Racist Video Goes Viral at UCLA

• • cyber racism, digital video, racism

Racism online takes new forms, as I’ve written here before, and it gets joined with centuries-old forms of racism. The latest example of cyber racism on a college campus is playing out right now at UCLA. Alexandra Wallace, a white female student, posted a video online that made fun of her Asian classmates, and the video has gone viral. Here’s a short video (1:38) from MSNBC / The Grio explaining the story:

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Clearly, this is the kind of thing that Ms. Wallace felt comfortable saying in the “backstage” to an audience that she imagined to be filled with like-minded, white friends. Remarkably, what she failed to consider is that other people in the “frontstage” would hear, see and be appalled at her clueless display of racism.

Now, the many students are calling for Ms. Wallace’s expulsion from UCLA and administrators at that institution will have to decide what kinds of repercussions, if any, she should have to deal with. What do you think? Should Ms. Wallace be expelled? Punished in some other way? Or, is this just a function of living in the U.S. and she should be able to say what she thinks?

Cyber Racism & The Future of Free Speech (updated)

• • cyber racism, Facebook racism, free speech, racism

Two new cases of cyber racism – one in Moscow, the other in Denver – are both making news for the way that they highlight new forms of racism and for the way that they challenge our ideas about free speech.

In Moscow recently, A 21-year-old received a one-year suspended sentence for forming a racist group on the popular Vkontakte social network.  In Russia, forming a racist group on their equivalent of Facebook was illegal because it violated Russia’s anti-extremist laws.   This kind of action on a social networking site is not viewed as “free speech” worthy of protection.   So, what about in the U.S.?

Clavier Apple
(Creative Commons License photo credit: JeanbaptisteM )

Just last month, a former City of Denver employee Joel Pousson, 46, a former clerk at the City and County of Denver’s planning department, was arrested in August after authorities traced a racist, hate-filled e-mail to a computer in his Littleton home. Poussan, who is white, allegedly sent the email to an African American woman who works as a Human Resources Manager on the same day Pousson was notified that he was being terminated.  In the email, Pousson repeatedly called the HR Manager a “n***” and suggested that she was now being targeted by the KKK (a very brief excerpt:  “Because now the Klan has your name and address. And there are plenty of Klan members needing stroke with the klan. … Call it an initiation And the sheet-wearing ghost that takes you out, he gets a lot of rank.”)  The reason that Pousson’s email was not considered “free speech” is that both the State of Colorado and the City of Denver have laws against “Ethnic Intimidation/Threats,” and Pousson’s email was prosecuted under this law.

Whether it’s a group organizing online or an individual sending email, the promotion of racism in the public domain threatens the sense of safety and security for those who are the targets of such cyber racism.  Sometimes, it can also be the precursor to racially motivated violence.  But, even if there’s no explicit threat of violence, racial hatred promoted online runs counter to the ideals of racial equality liberals say they value.

Yet, in the U.S. there’s very little dialogue about cyber racism, in part I think because of the liberal tenet that hate speech just an unfortunate consequence of free speech, even though that’s not true in Europe and other western democracies.  And, free speech according to most of the leading intellectuals writing about the Internet, is considered the highest ideal, as in a post today by Tim Wu at The Chronicle of Higher Ed.  In the piece (which previews a new book he has from Knopf), Wu deftly connects the early crusades against Hollywood movies by Catholics to current efforts to limit speech on the Internet by pressuring technology firms:

These firms are already under strong pressure to censor from powerful governments, religious groups, political parties, and essentially any outfit with a reason to want information suppressed.  The Turkish government, for example, demands that Google take down mockery of the nation’s founder, not just in Turkey, but everywhere. The Church of Scientology has never stopped demanding of anyone who will listen to remove criticism of its practices from the Internet, usually claiming copyright infringement.

Wu’s assessment, like that of Mike Godwin and other cyberlibertarians, about the importance of free speech is flawed because it rests on an analysis of information as existing apart from political and social context.   In such an analysis, “information” on the Internet is content free and should all be treated the same. I do agree with Wu, however, when he writes about what managing speech looks like today:

This is what speech management looks like in 2010. No one elected Facebook or YouTube, and neither one is beholden to the First Amendment. Nonetheless, it is their decisions that dictate, effectively, who gets heard. What’s the answer? There is no easy answer. Monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Hollywood have certain advantages: That’s why they tend to come into existence. That means the American public needs to be aware of the dangers that private censors can pose to free speech. The American Constitution was written to control abuses of power, but it didn’t account for the heavy concentration of private power that we see today. And in the end, power is power, whether in private or public hands.

While Wu evokes “power” at the end of this passage, he doesn’t go quite far enough in his analysis of how power shapes what constitutes information.  Here, Wu is trapped within the same larger (white) frame as other scholars writing about the Internet without considering race.  Within this frame, all “information” is the same offers no mechanism for evaluating claims for racial or social justice against the protection of free speech.   Such a supposedly value-neutral frame for discussing free speech as separate from a social and political context systematically disadvantages some members of society and while it privileges others.   To go back to the two cases of cyber racism I discussed at the top of this post, seeing all speech as neutral “information” would then mean that the racist group organizing online in Moscow and the racist email sender were both entitled to have their speech protected to defend the right to free speech.

Taking a stand against cyber racism isn’t a threat to the future of free speech.   I don’t think we have to defend racist groups online in order to value free speech.  And, I don’t think we have to defend  the actions of people like the guy in Denver who sent the racist emails in order to value free speech either.

Outside the U.S., other democratic nations have taken seriously Article 4 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.  This article requires countries such as Australia, NZ, the UK and Canada which are parties to the Convention to “declare an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred…and also the provision of any assistance to racist activities.” However, complying with this article in the global, digital era is no easy task.

Writing about the Australian context on today’s JWire, Peter Wertheim has a smart column in which he notes the difficulties of battling cyber racism across national boundaries when the U.S. acts as a haven and Internet companies (ISP’s) are recalcitrant, even proud, of hosting racist content.  Wertheim writes:

ISP’s lack the knowledge and insight into racism to enable them to make an informed decision about whether a particular publication has crossed the line into racial vilification or harassment.  More to the point, web-sites often generate advertising revenue for their owners, and the owners pay the ISPs. In social media platforms, the more viewers and discussion, the more advertising revenue can be created, and this advertising revenue usually goes directly to the platform provider. ISP’s and platform providers have a clear commercial interest against any form of regulation, and in being as permissive as possible.  The final decision about whether or not to allow an allegedly racist publication to remain on the net should not rest with them.

Ultimately, even though the law is not the whole answer to cyber racism, it must be a critical part of the answer.  Without the ultimate sanction of the law, the scourge of cyber racism will continue to grow unchecked.  Like other contemporary scourges, such as terrorism and environmental degradation, cyber racism operates across national boundaries and governments acting individually cannot deal with it effectively.

Wertheim’s observation that Internet companies “lack the knowledge and insight into racism” to enable them to know what to do when faced with racist content is an astute one.  I’ve worked in the Internet industry and I don’t think that the people there are evil, but have never learned to think critically about race or racism.   Unlike that MCI commercial from the 1990s, the advent of the Internet has not meant “here – there is no race.” In fact, the advent of the Internet means that we need to be smarter about the new forms of racial hatred – like cyber racism – rather than dismissing them as just the price we pay for free speech.

As Werthiem points out, the law can’t be the whole answer but it “must be a critical part of the answer” is spot on, I think.   And, as Wu notes, these decisions are already being made by those at the helm of Facebook and YouTube.

Cyber racism is a real problem of the Internet era but we shouldn’t confuse taking action against it as a threat to the future of free speech.   In fact, it’s quite possible to balance free speech and concerns about cyber racism.  Indeed, we must in this global, digital era.

Updated 11/16/10 @ 5:18PM ET: Just saw this on Twitter via @hopenothate:  The BBC reports that in the UK, a man has been jailed 15 months for uploading racist video clips calling for a “racial holy war” on YouTube.   Local law enforcement officials are quoted in the piece as saying: “Publishing something that is abusive and insulting and that is likely to stir racial hatred is against the law and [law enforcement] will work with the police to prosecute robustly anyone who does so.” This is not a threat to free speech, but rather recognizes that free speech has to be weighed in the balance with protecting the rights of those who are targeted by racist speech.

White Nationalism and the Tea Party

• • cyber racism, politics

The NAACP recently released a Special Report on Tea Party Nationalism, which addresses the overlap and interconnectedness between white nationalist hate groups and the various Tea Party groups that are sprouting like bad weeds across the U.S.    As if to highlight this connection, David Duke, former KKK leader, early Internet adopter for the cause of white supremacy, and one-time candidate for Louisiana governor, has released a video addressing the Tea Party.

The report, written by Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind, is just 80 pages, 9 chapters and includes 17 figures and maps.   It’s in Chapter 8, “Racism, Anti-Semitism, and the Militia Impulse,” that the authors address the link to overt racists such as Duke, a connection that many Tea Partiers vigorously deny.      In this chapter, the authors write:

“In preparation for Tea Party protests held on July 4, 2009, national socialists and other white supremacists created a discussion thread on Stormfront.org, the largest and most widely accessed of the many white nationalist websites.216 While highlighting the distinction between themselves and the majority of Tea Partiers who were not self-conscious about their own racism, one person argued, ‘We need a relevant transitional envelop-pushing flyer for the masses. Take these Tea Party Americans by the hand and help them go from crawling to standing independently and then walking towards racialism.’ “(p.60)

This quote highlights the use of the Internet by white nationalists who see the Tea Party as an opportunity for “walking Tea Party Americans…towards racialism.”   And, this seems to be the general take in the report, that the Tea Party includes some white nationalists, but is mainly seen as an opportunity for those in the white nationalist movement.    The authors take this stance with regard to Duke, as well.  The video linked to above appears to have been around awhile, as the authors refer to it in the NAACP report.

David Duke’s embrace of the Tea Parties reveals less about the Tea Parties than it serves as a reminder of the former Klansmen’s never-ending opportunism. He used the Internet to broadcast a ten minute video speech, “Message to the Tea Party.” Duke began the “message” by paying homage to the Tea Parties and the “Founding Fathers,” and ended with his usual roundhouse attack on “the Zionists” (meaning Jews). Over the decades Duke has switched organizational allegiances as new openings emerged for him, but he never abandoned his core national socialist ideology.
“Most recently, Duke had spent time flitting across the globe: In France, Duke had his picture taken with Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the anti-immigrant Front National. In Russia, he turned a 1995 meeting with Zhirinovsky into a spot at a 2002 “anti-Zionist” conference in Moscow. In November of that year, he spoke at a meeting in Bahrain. He reappeared in Iran in 2006 for a Holocaust denial conference where he thanked President Ahmadinejad for his “courage” and “foresight.” And in 2009, the once and future Republican, David Duke, was unceremoniously expelled from the Czech Republic (although the charges were later dropped.)
Duke’s announcement that he will use a year-long speaking tour to gauge potential support for another campaign in the Republican presidential primaries (in 2012) should not be understood as anything more than a declaration of his perennial search for contributions from new followers. He is quite unlikely to repeat anything near the successes he has had in the past, when he won a majority of white voters in two statewide Louisiana elections. It is, however, one more sign that hardcore white nationalists regard the Tea Party movement as a reservoir of racists, and as potential supporters of a more ideologically defined white nationalism.
The actions of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the Stormfront.org posters and other white nationalists need be understood, in aggregate, as one measure, among many, of the Tea Party movement’s political characteristics. Together they point to a truth many Tea Party leaders will not want to acknowledge.” (p.62)

This is the cautious tone of analysis taken throughout the report.  The Tea Party is dangerous for the way that it appeals to white nationalists and for what it could become, but less so for what it is now.   Here’s is another passage from the report which illustrates this point:

“Despite the fact that Tea Partiers sometimes dress in the costumes of 18th century Americans, wave the Gadsden flag and claim that the United States Constitution should be the divining rod of all legislative policies, theirs is an American nationalism that does not always include all Americans. It is a nationalism that excludes those deemed not to be “real Americans;” including the native-born children of undocumented immigrants (often despised as “anchor babies”), socialists, Moslems, and those not deemed to fit within a “Christian nation.” The “common welfare” of the constitution’s preamble does not complicate their ideas about individual liberty. This form of nationalism harkens back to the America first ideology of Father Coughlin. As the Confederate battle flags, witch doctor caricatures and demeaning discourse suggest, a bright white line of racism threads through this nationalism. Yet, it is not a full-fledged variety of white nationalism. It is as inchoate as it is super-patriotic. It is possibly an embryo of what it might yet become.” (p.11)

The rise of the Tea Party, with its embryonic white nationalism and the racism, antisemitism and xenophobia of videos like David Duke’s, are political trends that people committed to racial justice should watch closely.

Cyber Racism in High School

• • cyber racism, Facebook racism

Cyber racism, and panic about these threats, spread across a high school in Louisiana last week.  Facebook messages threatening violence against black students at Assumption High School in Napoleonville, Louisiana led to increased campus security, hundreds of parents taking children out of school early and concerns that the situation could strain race relations among the school’s students.  The threats, which contained racial slurs, references to lynchings and some names of potential targets, were posted on a Facebook page belonging to “Colins John” according to reports from students. Word quickly spread among students, parents, school administrators and authorities late Tuesday night about posts made by, whose profile picture featured a person in a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood.  The threats also caused about half of the 1,200 students to leave before the end of the school day Wednesday. Another 200 did not go to school at all.

But the racist threats were not posted by any member of the KKK, nor by any member of a white supremacist organization.   The next day, a 17-year-old student at the high school, who is also black, confessed to creating the threatening Facebook page.  The student is now charged with terrorizing, cyber stalking, hate crime and theft of utility service. He is being held in jail without bond.

Individual Acts of Cyber Racism.  This is not the first time that an individual young person, not affiliated with any kind of a hate group, has engaged in an individual act of cyber racism.  In my book, I talk about the case of Richard Machado, then a student at UC-Irvine, who used the student directory’s pull-down menu of names to select emails of students he designated as having “Asian-sounding” names.  He then sent an email to a list of students saying that he was going to kill all of them.  Machado’s crime was newsworthy because he used the Internet to send threatening hate messages and there were unique technological features of this crime.  And, there are lessons from the Machado case for the Louisiana case.

The fact that the student accused in the Louisiana case is African American and that Machado (a recently naturalized American citizen from El Salvador) suggests some important elements about how race and racial identity figure into cyber racism.  Machado was not, according to published accounts, involved in an organized white supremacist group, nor was he known to have visited white supremacist sites online.    Similarly, the young student in Louisiana was not a member of any organized hate group and is African American.  Yet, the language of Machado’s email and the high school student’s Facebook page clearly contained quite literally worded hate speech.

White Racial Frame. One explanation for this type of action is that both these young men, no less than most other people in the U.S., have adopted the dominant white racial frame.  Part of what’s useful about this theoretical framework is that it situates individual racist actions, like these, within a larger system of racial oppression rather than in either individual identity (not only whites adopt the white racial frame) or individual pathology of racial prejudice tied to a personality disorder.  Neither of these young men needed to have been white to engage in individual acts of white supremacy online.   Nor, did either need to be mentally ill to engage in such acts, and there is no indication from the published accounts that either is mentally unstable.  Instead, they merely needed to grow up in the U.S.  and adapt to the dominant culture’s white racial frame.


Emails, and Facebook Pages, that Wound. Placing the victims’ story at the center of an analysis of hate speech via email or Facebook, as critical race theorists suggest,  is difficult because of the way this story and others like it are reported in the mainstream news accounts.  Press accounts mainly leave out the perspective of those who are the targets of hate speech.  In the Louisiana case, we get some limited reports that students (and their parents) were frightened and left school (or didn’t attend), but there aren’t interviews with any of these students.    In the Machado case, the the UC-Irvine students included on his list of recipients for the hate-filled email messages appear nowhere in the public record of reporting about the story.  So, mainstream press accounts are also written from within the white racial frame and thus leave out the systemic pattern of virulent racism that might offer more context and understanding about the impact of such online speech.   In California, Asian students on UC campuses have been targets of virulent anti-Asian telephone calls, graffiti and e-mail at the time of Machado’s attacks.  In Louisiana, anti-black racism has a long history, much of it interwoven with Klan history, and that might be enough for some parents to keep their children home from school upon hearing about KKK-themed threats on Facebook.

The Myth of Online Anonymity. Many people believe that when you’re online, you’re completely anonymous.   There’s a rather famous (in computer-geeky-circles) New Yorker cartoon from the early Internet era that shows a dog, sitting at a computer keyboard, the caption reads, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” In many ways, that notion of anonymity on the Internet – that “nobody knows you’re a dog” – is a myth.  And, it’s a myth that fuels these sorts of individual acts of cyber racism because people think that they can’t be identified when they’re online.  In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.   The casual Internet user is completely track-able online.  Covering your digital footprints takes pretty high level skills that most of us don’t possess.

The high school student in Louisiana confessed to creating the hate-filled Facebook page, but not before law enforcement found him.    They did this through a coordinated effort. The local sheriff’s office in this case worked with the state Attorney General’s Office and the Louisiana State Police during the investigation.  They requested information from Facebook’s corporate offices, as well as from Yahoo and Charter Communications (an Internet Service Provider) to determine the identity of the Facebook poster and make an arrest.  So, just as this form of hate speech can be facilitated through the Internet, it can also be countered through the same technologies.

The way that Machado was ultimately caught also reflects some of the possibilities of the Internet for addressing cyber racism.   Upon receiving the racist hate email, several students responded with email of their own to the Office of Academic Computing (OAC).   The staff at the OAC was able to identify Machado as the sender by tracing the emails he sent using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).  Then, they identified the lab and located the individual computer from which they were being sent.   When staffers went to this machine, they found Machado still sitting at that particular computer in the lab, and asked him to leave. Surveillance cameras in the computer lab later confirmed that Machado was in fact the person responsible for the threatening email messages.    Part of what this technological hate-crime-busting story suggests is that there are ways to address such individual acts of cyber racism, if there is a will and an effort to do so.  Mostly, in the U.S., there isn’t a will to do anything about such acts.

The Usual Suspects. Machado was the first person convicted of a federal hate crime via the Internet in the United States. The fact that Machado was convicted of a hate crime involving the Internet reveals some features of the law and the Internet in the U.S.    Within the U.S., the only time speech online loses its First Amendment (“speech”) protection is when it is joined with conduct that threatens, harasses, or incites illegality.   Yet, this case suggests that the law does not appear to be consistently applied to all people in the U.S.  The fact that prosecutors vigorously pursued the Machado case, and seem to be pursuing the Louisiana high school student, is consistent with the rest of the criminal justice system in the U.S. in which minority men are viewed as inherently suspect and differentially arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated.  So, even when it comes to cyber racism, it’s black and brown men who are regarded as the usual suspects.

Elle’s Photo of Gabourey Sidibe: The White Racial Frame is Everywhere

• • academic, African Americans, backstage racism, cyber racism, gendered racism, media, popular culture, white racial frame



Serious public discussion about how magazines and other mainstream media sometimes darken or lighten the skin of black Americans is relatively rare. Periodically magazine covers lighten or darken as that suits the editors’ white racial framing. You may remember how some magazine pictures of O. J. Simpson were darkened to make him fit the white racist framing of black men as dangerous. Now we have Elle magazine significantly lightening the skin of prize-winning actor Gabourey Sidibe on its recent cover. Over at yahoo, there is this commentary(with a very revealing photo backing it up) on that editorial action:

For its special October edition, ELLE produced four separate covers, each one meant to celebrate a different mid-20’s female star–in addition to Sidibe, 27, it included actresses Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox and reality star/fashion entrepreneur Lauren Conrad…. While each of the other three (all oft-used, not to mention skinny and Caucasian) cover girls are shown off in full-body glamour shots wearing stylish clothes, Sidibe is cropped at the mid-chest, with a swath of ruched green fabric hiding her curvy frame. Plus, her skin appears to be [much] lighter than in most photos of the actress we’ve seen, which has stirred reactions on the Web. …. This is the first big fashion magazine cover for Sidibe…. Similar claims about skin lightening were made in 2008 about the possible whitening of Beyonce’s face for a L’Oréal Paris ad and in 2009 for an ad with Indian actress Freida Pinto.

The analysis of this in the mainstream media is amazingly rare and often weak as here, as with “appears to be” and “claims” type language. Such skin lightening and white or whiter skin preference can be found in a great many nooks and crannies of this society. The white racial framing of what is “beautiful” skin color and what is not is centuries old. This racist framing and preference go back well past the racist diatribes on the “lovely white” color that one finds in our founding fathers such as Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

Such constantly recurring events raise many deeper questions that are not touched in the media, or even by much mainstream social science. Dr. Edna Chun recently mentioned the white racial frame concept that I have been working on for a decade or more. One reason I think that it is important is because we need as social scientists today to move well beyond the white-social-scientist-created and typically individualistic concepts of stereotype, prejudice, bigotry, and assimilation—which are OK for analyses as far as they go but which are ultimately rather weak–compared to the great and deeper ideas from the (mostly black) critical racial tradition, concepts such as institutional racism and racial oppression.

In work since the 1970s I draw on this critical black tradition with concepts of the “white racial frame” and “systemic racism.” In my view the white racial frame idea is far better in making sense out of such things as these media actions, as well as much else about “racial relations,” than “stereotypes” or “prejudice” because it includes not only stereotypes, but also much else. It is a whole white-generated racist worldview that is actually imposed on all folks in the United States and in many other areas of the globe. Systemic racism and institutionalized racism are also much better than those traditional “racial and ethnic relations” concepts because they can make the uninformed to think about the foundation of this society in racial oppression (246 years of slavery and 100 years or so of Jim Crow segregation).

In the book Systemic Racism I developed the concept of a white racial frame. I expanded the discussion in a book in last year titled The White Racial Frame. Since its development in the 17th century, this racial frame has been a dominant frame, a pervasive framing that provides a generic meaning system for the racialized society that became the United States. In this racial framing, whites have long combined racial stereotypes (the cognitive aspect), metaphors and interpretive concepts (the deeper cognitive aspect), dramatic images (the visual aspect), deep emotions (feelings), and inclinations to discriminatory action. This frame buttresses, and grows out of the material reality of racial oppression. The complex of racial hierarchy, material oppression, and the rationalizing white racial frame constitute what I term systemic racism.

In our book, Two Faced Racism Leslie Picca and I give many examples of the white racial frame. We collected journals from 626 white students at 28 colleges and universities in various regions. They were asked to record (for, on average, about 6-9 weeks) observations of everyday events in their lives that revealed racial issues, images, and understandings. In these relatively brief diaries these white students gave us got more than 7,500 accounts of blatantly or obviously racist commentary and actions by white friends, acquaintances, relatives, and strangers, much of it in backstage areas. In addition, about 300 students of color at these same colleges gave us another 4000 accounts of clearly racist events that happened to them and their friends or relatives.

Their everyday accounts offer many insights into how the white racial frame works today. Here, for example, is one of thousands of extended racial events from the diaries, this one about an evening party of six white students at a midwestern college. Trevor, a white student, reports on a typical evening gathering:

When any two of us are together, no racial comments or jokes are ever made. However, with the full group membership present, anti-Semitic jokes abound, as do racial slurs and vastly derogatory statements. . . . Various jokes concerning stereotypes . . . were also swapped around the gaming table, everything from “How many Hebes fit in a VW beetle?” to “Why did the Jews wander the desert for forty years?” In each case, the punch lines were offensive, even though I’m not Jewish. The answers were “One million (in the ashtray) and four (in the seats)” and “because someone dropped a quarter,” respectively. These jokes degraded into a rendition of the song “Yellow,” which was re-done to represent the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. It contained lines about the shadows of the people being flash burned into the walls (“and it was all yellow” as the chorus goes in the song).

There is nothing subtle about these racist performances. Trevor continues with yet more performances:

A member of the group also decided that he has the perfect idea for a Hallmark card. On the cover it would have a few kittens in a basket with ribbons and lace. On the inside it would simply say “You’re a nigger.” I found that incredibly offensive. Supposedly, when questioned about it, the idea of the card was to make it as offensive as humanly possible in order to make the maximal juxtaposition between warm- and ice- hearted. After a brief conversation about the cards which dealt with just how wrong they were, a small kitten was drawn on a piece of paper and handed to me with a simple, three-word message on the back. . . . Of course, no group is particularly safe from the group’s scathing wit, and the people of Mexico were next to bear the brunt of the jokes. A comment was made about Mexicans driving low-riding cars so they can drive and pick lettuce at the same time. Comments were made about the influx of illegal aliens from Mexico and how fast they produce offspring.

All white male participants here are well educated. Notice the great “fun” these educated whites are having as part of this recurring social gathering–backstage racism. Racial stereotypes, images, emotions, and action orientations are all on exhibit here. Note too the different roles played by whites in this one racialized evening. There are the protagonists performing assertively for an all-white audience. Some appear also as cheerleading assistants, with the recording student apparently acting as a passive bystander or perhaps a mild dissenter. No one, however, openly remonstrates with the active protagonists. The contemporary white racial frame as revealed in such everyday performances has great implications.

Indeed, much has been made lately about how “liberal” on racial matters the younger white generations are, presumably including numerous magazine editors. But how true is that when you get thousands of examples of blatantly racist joking from just 626 white college students in short diaries they kept for just a few weeks?

Enlightened Racism in MMORPG’s

• • cyber racism

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), like World of Warcraft (WOW) and Modern Warfare 2, are becoming more popular than ever before. Accurate statistics are difficult to come by, but the top game (World of Warcraft) reportedly has over 10 million subscribers.  These numbers reflect a global ‘audience’ of participants because players are not just located in the U.S., but are located throughout the world.  While the fantasy and the disappearing of race in online gaming has been the focus of some scholarship, until now no one has taken up the practice of “griefing.”  Griefing – or pranking – is a practice of disrupting online games that dominates MMORPG’s.   In another context like a basketball court of a baseball field, this is known as “trash talking.”  It’s a way to distract other players and disrupt the game to one’s own advantage.   What seems to be unique about the online games is the way that griefing has become thoroughly racialized.

Here, in a talk delivered recently at the Berkman Center at Harvard University, Lisa Nakamura recaps the history of racist griefing online and links the current crisis in racial discourse in the US with this practice, exploring the implications for digital games as a public sphere.  Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program, and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and the author of the book, Digitizing Race.

A few words of context is necessary for this video, especially if you’re new to, or unfamiliar with, Internet culture.  In the first part of the talk, Nakamura spends some time referring to ‘ROFLcon’ which is a biennial convention of Internet memes that takes place at MIT.  Throughout, she also refers to 4Chan.  4chan users have been responsible for the formation or popularization of Internet memes such as lolcats (and the endless variety of ‘I can haz cheezeburger’ images) and Rickrolling, in which Internet destination was hijacked for a prank, so that images of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up” appeared instead of the page that was searched for.  She spends all this time talking about these humorous Internet memes because two of her main points in this discussion are that “racism is a meme” and that “being funny is the real currency of the popular Internet.” Here’s the talk, which is on the long side (1:10), but worth it:

To explain racist griefing, Nakamura poses the concept of “enlightened racism.” For this concept, she draws on the work of Susan Douglas’ Enlightened Sexism, which Douglas defines as a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that full equality has now been achieved so it’s now ok, even amusing to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women. Quoting Douglas, Nakamura says, “Enlightened sexism takes the gains of the women’s movement as a given and uses them as permission to resurrect retrograde images of girls and women as sex objects, bimbos and hoochie mamas still defined by their appearance and biological destiny.”

Similarly, then, she argues that “Enlightened racism is a form of racist behavior and speech only available to those who are known, or assumed known, not to be racist.” In many ways, I think this concept is part of what is going on with the “ghetto parties” at college campuses and the young people painting themselves with blackface for Facebook photos, that we’ve talked about here, and the “hipster” racism some have mentioned elsewhere online. The racist griefing that she is addressing in online gaming often makes explicit use of racist epithets, which she explains this way: “The n-word is funny because it is so extreme that no one could really mean it. And humor is all about ‘not meaning it.’ If you take humor and the n-word, you get enlightened racism online and attention.”

Nakamura goes on to argue that paradoxically, “the worse the racism and sexism are, the more extreme and cartoonish it is, the harder it is to take seriously, and the harder it is to call it out.” She points out, quite astutely I think, that for those within gaming culture, calling out racism in this context signals you as someone “not of the gaming culture” and thus, as someone who is taking racism “too seriously” and doesn’t have a good sense of humor. Yet, this sort of
humor is a “confusing discursive mode for young people,” she observes, because they are “unable to separate enlightened racism from regular racism.” And, indeed, I think this is a real problem here. As Nakamura notes, the image of the “humorless feminist” is now joined with the image of a “humorless” old(er) person who takes race too seriously.

As usual, I find Nakamura’s work compelling and provocative, although I do have a couple of points of criticism. While I realize this was just a luncheon talk and as such is work that’s in a formative stage, I was surprised that she didn’t mention the work of Doug Thomas who has written on racism in MMORPG’s. Of course, I’m also not convinced that everyone in our society has moved on to “enlightened” racism, as I point out at some length in Cyber Racism. But, I get the appeal of studying this form of racism and acknowledge that this is certainly the more popularized form of racism.

I’m also a bit surprised that she would use the term ‘enlightened racism’ and not make reference to the book by this same name, written by Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis (about audiences watching the Cosby Show). Although Jhally & Lewis’ work is 18 years old now, I think there are some relevant insights from this work that might inform our understanding of racist expressions in a supposedly post-racial era. Much like people today look to the election of President Barack Obama as a marker of the ‘end of racism,’ so too did many people took the success of the Huxtables, the fictional family on The Cosby Show, as evidence of racial progress. In their research, Jhally & Lewis interviewed racially diverse audiences to find out how they viewed and interpreted The Cosby Show. Part of their purpose was to see if watching the show diminished racist attitudes, which was an explicit goal of the show’s producers. Instead, what they found was that the show actually confirmed people’s racist attitudes because they took the Huxtable/Cosby’s success as evidence that there were no barriers to blacks’ success in this society, so any failing must be due to individual characteristics. While what constitutes ‘an audience’ is certainly changing in the digital era, I think this kind of research with people who are actually involved in MMORPG’s would be a useful way to explore the latest iteration of ‘enlightened racism.’

Social Media and America’s Conversation on Race

• • cyber racism

Recently, a furor erupted when a private email by a Harvard law student (and editor of the Harvard Law Review) was made public by the recipient.  The gist of her argument is captured in the following quote:

“I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African-Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent.’’

While this revival of the early 20th century discourses which notoriously legitimated eugenics projects has undoubtedly outraged all who have experienced or are aware of institutional racism, it is not the specific content of these emails that I want to focus on.  Instead, I want to consider how this event is representative of the historical moment in which our culture finds itself.

We are witnessing the unfolding of two largely interrelated processes: 1.) an implosion of the private sphere into the public sphere and 2.) the emergence of a new dialectic between the top-down racial discourses of the mass media and a wide breadth of localized racial discourses that have only recently been amplified or made visible through the power of the Internet (specifically, social media).  Put simply, the Internet is a powerful tool that, for the first time, has provided (at least some) everyday people with the ability to project their voices loud enough to compete with all the machinery of the  media industry.

In recent decades, the mass media has worked tirelessly to rebrand America as “de-segregated,”  “tolerant,” “post-Civil Rights era,” and now “post-racial” (for example, see  Crockett, Marketing blackness: How advertisers use race to sell products, Journal of Consumer Culture, July 1, 2008, Vol. 8(2): 245 – 268).    Empirically speaking, of course, none of these descriptions are tenable, but the dominance of such vocabulary has had a two-fold effect on our society: On the one hand, these discourses have obscured very real and persistent structural inequalities, leading to a new form of “color-blind” racism.  On the other hand, they have established a new pattern for normative behavior, purging the most overt and outrageous forms of racism from the public sphere – at least until recently.

The Internet is a game-changer for racial discourse in America.  It has enabled many people to scale the walls barring entry to the public sphere.  No longer is overt racism confined to conversations held behind closed doors or even to websites owned and operated by racist organizations.  Today, racist discourses are flourishing in blogs, on users’ public profiles for social-networking sites, and in the comment sections of even the most mundane websites.  Moreover, supposedly private communications are only a click away from becoming public – as the previously mentioned Harvard law student discovered.

The most significant consequence of the proliferation of public and overtly racist discourses through social media (“cyber-racism 2.0” ?) is that the facade of a color-blind society is rapidly deteriorating.  Like a pair of stage curtains, the superficial media-fabricated discourse of a post-racial America is splitting apart to reveal something far more complex in the backstage.

This new world where overtly racist language is again part of our everyday lives is, of course, no Utopia.  However, it does offer an opportunity for scholars and activists alike.  The reemergence of overtly racist discourses means that race can no longer be blithely ignored in the public sphere.  Just as the Internet has amplified the voices of the racists over the silence of the mass media, it also provides an opportunity for progressives to project a racial discourse that is neither racist nor blind, but, instead, seriously addresses the problem of systemic racial inequality.

~ PJ Rey, PhD Candidate, Sociology Department, University of Maryland, College Park.

The New (Old) Language of Anti-Mexican Racism

• • African Americans, cyber racism, human rights, immigration, Jim Crow Segregation, Mexican Americans, white racial frame, whites



Reposted from the NAACP/LDF defendersonline.com.

Mexican immigrants and other Latinos are today being described in terms such as “dangerous” and “criminal.” They are called “lazy” and reported to be “lurking on street corners.” The way they dress is said to be “funny” or “dirty.” They are “flooding the country.”

The new language of anti-Mexican racism is actually drawn on centuries-old images from the white racial framing of African Americans, now repurposed for other people with brown skin.

The current white diatribe targeting Mexican immigrants–revealed in polls, media commentaries, actions of Arizona legislators–is much like the invective used against African Americans during the civil rights era. Where does this language come from? It’s developed over centuries of real racial oppression, including slavery and Jim Crow, by whites that wanted to explain the social order in way that rationalizes the fact that black Americans were consistently at the very bottom of society. Now, a similar strategy is being used against Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and other Latinos.

This white racist frame adapts to new groups by reimposing old racist imagery and stereotypes, with some tweaking. Today, Mexican immigrants work at some of the most dangerous, difficult and lowest-paying jobs in the country. And, not coincidentally, an anti-Mexican language has emerged to justify their low position in the social order. It’s similar to the strategy of the old anti-black language rationalizing slavery, Jim Crow, and contemporary antiblack racism.

This old language of racism now circulates in new ways as it reverberates and spreads easily via the web. Just last year as concerns about the swine flu virus were widespread, rumors abounded on the Internet that swine flu might be a plot by Mexican immigrants to “reconquer” the U.S. by intentionally spreading the disease here. In the echo chamber of right-wing websites and cable news channels, such rumors often get picked up by mainstream news outlets.

Linguistics scholar, Otto Santa Ana, examined language used by mainstream media editors and reporters about Mexican immigrants. He found numerous newspaper articles with comments like this: Public programs are “a lure to immigrants.” The electorate has an appetite for “red meat of deportation.” INS agents catch “a third of their quarry.” We need to “ferret out illegal immigrants.” Today, in Arizona and many other areas in the U.S., whites’ use of the hostile metaphorical language of “burden,” “disease,” “invasion,” and “flooding the country” conveys an overt or subliminal image of Latino immigrants as very threatening and dangerous.

Recently, an Assistant Director of the Texas Election Division jokingly suggested that local white election officials should “speak slowly and loudly, in broken English” to Latino voters in need of the language assistance required under the law. Such mocking is not new, for whites have for centuries mocked the accent and character of English spoken by African Americans.

Anthropologist Jane Hill has pointed to the widespread use of mock Spanish by whites–made-up terms such as “no problemo,” “el cheapo,” “watcho your backo,” “hasty banana,” and “no way, Jose.” These terms incorporate a negative framing of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. As Hill puts it, through the means of mock Spanish “people are endowed with gross sexual appetites, political corruption, laziness, disorders of language, and mental incapacity.” This too is similar to the way whites have mocked black speakers of English, for centuries.

This new language of anti-Mexican racism matters. The way legislators, mainstream media, and everyday folks talk about the issue of immigration matters because it has real consequences for peoples’ lives. If people are deemed “illegal,” it becomes easier to enact laws threatening their existence. If Mexican immigrants are “dangerous,” it becomes easier to deny them basic human rights.

There are many lessons we can learn from earlier civil rights struggle. One of the most important ones is that the right to respect through language is a crucial part of the struggle for equality and human dignity.

Cyber Racism on College Campuses

• • cyber racism, Facebook racism, whites, women, youth

Racism on college campuses these days often spreads through email or via popular social networking sites, such as Facebook.  This new medium for racist expression is forcing universities to reconsider what it means to provide a safe space on campus for all students.  My research on cyber racism indicates that this is a growing problem in the U.S., and a recent incident at the University of Minnesota-Duluth (UM-D) illustrates a few of the relevant issues.

Keyboard

Creative Commons Licensephoto credit: Chris Campbell

Here’s what happened at UM-D.  Two first year students, self-described white girls, began a Facebook wall conversation after an African-American classmate entered the room where they were studying.  More on what they typed to each other via the local news in Duluth:

One of the posts read, “ewww a obabacare (sic) is in the room, i feel dirty, and unsafe. keep a eye on all of your valuables and dont make direct eye contact….i just threw up in my mouth right now …”

In another post, one of the women wrote, “were two white girls..she already has her (N-word) instinct to kill us and use us to her pleasure …”

In the past, this sort of conversation between two white students might have happened in handwritten notes passed in class.   While some may view such overt expressions of racism a thing of the past, overtly racist comments often occur – even today – in the “backstage” (white-only space), as research by Leslie Pouts-Hicca and Joe Feagin demonstrates.  Social media has changed all that now.   As more white people spend time online, they forget that the comments they think they’re making in the “backstage” (white-only spaces) are easily made public and shared in the “frontstage” by people who do not share their views (or, have other agendas).   As more of these expressions of overt racism come to light, it forces all of us to decide again and again what is socially acceptable and what isn’t, especially on college campuses.  The question for colleges and universities is also what can and should be done about incidents like this one?

Many people, like the young man quoted in this article, think that:  “If you really do believe in free speech, they shouldn’t be punished.” But “free speech” is not that simple.  There are a couple of issues here.

First, the UM-D  has an “anti-hate” policy which the white girls clearly violated.

Second, the framers of the U.S. Constitution didn’t have Facebook in mind when they were drafting the First Amendment to protect free speech.   No one has a constitutionally protected right to be on Facebook.   If you use Facebook, you have to abide by their Terms of Service (TOS) agreement which prohibits overtly racist speech (although it’s only sporadically enforced).   If ‘we’ – all of us, users of Facebook – allow it there, we’re condoning a return to overt racism of Jim Crow.

In my view, the white girls at UM-D who racially harassed their African American classmate deserve some kind of punishment from the university.  To address this sort of behavior, I want to suggest that ‘human rights’ is a better, more useful frame for dealing with cyber racism than ‘censorship’ and ‘free speech.’

There are no reports that I’ve been able to find (interesting fact in itself) about what the African American student who was the target of this racism has to say.    I’ll bet that her experience of college life (+ life in general) has been damaged in some way by this run-in with her two white ‘friends.’   At the very least, she has a new awareness of that her college campus is just a little less ‘safe’ from racism than it was before.  In some ways, it’s not surprising that this African American student’s story is not being reported.  As critical race scholars have pointed out, the ‘victims’ story is almost never told. Our understanding of “free speech” shifts when we listen to these stories.

In 2003, the Supreme Court of the U.S. ruled that a burning cross is *NOT* protected speech (Virginia v. Black). Part of that ruling declared that a “burning cross has no value in a democracy” because it is not meant to be a discussion, but it’s a symbol meant to racially terrorize a group of people.  (Today, 14 states have anti-cross burning laws.)   So, not all speech counts as “protected speech,” and the Supreme Court has already ruled that racist speech in the form of a burning cross, can be ruled illegal.   Given the rise of social media, the question becomes: what constitutes a burning cross in the digital era?

I think what those white girls did on FB was akin to cross burning in the digital era.   That kind of speech is harmful and it has no value for democracy.

There are real, material consequences from racism.  Children who experience racial discrimination feel psychological stress that may lead to depression.   Likewise, there are real, material consequences from  actions that seem to be exclusively digital. The tragic case of Phoebe Prince, who was harassed online and offline (and called an “Irish slut”) and then took her own life is a case in point.  Perhaps not surprisingly, minority college students report more experiences of online bias than do whites.

Yet, whites like these two white college students at UM-D, say overtly racist online and very few step up to challenge them because of misplaced belief in what kind of speech the First Amendment protects.  Americans are quick to say “free speech” (1st amendment) is an ideal that trumps equal protection under the law (14th amendment), but most other democracies see “speech” and “equal protection” as two values that always need to be balanced against each other.   I discuss this argument at length in my book Cyber Racism – which I wrote in many ways as challenge to (white) liberal friends who often seem hamstrung by misunderstandings of the first amendment and free speech.  The solution is not to abandon free speech as principle, but to shift the discussion to a consideration for how we balance the 1st and 14th amendments, balance between free speech and equal protection.

Given this re-framing of “free speech,” it seems clear to me that a college campus should be a place where we want to protect all of our students from the intentional infliction of emotional distress at the same time we encourage a lively exchange of ideas.

Colorblindness Linked to Racism Online and Off

• • cyber racism, discrimination, health, social networking sites

An important and path breaking new study links colorblind racial ideology to racism online and off.  The study, by Brendesha Tynes, a professor of educational psychology and of African American studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Suzanne L. Markoe of the University of California, Los Angeles, is published in the March issue of Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.

The study, which examined the relationship between responses to racial theme party images on social networking sites and a color-blind racial ideology,  found that white students and those who rated highly in color-blind racial attitudes were more likely not to be offended by images from racially themed parties.  In other words, the more “color-blind” someone was, the less likely they would be to find parties at which attendees dressed and acted as caricatures of racial stereotypes (e.g., photos of students dressed in blackface make-up attending a “gangsta party” to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day) offensive.

To conduct the study, Tynes and Markoe showed 217 ethnically diverse college students images from racially themed parties and prompted them to respond as if they were writing on a friend’s Facebook or MySpace page.   Fifty-eight percent of African-Americans were unequivocally bothered by the images, compared with only 21 percent of whites. The majority of white respondents (41 percent) were in the bothered-ambivalent group, and 24 percent were in the not bothered-ambivalent group. n the written response portion of the study, the responses ranged from approval and nonchalance (“OMG!! I can’t believe you guys would think of that!!! Horrible … but kinda funny not gonna lie”) to mild outrage (“This is obscenely offensive”).

The students also were asked questions about their attitudes toward racial privilege, institutional discrimination and racial issues. Those who scored higher on the measure were more likely to hold color-blind racial attitudes, and were more likely to be ambivalent or not bothered by the race party photos.  Respondents low in racial color-blindness were much more vocal in expressing their displeasure and opposition to these images, and would even go so far as to “de-friend” someone over posting those images.

Tynes’ research also revealed an incongruence of reactions among white students that she’s dubbed “Facebook face,” which she explains in an interview:

“To their friends, they would express mild approval of the party photos or just not discuss race,” Tynes said. “But in private, in a reaction that they thought their friends wouldn’t see, some students would let us know that they thought the image was racist or that it angered them. We think that it’s because whites have been socialized not to talk about race.”

According to Tynes, a color-blind racial attitude is the prevailing racial ideology of the post-Civil Rights era, and is the view that seeing race is inherently wrong:

“If you subscribe to a color-blind racial ideology, you don’t think that race or racism exists, or that it should exist. You are more likely to think that people who talk about race and racism are the ones who perpetuate it. You think that racial problems are just isolated incidents and that people need to get over it and move on. You’re also not very likely to support affirmative action, and probably have a lower multi-cultural competence.”

Since a color-blind racial ideology is associated with endorsement of the racial theme party photos, Tynes says that mandatory courses on issues of racism and multicultural competence are necessary for students from elementary school through college.

Tynes, who recently was awarded a $1.4 million grant to study the effects of online racial discrimination by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said that along with the role children and adolescents play in producing online hate, her inspiration for the study was the numerous racially themed parties that occurred on college campuses across the country in 2007 and the resultant blowback when images from the parties were posted on Facebook and MySpace.