Race in Cyberspace(Interesting Article)

Race in Cyberspace

By Maurice Berger
University of Pennsylvania law professor Lani Guinier recently proposed that racism in the United States might be alleviated by an ongoing national conversation on the issue. She argues that as the debates over affirmative action, quotas, welfare, and crime grow increasingly polarized and destructive, race becomes a "four-letter word."

"We don't live next door to each other," Guinier observes. "We don't go to school together. We don't even watch the same television shows." A half-century after the end of Jim Crow segregation, we are still a nation divided - a country whose people rarely talk to each other about the most explosive political issue of our time.

Guinier's point begs an obvious question: Is it possible for a consensus-building dialog to exist with our vast racial, ethnic, regional, and cultural differences, when even the English we speak varies from community to community? The models for such dialog already exist - the digital revolution provides a viable starting point. With the support and sponsorship of the Whitney Museum of American Art, some people put the medium to the test last summer when they participated in an online conference devoted entirely to race. Echo, a New York-based BBS, facilitated this robust, four-month discussion, a favorable alternative at a time when face-to-face communication is so difficult - geographically, politically, and emotionally.

Though the experience wasn't always pleasant (participants frequently vented, argued, and, in some cases, deserted), talk repeatedly turned to the kind of hot-button issues that rarely come up in polite conversation: money, quotas, resentment, guilt, the "failure" of integration, black separatism, white belligerence, black rage, racial tension, and white moral responsibility for slavery and discrimination.

Debate was honest. White participants expressed resentment at being put in the position of oppressor: "I would be interested in knowing," wrote a male artist, "what kind of power someone like me, who has trouble paying his rent, has, and how that relates to my 'whiteness.'" Others squirmed when confronted head-on with the petty stupidity of establishment thinking: a prominent white cultural critic asserted that most successful black, Latino, and Asian-American artists were "losers" propped up by institutional quotas. One African-American man painfully described how women clutch their purses whenever he comes into view on the street. As in real life, many of the white participants avoided, or entirely ignored, the posts of African Americans.
While the conference at times seemed like a bunch of mostly white people indulging in an abstract-thinking free-for-all, discussion was more often astonishingly naked, real, and instructive, allowing everyone present to better understand the ignorance and fear that fuel our collective racial paranoia and turn us on each other.

The Whitney conference shows us how the unique characteristics of online communication can push the envelope of hard-edged race talk. The word-driven structure of the BBS and chat forums, the anonymity, and the presence of lurkers set a unique stage. Participants don't always know who is listening or speaking - a circumstance that forces some to more carefully consider (and possibly learn from) the discussion. But a danger exists. While people posting in the Whitney conference were surprisingly polite, many others on the Net opt to throw civility to the wind. However, in the context of race, the dreaded flame may teach us something: how else would we hear the irrationalities that pass through others' lips when they think they are speaking in confidence? Distortional, inflammatory, or inexact language - which spurs racist myths and paranoia - often comes across as the bullshit it really is when spelled out onscreen.
But what if such online conversations are not particularly cross-cultural? How do we work around a medium that's vastly white, middle-class, and male? These demographics will no doubt change. But more immediately, the Whitney exchange proved that even one black, Latino, Native American, or Asian-American participant can act as a catalyst for substantive online dialog.

Aside from the bigoted remarks uttered when no people of color are around, white Americans too rarely talk to each other about race. Online or off, this is a real problem, one that screams the need for dialog within the urban and suburban middle-class white communities that have traditionally been most resistant to this discussion - a point repeatedly made by prominent African-American cultural critics. Undoing centuries of ingrained myths and biases will not be easy. But if whites don't first engage in this dialog with one another, we may never get to the national conversation Guinier proposes.

- Maurice Berger (berger@echonyc.com) is a senior fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics of the New School for Social Research in New York.