderate request. In the past, researchers have found that people are more likely to comply with the moderate request when it was preceded by the large request than when the moderate request was presented alone, and this held true in the virtual world as well. In the virtual world, the experiment’s moderate request was: “Would you teleport to Duda Beach with me and let me take a screenshot of you?” In the DITF condition, that request was preceded by a request of the avatar to have screenshots taken in 50 different locations — requiring about two hours of teleporting and traveling.
Still reading? Good. What these researchers then did was to vary the skin tone of the avatar making the request, like this:
What’s interesting to note is the way that the skin tone change altered the responses:
In one of the most striking findings, the effect of the DITF technique was significantly reduced when the requesting avatar was dark-toned. The white avatars in the DITF experiment received about a 20 percent increase in compliance with the moderate request; the increase for the dark-toned avatars was 8 percent.
While it may not be surprising to learn that people take their racism with them into these (supposedly) new virtual worlds, this research is still noteworthy both for its innovative methodology and because it challenges the conventional wisdom on two fronts: one that we are living in a post-racial society and that the Internet is an inherently liberatory technology that offers an escape from old hierarchies of oppression.
Contexts Podcast: Cyber Racism
Posted by: | CommentsThe good folks at Contexts asked me to an interview for their podcast series a few weeks back about my new book, Cyber Racism, and now it’s available online, here. The description from their website about the podcast:
Cyber Racism is about white supremacist groups online, and Daniels tells us how white supremacy online is important for how we think about education, free speech and multiculturalism.
If you’ve missed any of the discussion I (or Joe) have posted here about cyber racism, this provides a good introduction. There’s a little bit at the end about the work Joe and I do here on the blog. One small correction, the scholar I refer to in the piece who developed the phrase “translocal whiteness” is Les Back (I mangled his name).
Fighting Cyber Racism
Posted by: | CommentsIn Cyber Racism, I examine the many ways racism is being translated into the digital era from the print-only-era of newsletters (such as those I explored in my earlier book, White Lies). I also spend some of the new book exploring ways of fighting cyber racism (see Chapter 9). There is a recent example that illustrates both the pernicious threat of cyber racism and an effective strategy for combating it.
Allen McDuffee is a NYC-based freelance journalist whose writing has appeared in The Nation, Mother Jones, DailyKos and HuffingtonPost. McDuffee as well as for his own site, Governmentality. Here’s McDuffee’s account of how this incident began (from July 15, 2009):
Last night as I looked at the results from my statistical gathering software program, I was disgusted to learn that an individual had posted and linked to some content from my blog. Most writers and bloggers work hard to get their work linked to, but when I saw the content of this individual’s blog, I literally became sick to my stomach.A white supremacist, with a screen id and blog called Kalki666, found a post I had written critical of Israel and decided to repurpose it for his anti-Semitic agenda. He also used me as his research assistant for the main part of that same post when he found this post on my blog from May 21 and just re-posted it yesterday. And then there are the swiped images, too. Not only had he posted my content and linked to me on his blog, he further linked on white supremacist discussion boards. In no way, shape or form will I allow him to attribute his agenda to my reporting and blogging. I fully condemn Kalki666’s actions and everything that he, his blog and his community stand for. Yes, I am critical of Israeli policies. I am also critical of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. But beyond that, it needs to be clear that being critical of Israel does not make one anti-Semitic.
This kind of “re-purposing” of content intended for a white supremacist agenda is one of the characteristics of cyber racism. In the book, I talk about the way other white supremacists have used this same strategy to re-frame material from the Library of Congress archive of WPA recordings with freed, former slaves to make their argument that slavery was “sanitary and humane” rather than the brutal and de-humanizing institution it was, in fact. Lifted out of context and re-posted on a white supremacist website, the oral history of slavery becomes part of an arsenal of web savvy white supremacists. In McDuffee’s case, text he authored critical of Israel – but not intended as antisemitic – ends up re-posted on a white supremacist forum to further their antisemitic agenda. On the web, as in print publishing, context and authorship matter; but, unlike printed-media, the copy/paste technology of the web makes the migration of ideas from one context and author to another several orders of magnitude easier.
Then, McDuffee’s story gets even more interesting. He writes:
Now, upon further research, I learned that Kalki666 was surfing and posting from an IP address registered to Wheaton College (IL)–a conservative, Evangelical Christian college. [And...] I’m writing to Dr. Duane Liftin, the President of Wheaton College. He should be made aware of the types of activities that are occurring on the Wheaton College IP address. If it’s an employee, I’m sure this violates the usage policy of the College. If it’s a student, well I suppose this opens a whole host of other issues.
I’m also going to bring it to the attention of WordPress, where the blog is hosted. While the post that I’ve described here probably does not violate their usage policy, I’m certain that I saw several others that do–ones that, in my mind anyway, provoke violence. To me, this is the difference between free speech and injuring speech that ought be censored. As a journalist, I take this issue very seriously and, again, I think this deserves its own post where I will elaborate in the next few days.
So, while the form of this digital-era white supremacy is thoroughly web-based, so is the response. First, McDuffee identifies the IP address (the unique identifier for each computer) and locates it geographically and institutionally to a suburban Chicago college. He then uses email to contact the president of the college and the software company that runs the blog software. McDuffee smartly invokes the “usage policy” (sometimes called “TOS” for “Terms of Service”) in place at the college. Indeed, most institutions, software platforms, and Internet Service Providers (the company that provides your Internet service) have some sort of TOS that prohibits explicitly racist / antisemitic language that encites hatred or violence. I’m often asked if fighting cyber racism isn’t “impossible” because of “free speech protection” – and the answer is no, it’s not impossible. This sort of hate speech over the Internet is a “TOS” issue, not a free speech issue. However, enforcement of these policies is almost entirely left up to individuals – like McDuffee – to pursue the issue and demand action.
Furthermore, McDuffee deftly uses his blog to document and post the responses from the college president, the blogging software and from the white supremacist in question. McDuffee was understandably horrified by this turn of events, and he was tenacious in his quest for a just resolution. And, his efforts paid off. Within 48-60 hours (approximately 2 days) of the initial discovery, McDuffee posted this:
UPDATE #9: Wheaton College President Duane Litfin emails me (July 17 1:44pm)
The culprit has been found and escorted off campus. More details to follow shortly.
As it turned out, the culprit was neither a student, nor an employee of the college, but was an interloper who had accessed one of several free-to-the-public computers in the college library. He was identified as Merrill Sech, 38, of Westmont, IL. When the campus police and a local Wheaton police confronted him on the college campus to escort him off campus and issue a do not return letter because he violated their computing policy, he assaulted the officers. So, Sech was arrested. According to McDuffee’s FOIA request, Sech also has a history of other criminal offenses and is currently in DuPage County Jail. For more info, there’s also this podcast about the incident. According to McDuffee, the story is still unfolding in various ways, so you’ll want to check his Governmentality blog (or follow him on Twitter @allen_mcduffee) to catch all the updates.
For my purposes here, I want to highlight that in order to effectively fight cyber racism, you need people who are 1) committed to the value of racial equality, 2) web-savvy and 3) willing to take action. McDuffee embodies all these qualities as an individual. On what might be called the structural side, you need laws and policies in place that regard hate speech as unacceptable (as the college did in this case), and officials that are willing to take action against these sorts of violations (as the college president, campus and local police did).
McDuffee’s encounter with this white supremacist illustrates several of the points that I make in Cyber Racism, chiefly that the threat from white supremacy online is less a threat of “recruiting” and more a threat to ideas and values of racial equality. McDuffee’s encounter also illustrates that the political struggle for racial equality is one that requires us to be committed, web-savvy and willing to take action and demand a response from institutions and organizations that may be unwitting perpetrators of white supremacy.
The Internet Angle: Cyber Racism and Domestic Terrorism
Posted by: | Comments
In today’s New York Times “Room for Debate” series, The Editors have an online forum about the “Internet angle” on the recent acts of domestic terrorism (
photo credit: pasukaru76 ). In both recent cases - the murder of Dr. Tiller and the attack on the Holocaust Museum – The Editors write that “the suspect arrested was well-known among fringe “communities” on the Web” (the quotes around “communities” are in the original from The Editors). I’m going to leave the Tiller case for now, and focus on an examination of the Internet angle in the von Brunn case. I return to the Tiller case at the end of this post.
After von Brunn was released from prison he went to work for a Southern California bookstore affiliated with the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) a Holocaust-denial group.
I refer to the IHR site (and others) as “cloaked” sites because they intentionally disguise their intention in order to fool the unsuspecting web user about their purpose. As I’ve written about here before and in the book, the cloaked sites draw millions of readers each year.
Following that, von Brunn created his own virulently anti-Semitic website called Holy Western Empire (link not provided). If you’re curious about his web presence, several writers at TPM have posted screen shots of von Brunn’s overtly racist and antisemitic website and other online postings here, here and here. Von Brunn’s sites appear to be “brochure” sites – that is, one-way transfers of information (rather than interactive sites where users can add content).
I’ve spent more than ten years researching hate and white supremacy online and in my new book, Cyber Racism, I discuss both kinds of websites: the “cloaked” sites like those of the Institute for Historical Review and the overtly racist and antisemitic websites like von Brunn’s Holy Western Empire.
There is no denying that white supremacy has entered the digital era. And, the overt racist and antisemitic sites have proven even more popular in the Age of Obama.
Avowed white supremacist extremists, such as James von Brunn (and David Duke), were early adopters of Internet technologies. White supremacists were among the first to create, publish and maintain web pages on the Internet. The reality that von Brunn and other white supremacists were early adopters of the Internet runs counter to two prevailing notions we have: 1) that white supremacists are gap-toothed, ignorant, unsophisticated and uneducated; and, 2) that the Internet is a place without “race.”
In fact, neither of these notions is accurate or supported by empirical evidence. There’s plenty of data to show that some white supremacists are smart, as well as Internet savvy. And, the Internet is very much a ‘place’ where race and racism exist.
So, what’s at stake here? What’s the harm in white supremacy online?
I argue that there are a number of ways in which white supremacy online is a cause for concern, namely: 1) easy access and global linkages, 2) harm in real life, and 3) the challenge to cultural values such as racial equality.
With the Internet, avowed white supremacists have easy access to others that share their views and the potential at least to connect globally, across national boundaries with those like-minded people. I highlight potential because so far, there hasn’t been any sign of transnational border crossing to carry out white supremacist terrorist acts, although while there is a great deal of border crossing happening online.
There is also a real danger that ‘mere words’ on extremist websites can harm others in real life (e.g., Tsesis, Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements, NYU Press, 2002). And, for this reason, I’m in favor of a stronger stance on removing hate speech from the web and prosecuting those who publish it for inciting racial hatred and violence. In my view, websites such as von Brunn’s constitute a burning cross in the digital era and there is legal precedent to extinguish such symbols of hate while still valuing free speech (see Chapter 9 in Cyber Racism for an extensive discussion of efforts to battle white supremacy online transnationally). There is, however, lots of ‘room for debate’ on this subject and that’s the focus of the NYTimes forum today.
It’s important to highlight the cloaked websites I mentioned earlier. The emergence of cloakes sites illustrate 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.
The danger in the cloaked sites is much more insidious than the overt sites, and here’s why: even if we could muster the political will in the U.S. to make overt racist hate speech illegal – admittedly a long shot – such legislation would do nothing to address the lies contained in cloaked sites.
The goal of cloaked sites is to undermine agreed upon facts – such as the fact that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust – and to challenge cultural values such as racial equality and tolerance. And, these sites are the ones that are likely to fool a casual web user who may stumble upon them and be unable to decipher fact from propaganda.
I’ll give you one other example of a cloaked site and connect this back to the Tiller case. A student of mine a couple of years ago made an in-class presentation in which she included the website Teen Breaks to illustrate the concept of “post-abortion syndrome.” Now, as savvy readers and those involved in pro-choice politics know, there is no medically recognized “post-abortion syndrome.” This is a rhetorical strategy of the anti-abortion movement used to terrify women and keep them from having abortions. This pro-life propaganda is effectively disguised by the cloaked site Teen Breaks which appears to be one of many sites on the web that offer reproductive health information for teens.
This cloaked site takes a very different strategy from the “hit list” websites that publish the names, home addresses, and daily routines of abortion providers. Whereas the “hit list” not-so-subtly advocates murder, the cloaked sites undermine the very agreed upon facts about the health risks of abortion. These are two very different, but both very chilling, assaults on women’s ability to make meaningful choices about their reproductive lives.
Similarly, the holocaust-denial sites and the overt racist and antisemitic websites are two very different, and both chillingly effective, assaults on racial equality.
Racism Flourshing Online
Posted by: | CommentsThe Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) has released its annual report on “digital
terrorism and hate” which finds that racism and antisemitism are flourishing online. Their report asserts that there has been a 25 percent rise in the past year in the number of “problematic” social networking groups on the Internet ( photo credit: rosefirerising).
In assessing the extent of hate online, the SWC casts a wider net than other monitoring organization (such as the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Anti-Defamation League) to include sites that promote “racial violence, anti-semitism, homophobia, hate music and terrorism.” And, the report encompasses a variety of forms of online communicatio such as Web sites, social networking groups, portals, blogs, chat rooms, videos and games that promote hate.
While it’s hard to measure such phenomena with any precision, there are other indications that racism, and other forms of hatred, are flouring online. For example, there’s been growing attention on the rise of racist groups on social networking sites such as Facebook, where roups with names such as ‘get all the Paki’s out of England’ with hundreds of members, are common. People in the U.S. take racism online (and off) much less seriously than people in Europe and other industrialized Western nations for a variety of reasons that I discuss at length in Cyber Racism. Typical of the European attitudes is indicated by a British MP (Labour) Denis MacShane, who told The Daily Telegraph recently:
“The way you defeat extremism, intolerance, prejudice and racism is to atomise it and make people feel that even if they think racist thoughts they can’t say it openly. But websites like Facebook have unfortunately allowed people to come together in one space and say, ‘there are people out there like me’. That is something that worries me greatly. For all the good social networking sites do, they also allow people to express prejudice that in a civilised society should be kept under lock and key.”
Although I certainly agree that racism online is flourishing, I take issue with the way that this typically gets reported. For instance, this Reuters story about the SWC report that’s being widely quoted in a variety of other news sources, starts this way:
“Militants and hate groups increasingly use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube as propaganda tools to recruit new members….” [emphasis added]
Calling what happens with the growth of hate online “recruiting” is to misunderstand the way the Internet works. People are not recruited into hate groups online any more than paying customers are recruited by sex workers (aka, prostitutes) on Craigslist. This sort of discourse (”recruit”) is often used alongside words like “lure,” and this is often used when describing the oddly coupled threat of white supremacists and child pornography online. When reporters and others talk about using the Internet to “recruit” or “lure” unsuspecting innocents online, they misperceive a fundamental feature of the Internet: the search engine. People go online and search for information. The reason online racism (and other forms of hate) are flourishing is because lots of people are searching for that sort of content, and a smaller group of people is creating racist content.
If we really want to do something collectively to address the growth of racism online, then we need to address the underlying appeal of racist content by those who create it and those who seek it out.
“Technigga”:Cyber Racism
Posted by: | CommentsJulian 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?
Cyber Racism on the Rise: Traffic up at White Supremacists Sites
Posted by: | CommentsThe 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.
