When I was reading the second article in this weeks reading (sorry the name escapes me- was written by the Korean/American guy who used a black avatar online) one of the things he said got me thinking.
He was talking about a university (I think) who has introduced policy to forbid any racial identification on any of its online services. The author identified the problem with doing this in that it would 'silence' an aspect of many users of non-white race (I hate using that word by the way, its so Victorian and problematic) who define their identity, at least in part, by their background.
My ethnicity is Scottish and English aka: white, so the issues of race online have never occured to me before.
But I wonder if anyone on this blog with an ethnic background easily identified by either name or appearance, would like to offer an opinion- if you were a member of this university, would it be nice sometimes to be race-anonymous? Would you enjoy not having to worry about the issues that arise from what the author described as unconcious racial profiling, or would you resent the censorship that doesn't affect your fellow white students (as they are probably complicit in the 'whiteness=assumed' camp) ????????
In response to Therese's question, I do believe that whiteness is assumed unless otherwise stated, although this depends on what kind of site you are on. That was interesting about the Hong Kong site in the first article-that despite it being a HK site, the 'native' (another problematic word) Chinese were scorned and writers were judged on their proficiency in English- talk about cultural cringe!
Anyway that is the end of my rambling monlogue. Any thoughts?
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6 comments:
This is very interesting indeed. I think it would be useful to be race-anonymous in the uni as I believe that stereotypes sometimes tag along with the racial categorization like an annoying ball-and-chain. In fact, I feel that the mere idea of racial profiling is somewhat disturbing.
Though I'm of a Malay/Javanese ethnicity, I have to admit that my name is still considered to be atypical in my community (or anywhere else for that matter). I'm not sure if it's considered to be ethnic enough to be culturally indentified. I mean the first thing that usually comes to mind would be the Loch Ness Monster, not racial-profiling. (Hey, maybe people think that I'm Scottish as well!) Anyway, this whole issue makes me wonder whether racial classification even matter in the first place in terms of administration. Perhaps, it would be best that the idea be eradicated.
However, there's still this nagging thought at the back of my head. Coming from Asia where ethnic cultures are deemed extremely important by the society, I feel as though I would be undermining my cultural identity by being race-anonymous. So I'm stumped. =\
I'm white, of an English background, but I wanted to really briefly think about the concept of a non-racial online policy. It just seems like such a poor effort, if that makes sense. Instead of addressing issues of racism within the school and trying to diminish racial prejudice, they just instead don't allow people to "have" a race?
If people are racist, they're going to be racist whether or not they know the ethnicity of someone they're talking to online. Pretending race doesn't exist, being "colourblind" or whatever, doesn't solve any problems, if anything, it allows problems to go unchecked if we're just going to ignore the issues of race and thus racism.
Thats interesting Nessi, I actually assumed your name was a nickname, for Vanessa or something :P so I certainly didn't identify it as ethnic.
And I can imagine that like Alex said, not letting you "have" a race would be frustrating and undermining.
Alex, I think you are so right when you say that making everyone race-anonymous is really not addressing the bigger issue.
I agree with Alex that trying to abolish race online is pointless, and doesn't get to the root of the problem. People will still be racist; they just won't know who to be racist toward. It is avoiding the issue, not solving anything.
Nessi's comments are interesting. I guess the best way to reconcile the two sides of the question, as she portrays them, is to allow people to present a racial identity if they wish to, but to make the infrastructure completely neutral - so that people are anonymous by default, but can choose to reveal details if they want to.
I do think the Internet can be helpful in terms of "race relations" - and it's partly because whiteness is assumed. (I know this was mentioned somewhere along the line, but I can't remember whether it was in one of the readings or in the lecture or somewhere else.) If a racist person becomes friendly with someone of another "race" online, and then discovers that person's identity, it might help to change the racist person's prejudices. This is possible because of the anonymity of the Internet - the racist person would almost certainly never have got to know the other person offline, because his/her prejudices would have got in the way. (This all sounds very jolly. Unfortunately I don't think it works that way most of the time - but it must sometimes.)
I find myself in agreement with Alex (and most other people it seems) on the point of being 'colourblind' doesn't solve any problems. It might help solve the problem of targeted racism at specific people, but that seems about it - I'm guessing that's why the system was introduced?
In emily's comment, I think whiteness assumed/race relations really depends on the type of community. I think the environment would have to be a fairly mature one, or else noone's going to be impressing anyone with their race-anonymous thoughts! If that even makes sense haha
The maturity of the community probably does have something to do with it, in that more mature people might be more likely to question their prejudices after encountering someone they are prejudiced against. I don't think it's all to do with maturity level, though. Communities that I would consider very immature still have systems of worth and hierarchy - ways of deciding who's "cool" or whatever - and if one of the "cool" people turned out to be someone other members might be prejudiced against, that could still destabilise prejudices.
It just occurred to me the whole idea of abolishing race is very normalising - very "white", in a way. I think that sometimes we "whites", still being the dominant "race", trivialise race issues. Now that we discovered there is no biological basis for race, we tend to assume that race isn't real, that it has no existence whatsoever. (I think this is partly because of the dominance of science in Western thought - if it isn't scientific, it just isn't anything at all.) But race still exists as an idea, and whether we realise it or not, we deal with it and its effects every day. Even people who condemn racism and sincerely believe that all humans are equal sometimes behave in racist ways. Racist ideas can be so ingrained in our culture that we perpetuate them without even realising we are, if that makes sense.
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