By Arturo R. García

Just when you thought Satoshi Kanazawa had wrapped up Tone-Deaf Article Of The Year honors for 2011, Forbes’ Gene Marks sauntered his way into consideration Monday with “If I Were A Poor Black Kid,” which spun a speech by President Obama on economic inequality into a privilege-fest with bon mots like these, emphasis mine:

If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their best. And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities. Getting good grades is the key to having more options. With good grades you can choose different, better paths. If you do poorly in school, particularly in a lousy school, you’re severely limiting the limited opportunities you have.

Somehow Forbes chose not to tag the bit about good grades as BREAKING NEWS. But maybe Marks’ editors didn’t want to overshadow the moment when he breaks it down even further than the President. That whole Occupy business? Totally barking up the wrong tree:

President Obama was right in his speech last week. The division between rich and poor is a national problem. But the biggest challenge we face isn’t inequality. It’s ignorance. So many kids from West Philadelphia don’t even know these opportunities exist for them. Many come from single-parent families whose mom or dad (or in many cases their grand mom) is working two jobs to survive and are just (understandably) too plain tired to do anything else in the few short hours they’re home. Many have teachers who are overburdened and too stressed to find the time to help every kid that needs it. Many of these kids don’t have the brains to figure this out themselves – like my kids. Except that my kids are just lucky enough to have parents and a well-funded school system around to push them in the right direction.

And about Prof. Melissa Harris-Perry thinking Marks’ column sounded like something out of The Onion? Well, she’s not wrong:

You know, it occurs to me that you don’t even live in America. And I’ve got to know, what the heck are you doing living in Sri Lanka? What do they have there? Camels? Rugs? Well, I can tell you one thing they don’t have: 100 percent grade-A American opportunity.

America is the land of milk and honey. You can probably catch a flight here from Sri Lanka for as little as $2,500 if you shop around. So what’s keeping you? Okay, I can imagine how it is: you live in a back alley and you eat garbage. And maybe you don’t have the liquid capital to outlay $2,500 on a luxury-like first-class airfare to the U.S. Well, you can always fly coach for about a third of first-class fare, and if worst comes to worst, put it on the plastic. As long as you pay it off as quickly as you can, the interest won’t cramp your style. (See Tip #1.)

It should also be noted that, as, Talking Point Memo’s Callie Schweitzer pointed out, Marks has also applied his “wisdom” to gender-equality issues in the workplace:

Women also have more personal and social pressures than men. And this affects their ability to further their careers and get the experience they need to become good managers. It’s common today for families to have two working parents. But let’s admit it, when little Johnny gets sick at school who’s the first person that’s usually called? When a child is up at night coughing, which parent is staying up with her? When the plumber has to make an emergency morning visit, who’s generally staying at home to deal with it?

It’s usually mom. And even if she has a full time job too.

When my wife and I were younger and our baby would cry in the middle of the night I would put a pillow…over my head. That stopped the crying for sure. My wife (who was working full time by the way) was the one who got out of bed to care for the child. Yes, I was an ass. I’m not saying that many dads don’t pitch in or try to do their fair share. But as much as women have achieved in earning their equality, there are still some age old cultural habits that won’t die. Children need their mommies. And most moms I know, whether they have a full time job or not, want to be there for their child. I know plenty of women who admit they struggle with this instinctual tug on their gut. Men don’t have this kind of instinctual tug. Let’s face it: unless there’s beer involved, men don’t have many instincts at all. We figure our wives will ultimately handle these things. And in many cases, they just do.

I could go on and on, and but, you know – beer. More reaction from around the ‘Net under the cut.

In other words, there’s more to getting a foot-hold in middle class than simply knowing how to use Google Scholar. There are a number of complex and tangle-ly mazes to maneuver when one is climbing up the socioeconomic ladder. Working hard is important; but let’s not be naïve. Gene Marks gives no real mention of the hard road ahead it will be for this kids like – access to a full range of technology, transportation to these those fancy-pants magnet schools. And what about supplies, equipment, oh and perquisite education just not offered at those lousy public schools. You see, no matter how hard a kid tries, when the smartest student from a poor-functioning school district walks into my freshman biology class, I can tell. And from day one, she or he is playing catch-up with the kids who attended those private or suburban school districts.
- DN Lee, Scientific American

Everything about Marks’ stupid, stupid essay assumes as unchanging truth that a poor person will have to work ridiculously hard in order to have a future where they are not poor, and this is the root of the problem that Marks not only doesn’t address but asserts is just not that big a deal in his preamble when, after applauding Barack Obama for talking about income inequality, claims that the superrich aren’t getting vastly more than their fair share. Because there’s nothing wrong with expecting someone to work hard to rise above their current status. But there’s plenty wrong with expecting kids to load themselves to the bone with work in order to have a chance to rise above their current status.5 He’s willing to pay lip service to the idea that inequality is wrong, but he’s not willing to suggest that something be done to address the problem of inequality. It’s just another hurdle for poor black kids to jump, and he’s ever so gracious to admit that he, Gene Marks, did not have to jump these hurdles – and that’s just how it is. Tough luck, poor black kids! Those of you who cannot do these incredible and amazing things to struggle upwards, well, there’s always McDonald’s.
- Christopher Bird, MightyGodKing.com

We Negroes are familiar with this particular brand of help. The #WhiteLove™ style of caring. Movies love to show how, when a white person with an open mind shows up and deals with poor blacks, their lives are magically changed. As I read this piece, I sighed to myself and mumbled, “White liberals.”

Please stop your furious typing. I’m not claiming that all white liberals are as completely clueless as Mr. Marks. I’m not even sure that Mr. Marks is, in fact, liberal — but this brand of “help” normally comes wrapped in an “I’m here with you, man! I understand your pain” bow that is purchased at your nearest “Awesome Liberals Totally Get It” gift shop. It’s the “Let me help you help you” brand of awesome.
- Elon James White, The Root

Excuse me Mr. Marks, while I understand and somewhat agree with your position, when was the last time you heard of Black kindergartners in inner-city Chicago receiving iPads? I’ve got all day.

He goes on to say that poor black children need to try their hardest to research nationally recognized magnet schools in hopes to attend. The accelerated learning material will put them on the track to college and higher learning.

Um, once more. I don’t know a child– white, Black, or otherwise– researching schools to attend in hopes of a better tomorrow. They would much rather be out playing with friends or watching cartoons, ignorant to the fact that the educational gap is indeed widening.
- Camille Travis, Uptown Magazine

If I was a rich white dude I would first and most importantly work to make sure I actually saw what it’s like to live as a poor black kid myself before I wrote a condescending column about how we should solve “our” problems. I would make it my #1 priority to spend some actual time with a working-class black family. Obviously, I wouldn’t know any personally, but I’d outreach to a social services program or an inner city school for help finding one willing to let me talk to them. Even the most privileged and obtuse person can look up the name of a charitable nonprofit in the phone book. And if you’re a technology columnist and business consultant, you’ll have even more resources: You can use Google!

Getting firsthand insights is the key to writing an informed column. By seeing and talking to actual people facing the actual situation you’re covering, you can choose to pen a different, better piece. If you choose to give advice about poverty from the comfort of your heated office, behind your expensive computer, in your ergonomic Aeron chair, you’re severely increasing the chances that you’ll look like an arrogant, condescending jerk.

And I would use the contacts available to me as a columnist for a magazine for rich white dudes. My school teacher says that columnists usually have or can find all kinds of stuff online these days. That’s because (and sadly) it’s oftentimes the only way that lazy columnists who don’t want to do their own reporting can get data to inform their opinions.
- Jeff Yang, WNYC

There’s plenty of good research on the subject of team performance that shows that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many different kinds of tasks. The problem is that this research doesn’t argue for demographic diversity, but rather for a diversity of perspectives. So, again, racial or gender diversity is not an end in itself. But we have to ask ourselves: if teams are consistently being put together with homogeneous demographics, what are the odds that they also will contain a diversity of perspectives? Shouldn’t we be worried that the same selection process that produces homogenous results in one area might be accidentally doing the same in the area that we care about (but that is harder to measure)?

Does that mean that the racism theory is necessarily correct? I don’t think so. I’ve certainly heard my share of sexist and racist jokes in Silicon Valley, but hardly enough to believe that people like Michael Arrington or Paul Graham are lying when they say that they are colorblind. I think that – in the absence of any counterevidence – we should take them at their word. Besides, we don’t need racism to explain these results. Now that we’ve clarified the question to be “how do we build a meritocratic selection process?” we can look at a wealth of research that has been done in this area.

And there’s good news here. Wherever selection processes have been studied scientifically, errors have been found. These errors are called “implicit bias” in the research literature, which causes a lot of confusion, because the word “bias” connotes malevolence. But let’s leave that connotation behind – we’re entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers, for goodness’ sake. We can talk about bias like grownups.

And what the grownups have discovered, through painstaking research, is that it is extremely easy for systems to become biased, even if none of the individual people in those systems intends to be biased. This is partly a cognitive problem, that people harbor unconscious bias, and partly an organizational problem, that even a collection of unbiased actors can work together to accidentally create a biased system. And when those systems are examined scientifically, they can be reformed to reduce their bias.

- From “Racism and Meritocracy,” by Scott Ries.

I really, really wanted to like CNN’s Black in America 4: The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley (which premiered last night) as well as Miss Representation, a documentary currently airing on OWN. Both, however, left me feeling the same way, which looks something like this:

A couple of synopses before I state why I felt this way:

Black in America 4 explores the rarely discussed facts and stories of Black people in digital technology, especially those who are inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Host Soledad O’Brien frames this through the stories of eight African American entrepreneurs who move into together as part of digital business owners Angela Benton’s and Wayne Sutton’s NewME Accelerator program, which provides Black entrepreneurs time and (relative) quiet space—and possible connections with venture capitalists—for their business ideas.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s Miss Representation connects some of the dots between the stats, the personal stories, and media images about women and how those images affect not only those in the media— Margaret Cho recounts the fatphobia and other drama around her 1994 comedy All American Girl — but also those consuming the media, meaning the rest of us.

Now, I know that both shows are, respectively, very much Black Studies and Women’s Studies 101, presented as and for those who may know very little to nothing about either Black tech innovators and owners or media literacy and feminism. So, I can see both try to provide a “hook” for their audiences with that in mind. However, the way their respective creative teams frame their stories does both topics a disservice.

When I asked O’Brien about the aim of this installment at a preview screening, she said, “First of all, [Blacks] are clearly using the technology, but we’re not innovating the technology. And Silicon Valley keeps saying how colorblind it is. So, this part of the series examines that statement.”

Watching BiA4, I felt like I was watching O’Brien trying to mash a news report with a reality show. (“Watch what happens when tech-y Black folks get real…with Soledad O’Brien!”) I can understand that the NewME Accelerator was a good (and, from a seeing-news-as-a-business standpoint, a fiscally feasible way) for CNN to gather a group of Black tech business owners (and the non-Black people who attempt to help and/or comment on them) to tell a relatable narrative about the dearth of Black people in the field.  (BiA4 states early on that less than 1% of digital entrepreneurs are Black. The majority, it says, are white, young, Ivy League and first-tier university drop-outs, which, as pointed out in the post-screening Q&A screening I attended, is a privilege unto itself as far as starting businesses.) But I actually think a better way to tell both stories is to decouple them. If I could reconstruct the story, I would have had O’Brien, say, follow one or two Black digital entrepreneurs in depth as they attempted to get investors and utilized Benton and Sutton as pundits— along with angel investor/philanthropist Mitch Kapor, who directly refutes Michael Arrington’s claim of the digital ownership as “meritorious.” Or I would have followed the NewME Accelerator crew as the main subjects of a full-length documentary to air on CNN.

Also, another questionable point is how Asians and Asian Americans are considered in this report. The show starts off by saying that the tech-innovation worlds are “white and Asian.” Though the presence of Asians and Asian Americans should not lead to Arrington’s erroneous conclusion that the tech world is, therefore, “colorblind,” the presence of Asian and Asian Americans shouldn’t be discounted as failing to bring racial diversity to tech communities. The more subtle equation BiA4 makes, however, is “Black=racial diversity.”

At least BiA4 addresses, albeit imperfectly, race and racism in the tech field, Miss Representation — for all of the visually racial diversity (you see Cho, former Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice, Dreamworlds director Sut Jhally, media-literacy advocate Malkia Cyril, and Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker, among others) — fails to talk about the issue of race and racism. When I asked why at a post-screening Q&A, the response was “We only had 90 minutes, though we’re planning a second movie to deal with race.” (Refer to image at top of this post.)

However, there were places in the film where race and racism could be mentioned, and it would have taken about 30 seconds. For example, a young Black woman talks about her hair and how media images make her feel about it. The narrator could easily say something like, “Far too many images we see in the media are of white women swinging long, flowing hair. Imagine how that would make a woman of color, whose hair may not do that, feel?”

I timed it: the quote took all of 15 seconds to read out loud. (I’ll be generous and give it about 30 seconds to account for dramatic voiceover.) Or even acknowledge that the majority of media images—both in the film and in entertainment itself, from news to shows to porn—are mostly of white women as both idealized and in variety of roles…and these are, quite a bit of the time, functioning in tandem. Again, all of a thirty-second voiceover or a statistic that could be one of many the film uses to further its argument on how the media hurts women and other people. The silence about race (actress Rosario Dawson is the only person who explicitly mentions “people of color”) — as well as class, gender identity, sexual identity, and  and physical ability, though the film does give a nod at how the media, especially television, fails to acknowledge women above the age of 35 as an audience or as characters — flattens the documentary’s discussion about women to the category of “woman,” as if female-presenting people all suffer from media images the same way. Of course, we don’t.

And I just quite can’t with Black in America 4 and Miss Representation.

Image credit: Bossip

By Arturo R. García

There’s been something ugly brewing in Silicon Valley, and now it’s starting to seep to the surface, following preview screenings for Soledad O’Brien’s latest CNN special.

The clip up top is an excerpt from her interview with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. The interview was taped in July, and is slated to air during the Nov. 13 episode of her Black In America documentary series focusing on the eight black entrepreneurs taking part in the NewMe Accelerator program.

In a commercial for the show, Arrington describes Silicon Valley as “a white and Asian world,” and in the interview, he goes so far as to tell O’Brien that he doesn’t know any black entrepreneurs.

Except that he really did. And Arrington’s been digging himself – and seemingly the tech industry around him – into a deeper hole ever since.

Here’s a transcript of the clip:

O’Brien: Who would you say is the Number 1 black technology entrepreneur?
Arrington: You know, that’s a weird question. Who would you say is the Number 1 black technology -
O’Brien: I don’t cover technology.
Arrington: I’m trying to think of any black CEOs in Silicon Valley, and I’m not even coming up with any.
O’Brien: Okay, so the entrepreneurs – the people who are making companies.
Arrington: I don’t know a single black entrepreneur.
O’Brien: And you cover the industry.
Arrington: I mean, there aren’t -
O’Brien: What does that say?
Arrington: It means there just aren’t any. It’s not a perfect meritocracy, but generally speaking, it doesn’t matter what your education is, it doesn’t matter who your parents are here. You can become very successful, based purely on your brain size and how you use it.

According to CNN’s Laurie Siegall, however, Arrington did correct himself at another point in the interview, telling O’Brien about one black entrepreneur who launched his company at a TechCrunch Disrupt event, at Arrington’s urging:

“His startup’s really cool,” Arrington said. “But he could’ve launched a clown show on stage, and I would’ve put him up there, absolutely. I think it’s the first time we’ve had an African-American [be] the sole founder.”

Arrington might be surprised to know, then, that there happens to be (gasp!) more than one black person running their own company in Silicon Valley, and as ZD Net’s Violet Blue has reported, they are furious with Arrington over his comments. One of them, consultant Adria Richards, knows who he was referring to:

The guy he had on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, he’s known for several years…and he basically called him a clown. Clarence Wooten sold his company, ImageCafe, for $23 million to Network Solutions in 1999, that’s over 10 years before Arrington sold TechCrunch to AOL for the same amount.

I’ve now likened it to Southern White male slave owner saying he has no idea why there are mixed babies cropping up on this plantation even though he damn well knows he’s been creeping down to the sheds at night.

Arrington has since compounded his gaffe on various online platforms, thanks to tweets like these:

And on his blog, where he uncorked this doozy of self-congratulation:

See, my brain database doesn’t categorize people in terms of skin color. Or hair color. Or sexual orientation. When I queried that database, under stressful circumstances, I got zero results.

That kind of statement would barely sound cute coming from a kid cosplaying a Cylon. Coming from a man who makes his living writing about and investing in the tech industry, it sounds skeevy and arrogant at best. And according to Mitch Kapor – an investor in NewMe, who has also been involved in developing seminal programs ranging from Lotus 1-2-3 to UUNET to the Mozilla Foundation to the company behind Second Life – it’s also, to borrow Arrington’s techno-babble, working from a deeply corrupted operating system:

A recent study, The Tilted Playing Field, indicates there are practices in recruiting, promotion, and retention within the IT sector which are problematic for women and under-represented people of color, and reduce their participation. Specific experiences of exclusion, bullying, difficulty balancing work/family are reported at much higher rates by underrepresented groups — i.e African Americans, Latina/o/s, and women of all backgrounds. Another vicious cycle at play. “If I’m not going to be valued or respected, then I’m outta here.” Meanwhile, Caucasian and Asian male engineers and managers report that their companies spend the right amount of time on diversity.

Silicon Valley likes to think it operates as a pure meritocracy, e.g., it’s the best teams and ideas which get funded. In practice, as luminaries from John Doerr to Ron Conway acknowledge, key decisions are often guided by a combination of pattern-matching based on superficial characteristics and the network of people you already know. More on this here and here.

If “young, white, geeky, and Stanford/Harvard/MIT dropout”, then “invest”, is a kind of mental shortcut that is anything but objective. This is mirror-tocracy not meritocracy.

Being meritocratic is a really worthy aspiration, but will require active mitigation of individual and organizational bias. The operation of hidden bias in our cognitive apparatus is a well-documented phenomenon in neuroscience. We may think we are acting rationally and objectively, but our brains deceive us.

Arrington has also accused CNN and O’Brien of sandbagging him, writing that the network did not mention race in its’ original interview request from O’Brien’s producer for Black In America, Kimberly Arp Babbit, which read in part:

We are producing, what we think is the first major broadcast news documentary on the Silicon Valley accelerator phenomenon and start-up culture. In this culture, Michael Arrington is God and TechCrunch is the bible.

The CNN “In America” documentary unit, led by special correspondent and anchor Soledad O’Brien, has produced a number of award winning long form documentaries.

This particular documentary will be told through the experience of a group of digital entrepreneurs who travel to Silicon Valley to chase their dreams.

He also wrote that, when O’Brien asked him if he’d heard of the NewMe program, to which he answered, “Nope. But [Arrington] said that sounded awesome.” Another TechCrunch writer subsequently covered NewMe’s inaugural demo event.

However, O’Brien has posted another e-mail sent to someone working with Arrington sent four days before the interview, at least one of which specifically mentioned NewMe and the program O’Brien was interviewing him for. So either Arrington’s memory storage capacity is limited, or somebody didn’t upload the proper talking points for him. Or maybe, like a lot of people before him, Arrington has only just realized his default setting was on Privileged this whole time, and doesn’t want to fess up to it.

By Guest Contributor Jonathan Vogeler

This summer, Citibank began running an advertising campaign that features three young men embarking on a project, financed by the bank, to photograph Earth from space, using a weather balloon and off-the-shelf equipment. The advertisement taps several currents of our national mythology – independence, ingenuity, discovery, and superiority in space (which is itself an extension of our glorification of colonial conquest).

This is not an entirely fictional story. Two years ago, Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh, two Asian-American MIT students, made international headlines when they used inexpensive, readily available materials to photograph near-space orbit on a $150 budget. They describe their project here, and received national media coverage.

There is a remarkable visual similarity between the Citibank ad storyboard and the real-life project documented by Lee and Yeh on their blog. But there are a few key differences.

As you can see in the commercial above, the most obvious discrepancy is that Lee and Yeh have been replaced by two young white men and a third who appears to be African-American. Within this group there is also a clear racial dynamic: the white men initiate and execute the project, while their friend drives the vehicle and points appreciatively at their success.

America has a long history of mis-attributing credit to white men. But the specific erasure of Asian-American men is indicative of deep cultural paranoia toward the challenge that Asian-American success poses to white hegemony. If the ad were to feature the real-life heroes of this story, many white Americans may read it, not as a feat of American ingenuity, but a dangerous manifestation of their loss of power. This fear is evidenced both internationally, in apprehension toward the rising economies of Asia, and domestically, as resentment of Asian-American students at elite universities. The narrative of enterprising white men achieving success (with an assist from a person of color) is less threatening, because it reinforces the identity that white American men like to imagine for themselves.

A second, less-apparent difference between the commercial and the real story is the source of funding. Citibank positions itself in the commercial as a benevolent patron of small-scale innovation. You may have the idea, the ad says, but the big banks make it feasible. Therefore, white people have an interest in allying themselves with big banks, in the same way that Citibank is tacitly allying itself with the cultural demands of whiteness.

One of the most inspiring aspects of this story, however, is that Lee and Yeh were able to compete with NASA on a budget of only $150. They did not need a bank loan; their seed money was a $200 donation. As they describe it, the specific barrier that they faced was a lack of access to resources. They simply could not afford the expensive equipment that would be needed for near-space photography (and presumably no bank would have lended them the money). Their accomplishment was not only an expansion of scientific knowledge, but the pioneering of a technique that allowed them and others who imitate them to overcome the financial obstacles that restrict scientific access.

The story of ordinary people achieving their goals by tapping small donations and economizing is just as threatening to banks as Asian space-flight is to many white Americans. So this inspiring all-American tale of hard work and ingenuity is rewritten as an alliance between white hegemony and the banking system. Sadly, this the only version of the story that most Americans will ever hear.

In some ways, The Monogamy Experiment is very much a comedy “in the moment.” Like many modern comedies, it hinges on ultra-dry awkwardness – so much it almost seems like a Britcom at times. And there’s a few compelling elements to this webseries, but five episodes in, it’s still not quite clear how they all fit together.

The trailer, and slight spoilers, are under the cut.

The show’s first episode introduces us to Amy (Amy Rider) and Nigel (Brayden Pierce) in home-movie style, in the aftermath of a caffeine malfunction instigated by an (unsuccessful) wedding proposal. As an unseen friend films the scene, Amy is inspired to begin a documentary on monogamy.

“I think the whole reason why I said no is because I don’t really believe in monogamy,” she explains. “I was told my whole life that monogamy is, like, a lie. My friends are all telling me that I shouldn’t get married, that I’m too young or something.” In the midst of her epiphany, the most refreshing thing about the show comes out right away: TME is build around an interracial relationship, but it’s not strictly about interracial dating – at least not for our protagonists.

Amy’s idea gains another layer not long after the spill, when a therapist (Tohoru Masamune) recommends the couple open their relationship for a month – he wants Amy and Nigel to stop sleeping with each other for 30 days, while still pursuing “intimacy” with other parties. Pierce and Rider do a good job showing us Amy and Nigel’s emotional shift here, a change that accelerates once Amy comes across an early prospect to, uh, work out her issues on.

Since then, most of the series has focused on Amy’s misadventures in dating, which have been complicated both by the kinds of guys you’d see in reader Caitlin’s video and her assistant (Liisa Evastina), who makes a costly error on her online dating profile. For the most part, Rider and company play it with the right amount of deadpan, even if one joke veered perilously close to Hangover II territory.

All the while, maybe the most compelling part of the show is taking place away from Amy and Nigel. For reasons yet to be explained, Amy is apparently making her documentary in the midst of her trial separation. Footage from a number of interviews are mixed into each episode, and she appears on-camera in a few of them. But while they’re interesting, these mini-segments bring up questions that threaten to disconnect the viewer from the story: is Amy the interviewer the same Amy who came up with the idea? If so, how will the insight from these conversations play into her new dating life? And how did she and her invisible friend wrangle James Kyson-Lee into appearing?

So far the show’s been savvy enough to avoid playing either Amy or Nigel as a villain, but we still haven’t gotten to see Nigel really enjoy his newfound freedom, so that might be about to change. In fact, the upcoming stretch of episodes might be the most crucial to the story, as we will presumably see whether Nigel and Amy “get theirs” with each other or somebody else, and, hopefully, where Amy ends up on her other journey as a budding documentarian.

Over at the Click the Toad Blog, the Chief Toad explains how the MLK Jr. official legacy site was outranked by white supremacists with a good grasp of SEO:

My hands are shaking with anger as I type this. A sick, cowardly, and racist website (hereafter referred to in insult-laced bold type) that trashes the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr is outranking the official Martin Luther King Jr website on Google. I will not provide a link to the racist site, as I will not directly contribute a single visit to them. However, I will show exactly how the official Martin Luther King website (found at http://www.thekingcenter.org) got beaten in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) battle. My dream to improve The King Center‘s SEO and Google Rank may not be as lofty and inspirational as Martin Luther King Jr’s, but I do have a dream. [...]

One of the best ways to beat a web competitor is to look at their metadata and their successful keywords… and then outdo them at their own game. So here is what The Racist Pukes have going on for their SEO (and the official Martin Luther King Jr website could simply borrow and improve upon all of these):

Racist Pukes’ Homepage Title: Martin Luther King Jr. – A True Historical Examination
Racist Pukes’ Meta Description: The truth about Martin Luther King: Includes historical trivia, articles and pictures. A valuable resource for teachers and students alike.
Racist Pukes’ Meta Keywords: Martin Luther King Jr, Civil Rights, Black History, Slavery, Reparations, Kwanzaa, Anti-Defamation League, ADL, anti-Semitism, racism, bigotry, hatred, prejudice, bias, Holocaust, Israel, democracy, terrorism, militia, Jews, Jewish, diversity, anti-Semitic incident, racist, discrimination, Holocaust denial, neo-Nazi, Nazi, Nazis, tolerance, civil rights, Black, extremism, extremist, hate crimes, skinheads, Middle East, Islamic Extremist, education, White supremacy, minority, bias, religious freedom, tolerance, religious right, Martin Luther King Jr., free speech, MLK, school prayer, religion, justice

We often talk about the legacy of civil rights being hijacked to suit the needs of those who would undo those gains in a heartbeat – this is a literal manifestation.

Activists need to up our tech game. Because this is just ridiculous.

(Spotted on Chris Rabb‘s facebook wall)

By Guest Contributor The CVT, cross-posted from CHOP-TENSILS

With the lead-up to Obama’s inauguration, there was a ton of chatter about multi-racial people and what that meant for the future of the U.S., in regards to racial relations and understanding.  (*1)  Some years passed, the 2010 census went down, and now the conversation seems to have reappeared in the public arena.  (*2)

The ideas are nothing new, of course: there are drastically more people claiming a mixed-race identity than ever before, with the numbers expected to continue trending upwards; and somewhere around 2060, the U.S. is expected to be less than 50% white.  The resulting question is deceptively simple – does this mean that we are getting closer to a “post-racial” world, and that, subsequently, racial conflict and inequality is on the downslope?

My simple answer?  Um . . .

Hell no.  And that’s it.

But for those of you who would like a bit more complicated answer, I’ll see what I can do here.

Check the “Multiracial” Box

I’m going to start this all off with a quick tear through some points I’ve mentioned in the past that touch on why current statistics on “mixed-race” folks doesn’t necessarily mean anything in regards to racial understanding or equality.  For those looking for a quicker-read, y’all can just stick to that.

For those looking for a little bit deeper analysis (and why I referenced Facebook in this post), that will come in the last section.  Cool?

Alright, here we go . . .

Statistics.

First off, I know statistics and how people use (or mis-use) them to come to questionable conclusions, and let’s just say that the statistics we’re looking at here are questionable, at best.  (*3)

It’s basically just a matter of sampling – nobody’s going to deny that “multiracial” wasn’t an official option until the last decade or so in  any official data collection attempts.  So the question is – how can we compare current numbers of “multiracial” folks to past numbers, if there are no past numbers?

We can’t.  At least not accurately.  Instead, folks employ all sorts of other statistical methods (all with their own flaws) to extrapolate that data from what they can find from past records.

But past records didn’t allow for “multiracial” individuals.  For all practical purposes, we’ve been talking “one-drop” up until now, so any “mixed” people were “monoracial” back in the day.  Hell – even Obama isn’t acceptably “multiracial” in a lot of folks’ eyes today.  So any guess – no matter how “statistically rigorous” – on how many “multiracial” folks there used to be is just that: a guess.

So yeah – anecdotally-speaking, it seems like there are a lot more mixed folks, but we can’t really prove that.  It’s probably true, but I bet it’s a much smaller increase than everybody’s claiming.

“Mixed kids are a step towards greater overall racial diversity.”

So let’s say there really is a huge increase in mixed folks in the U.S.  Then what?

The bolded statement above?  A huge assumption that’s not necessarily true, either.

Let me give you an example: take a bi-racial (white/Asian) gal.  Say she marries a “mono-racial” white guy and has kids.  In all likelihood, what are those kids going to look like, and how are they going to identify themselves, racially (and be identified)?  Yeah – probably as “white.”

So, in that case, the mixed girl was actually an interim step towards less blood of color in her family’s genepool.  Add to this example the fact that most white-and-”other” mixed folks tend to marry and have kids with other “monoracial” white folks (especially in Asian communities), and it just stretches out the case that mixed kids often lead to less racial diversity on an overall level.

Is this the majority of the cases?  (*4) Maybe, maybe not.  But it’s certainly common enough to dispense with that particular myth, and call into question the drastic increases expected based on current numbers.

“Brazil.”

Brazil is ridiculously mixed (between 40 and 50% of the population).  There are specific names for many of the different racial combinations possible, because it’s so common.

So Brazil must be “post-racial,” right?  Um.  Not so much.  The racial hierarchy remains the same, color-wise (lightest skin at the top, darkest at the bottom). They just have more names for the “in-between” folks.  Subsequently, there is just as much (or more) racism and conflict, but with more epithets to throw around.

Great.

In the States, Hawaii is the most-mixed State by far, and the extent of racial conflict (kids throwing stones at white people in the street, for instance) and tension definitely competes for the highest in the U.S.

In real life, greater levels of true diversity (ie. not just a couple “token” folks, but more evenly-represented groups) tend to bring on greater levels of conflict.  Because, in those situations, when there is cultural misunderstanding and/or negative interactions, the “majority” doesn’t have the overwhelming numbers to make the “other” folks just “shut up and take it.”  Suddenly, “those minorities” are actually speaking their minds and standing up for themselves on a regular basis – and this shakes things up, obviously.

“We’re all human beings.”

We are.  It’s true.

However, that doesn’t make race “not matter.”

It does mean that some mixed folks have better racial understanding and ability to “see it from both sides.”  It also means that plenty of mixed folks have no f-ing clue, or don’t care, or “don’t want to get involved” just like all the rest of humanity.  Meaning a whole lot more ethnically-ambiguous folks like me doesn’t necessarily suggest that “understanding” is going to increase at all. 

And finally . . . “The Social Network”

So I don’t agree with the pundits.  I don’t think the numbers mean what other folks want them to mean.  Great.

That said, it’s more than that.  Because I worry about how people are using these numbers.  How people are talking about the “inevitability” of a more-diverse nation, and the subsequent “inevitability” of greater racial understanding as a result.

My problem with that is that it’s so passive, and it completely ignores how social/political change actually happens in the world.

To better understand what I’m getting at, let’s check out Facebook, the newest world superpower:

The most current statistics I can find seem to have Facebook carrying about 250 million users, with the numbers continuing to increase.  (*5)  The site is pretty much omnipresent, as far as modern media goes,  they made a dramatic movie about it that got all sorts of Oscars love, and now folks are claiming Facebook’s responsibility (along with Twitter, of course) in fomenting revolution across the Middle East . . .

Now how the Hell did that all happen?

To state the obvious – they created a social movement, which worked like any other social movement:  First, some guy (or multiple guys – I’m not trying to judge) got an idea and got a bunch of hard-working folks together.  Then, these folks took all sorts of risks and developed a product.  Next, they convinced other folks higher up to take their own risks to fund it and push it out into the world, “early-adopters” took some social risks to get on board, then more folks, bla, bla, bla . . . and then Facebook took over the world.

But was any of it “inevitable”?

Well, let’s look at Facebook about five years ago:  Lots of folks were using their product, they were in the public eye, they were getting a decent chunk of MySpace’s market share.  Other up-and-coming social networks were out there, too, but Facebook was near the top.

So what if the Facebook folks had seen all that and said, “We’ve arrived. We’ve been increasing in size steadily, and if we continue to grow like that, we’re going to be huge in five years.  So let’s just chill on it, leave our product as-is, and wait for the world domination to begin . . .”?

Um.  Right.  That seems patently ridiculous, and it’s obviously not what they did to become the power that they are today.

And yet, with another social trend – that of “increased multi-racial individuals in the States” – we all want to read the statistics and pretend that it’s all going to continue and keep getting better without any extra effort on our part.  Folks want the comfort of thinking, “I don’t have to actively do anything at all, and racial conflict will handle itself – see the numbers?”

As if thousands of individuals (maybe millions) haven’t sacrificed and risked and fought for the last many generations to get to this point.  As if thousands (and millions) more won’t have to fight to keep up the momentum and get beyond this current, still-unequal, state.  As if Facebook could have gotten so huge without “normal” people signing on as active users.

The same applies to the U.S. today.  Everybody got all “rah-rah” and excited about voting for Obama, patted themselves on the back and hit the streets for his victory, and then said, “we arrived.”  And now?  Our lawmakers are more racist (Arizona), classist (Wisconsin), and nationalist (“outsourcing” debates), than any other period in my generation’s lifetimes.

Because Facebook has active users, and Obama got the equivalent of millions signing up for an account (a vote) without ever checking or updating it.  And then everybody gets disappointed with the results?  Please.  The U.S. president only has the power to do what is “safe” or generally acceptable enough to get away with.  And if the general public isn’t doing the work to make “equality” safe or acceptable for the lawmakers to act on . . ?

So.  There are probably more mixed folks in the States.  Meaning more interracial relationships.  Possibly meaning a little bit more racial understanding in the world.  Right now.

But where is it all heading?  That, we can’t know.  No passive numbers or statistics can tell us that.  Only the actions of large numbers of individuals.  Only risk and hard work.

And right now?  While a bunch of us are passively looking at these statistics or patting ourselves on the back for a freaking vote, the Tea Party and Arizona and Wisconsin lawmakers are getting active users ala Facebook.

So great – you signed up for an account.  But now what are you going to do to make your “social network” mean something?

(this article was written by the CVT, who has no affiliation, public or private, with Facebook or any of their people . . .  really)

(*1) I wrote on it back then.  However the writing was, in my opinion, pretty bad, which is why I’m “re-visiting” in this fashion, but if you want to check it out for a laugh, it’s here.

(*2) With articles such as this one from the New York Times.

(*3) I’ve seen some pretty shady “data massaging” in my past work in the field of Psych research.  Sadly, I’ve since learned that that’s pretty standard practice, which is why I’m certain that the majority of scientific “findings” out in the world are complete fabrications.  When results are the only way to get more funding (via grants, etc.), people do what they have to do to get “results.”

(*4) I’m kicking myself here, because I read a great article that had all the numbers on this many years ago, and I haven’t been able to track it back down.

(*5) Unfortunately, I’m not one of those 250 million, cuz I live in China.

Watching black folks on Twitter tells no more about African American culture than watching the forums at Salon or Gawker reveals about white culture. Sure, among certain Twitter groups, black folks relax and use vernacular and call on experiences that are unique to us. But attempting to assign deep cultural meaning to trending topics like #hoodhoe is a reflection of racial bias. We do ourselves no favor by buying into the thinking that topics like this and #itaintrape reveal something particularly significant about black people. Don’t get me wrong, these memes are misogynist. But anyone who has spent more than two seconds online knows that misogyny and sexism are everywhere–a reflection of American…no…world culture, not that of any particular race. Consider the deeply sexist conversation surrounding the Julian Assange sexual assault accusations and the trolling on the #mooreandme hashtag. These were hardly driven by black Twitterati.

If some white people are amazed at what black folks do on Twitter, it is a sign of their own ignorance and prejudice. Williams laments that on the anniversary of the disaster in Haiti, the #haiti hashtag peaked at number 76 on the Twitter trend list, far below a slew of vulgar and sexist tags. But are black people solely to blame for that? Were all the white people on Twitter discussing Haitian relief efforts? Why should black people be more or less ashamed of the idiots among us than people of the majority culture? Why should silly and profane Tweets written by black folks hold more weight than the equally silly and profane Tweets written by everybody else?

I, for one, refuse to be burdened with the actions of @lilduval, some dude I’ve never heard of who created the  #itaintrape meme, nor those of @slimthugga, who waxed yesterday about sleeping with white women in honor of MLK Day.

~~Tami Winfrey Harris, “Rejecting the Notion of “Black People Twitter“

Image credit: Boing Boing (via Portfoli)

The FCC is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a huge merger between Comcast and NBC Universal, which would create a new media mega-corporation.  This has brought quite a bit of controversy over the future of the web, with many digital justice activists protesting the increase of corporate control over the web.

Angry Asian Man reports on an unexpected silver lining: the FCC has proposed that Comcast and NBC must improve diversity if they are going to complete the deal, to ensure minority broadcasters are not left out.  According to ABC News:

Public interest groups have urged the Obama administration to reject the deal. They fear Comcast might charge other cable distributors higher fees to transmit NBC Universal-owned content, leading to higher cable bills, fewer independent programing choices and less competition.

Comcast said in agreements filed with the FCC that it would add four new cable networks either owned or partly owned by African-Americans within eight years if the deal goes through.

It would also expand an existing channel carrying Asian-American programing to more markets, or create a new English-language channel that caters to Asian-American interests.

More diversity on major networks is definitely something to celebrate, but I’m not so sure this is the major step forward as some are quick to claim.

Most of what I’ve heard about the merger has been from the net neutrality aspect.  Back in August, Colorlines broke down why it was so important to keep an eye on Comcast:

The fight started because those scary scenarios about blocking and slowing traffic aren’t merely speculative. In 2005, Comcast blocked its users from sharing BitTorrents, which are popular ways to send and receive large files. The company claimed that it was preventing its users from committing copyright infringement, since the file-sharing platforms are often associated with quick and easy ways to get free music and movies.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) stepped in and ruled that no Internet service provider could block or interfere with user traffic—unless it was for “reasonable network management purposes.” Comcast challenged the ruling and this year a federal court overturned it, finding that the FCC didn’t have the authority to regulate broadband in the first place.

The court ruling has added yet another layer to the debate. The FCC is scrambling to regain its regulatory authority. That authority actually began eroding years ago, when a conservative majority of commissioners ruled that broadband be treated differently from landline phone and TV services, which are seen as essential to every household and therefore subject to federal oversight.

Meanwhile, service providers have argued vehemently against net neutrality regulations, saying that any formal rules would stifle competition and innovation—which would in turn keep prices up and limit broadband expansion into poor and rural communities.

So the issue on the table Tuesday is really a continuation of an earlier move – what right do large service providers have to restrict access for certain users?

The Comcast site even dips into the debate, explaining in a roundabout way that space online is limited, and most companies are making moves to ensure that there will be enough bandwidth for all our phones and devices.  However, they seek to control content providers, with far reaching impacts:

Level 3 Communications, a company that helps Netflix Inc stream videos online, has accused Comcast of charging it unfair fees to deliver content to Comcast subscribers.

(As a Comcast customer – they have a chokehold on my area – I find it interesting this is happening.  On Demand now promotes their movies by saying “Get it 28 days sooner than on Netflix!” so if I was Level 3/Netflix, I’d be pissed too.)

In addition to higher fees for certain types of content, there is the looming threat of “paid prioritization” – essentially the idea that certain content providers can pay more for more access and faster speed, which means smaller sites may be left to fight for the remaining scraps of slower, free bandwidth.

Senator Al Franken is not having it:

Just days before the FCC’s scheduled Tuesday morning vote on net neutrality, Franken blasted Genachowski for offering too many breaks to communications giants. “Let’s be clear. This is not real net neutrality,” the lawmaker said during the rare Saturday session. “This is the first time the FCC has allowed discrimination on the Internet,” he warned, referring to provisions that would let corporations pay for faster transmissions, creating Internet toll lanes.

The proposed rules, he further complained, would allow dominant wireless providers to block access to various applications, such as Google Maps. “I sincerely hope that the FCC will make significant improvements” before the Tuesday vote, he demanded.

While I am thrilled we will get some new programming out of the deal, I don’t feel like that’s a good trade or compromise.  Comcast-NBCU agreed to create the networks within four years.  They have yet to say what type of support the networks will be given, or if they feel any obligation to stick with these networks until they are financially viable.  They also agreed fairly quickly to creating more networks and the formation of “a diversity advisory board” – but the creation of these things has historically been a smokescreen for large corporations to hide behind, not avenues to lasting, institutional change.

The vote on Tuesday is impossible to call – there are too many factors in play.  However, this is one of those decisions that is ripe with unintended consequences, and we should all keep our eyes and ears open.

By Guest Contributor Monique Poirier, cross-posted from Beyond Victoriana

I’m not one for preambles, so let’s get down to brass tacks here. I’m Monique Poirier. I’m a member of the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe. I’m a Steampunk.

When I got into Steampunk several years ago, it didn’t really occur to me to even try to incorporate my cultural identity into my Steampunk presentation; my first Steampunk outfit (worn to Templecon 2009) was cobbled together from my existent goth attire, stuff from the renfaire costume trunk, and a duct-tape corset.

Then I read Jha’s articles at Tor.com. Then I started reading Beyond Victoriana. It was powwow season… and everything just -clicked-. When I attended The Steampunk World’s Fair in May 2010, I made an active effort to incorporate my ethnic identity more visibly in my Steampunk attire.

That’s where things get complicated.

Overcoming The Noble Savage and the Sexy Squaw

Making a deliberate choice to construct my Steampunk attire around Native attire often involves deciding between which pieces are appropriate and which will be recognized by a wide audience as being Native. It means working with and against existent images of What Indians Look Like–and it becomes extra difficult when I have to work against the fact that Native Americans are already assumed in the popular consciousness to be anachronistic. Am I subverting Victoriana-centric Steampunk with my Native attire, or am I just reinforcing the stereotype that Native folks all dress like it’s 1899 all the time because that’s when they stopped existing? Is being a Steampunk Native American just rehashing Indians In Aspic? When I put on a pair of buckskin leggings, or wear bead work that I have spent hours making by hand with skills taught to me by my mother–clothing and jewelry that I’ve also worn to powwows–am I marking myself as Other-Than-European or am I just reinforcing Braids, Beads, and Buckskins?

It comes down to mythology, to narrative, and to what stories we’re telling with the personas we portray and how we present them. Some of the attire I own will never be worn outside of a powwow or tribal gathering. For example, I don’t wear prominent feathers–or any feather at all that look like This as part of my Steampunk attire; I treasure the feathers I’ve actually gained through ceremony and ritual too much to wear them to anything less solemn than a powwow or tribe meeting, and I am not comfortable in making mockup feathers that my character /persona would have similarly earned.

It’s pretty grating, then, to be at a convention and having someone comment, “If you’re trying to look like a Native American, you should incorporate more feathers,”‘ because I do understand where that comment comes from. How do you know that an Indian is and Indian if they’re not in the Hollywood Dress Code attire for Indians? A hard and fast rule I’m going by: “If I ran into another member of my tribe while wearing this here, would I feel the need to explain or apologize for it?” If so, I am not wearing that. Even if it means that I’m losing recognition.

There is a vast and predominantly grossly incorrect mythology surrounding Native Americans. Children in American Public Schools, unless they happen to be from an area that has a very prominent and active Native community (and sometimes even then) are generally spoon-fed the tidy and feel-good Story Of Thanksgiving as their first lesson in Native American Culture–depending on whether or not they’ve already seen Pocahontas and Peter Pan. They generally graduate to Westerns* and various other Hollywood mythologies so that by the time they’re attending cons all on their own they’ve built a distinct expectation of what ‘Native American’ should look like–and if an outfit doesn’t do that, it will not parse as Native American.

Which makes my costuming choices complicated.

Part of the fun of Steampunk is the aspect of alternate history; of deliberate anachronism and the application of alternate timelines and technological developments and the ration of ‘Steam’ to ‘Punk’. It means having the chance to create alternate histories in which Native Americans maintain sociological primacy and control over the North and South American landmass, if we so choose–my own Steampunk persona is an Air Marshall in a timeline in which Tecumseh’s Rebellion was successful and resulted in the creation of a Native American confederacy of nations that holds most of North America, as well as parts of Mexico and several island nations in the Pacific (most notably the Kingdom of Hawaii). She carries a ray gun–and as far as I’m concerned, this is still entirely Native Tech.

Recognizing Native Technologies

Among the issues in creating a Native Steampunk Persona is overcoming the assumption that technological advancement is not something endemic to Native cultures. That any and all advanced technologies utilized by Native Americans must necessarily be adopted and adapted from European ones. Beyond Victoriana #9 does a good job talking about this and has an excellent link list already, so I won’t go into much detail here.

But the gist is this: Native Tech is a real thing, and was a real thing in the 19th century. Contact Effect is a real thing, and any population that’s exposed to a piece of technology is just as likely as any other to reproduce it, to make innovations and modifications on it, and to take it and make it work in the most efficient and useful way for them. If one knows how to make/use rays, and someone introduces the concept of guns, well suddenly one gets the bright idea to develop ray guns, and then does so! If one is already utilizing solar energy in a number of ways, and the concept of electricity and steam power are introduced, one is very likely to pioneer development of photovoltaic cells and solar steam engines–if one doesn’t happen to be kept distracted by being at war or having genocide conducted upon one’s people. Indigenous cultures are just as ripe for internally-controlled industrialization and technological innovation, by themselves and for themselves, as any other population in the 19th-century landscape.

There is no reason other than our own limited and stifled imaginations to assume that Native Americans would not have technologically advanced under their own innovative impetus had the historical cultural interplay been altered. Just look at the technological innovations they’d already given to Europe via contact effect, particularly in the area of biological engineering and materials: Latex rubber and the Vulcanization thereof, for example, is Native technology adapted by Europeans that’s pretty essential to a lot of Steampunk applications. To me that’s the most exciting part of Native Steampunk–thinking about what might have been radically different, and then doing it. Extrapolating and sussing out the historical paths of Native technology and culture as it might have developed through its own industrial and technological revolutions in the 19th century.

Toward a more inclusive Steampunk landscape

So Native Steampunk isn’t easy. It requires forethought and creativity and overcoming a lot of sociocultural baggage.

But isn’t that part of the fun of Steampunk?

I would ADORE seeing other people do it too! It would be incredibly awesome to see someone else rocking some Steampunk wampum jewelry, or steaming up a trade shirt. But the caveat here is that anyone who wants to undertake this really needs to take the time to not do it in an insulting, hurtful way. That means becoming apprised of what stereotypes exist and are hurtful and not using them. Things like NOT wearing warbonnets or face paint, and recognizing cultural appropriation. It means doing your research. If you’re still interested: Go for it! I know only a small handful of Steampunks who also identify as Native. I’d LOVE to hear more voices and see more Native Steampunk costuming. For those seeking research sources, I highly recommend NativeTech and NativeLanguages.org, as well as any of the books listed in Beyond Victoriana #9, most especially Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World.

There’s a lot of directions to move in in Steampunk. It’s still a relatively new genre and one that’s still being defined. We can definite it in inclusive ways if we want to. If we try to. We can do it right if we work hard. Let’s do this.

*So about Westerns. It is a personal thorn in my side that everyone who does recognize that my attire is Native automatically files me under ‘Weird West’ – as if there are/were no Native Americans present east of the Mississippi. Native Americans =/= West. Really. Some tribal nations are from there, yes. The Native Removals of the 1830′s moved a lot of tribal nations from the east into the west, yes. But alternate histories might not even include Native Removals, and tribal nations from the east were in the 19th century and still are today living cultures. I just wanted to get that out there for everyone. Native Steampunks need not be from the Weird West.

Last weekend, I keynoted at the Washington State Association for Multicultural Education. I was asked to talk a bit about the role of technology in the classroom and multicultural education. They asked what educators should know about how technology impacts the classroom.

After thinking on it, I decided on the core message for the talk: a lot of the issues in technology are the same old problems, wrapped in new packaging.

I opened with a discussion of the changing nature of technology and how it influences children, and then explain how some people are still locked out. Here is the slide deck from the talk:

I’ll be adding rough notes to go along with it soon.

Since I tell a lot of stories in the talk, consider the deck to be a rough outline.

After that, I hosted a break out session on video games and teaching, here are the slides from that:

And created a monster resources page, which is still in process.

The presentation went over well, as both people comfortable and uncomfortable with technology found out new and interesting ways to think about how we discuss and frame technology, and why more people aren’t fully participating in the digital revolution. But the really interesting things started to happen after the talk was complete, and I was given a racial landmark tour of Seattle.

Cynthia Rekdal and Bettie Luke were my guides for the weekend, and between the two of them they turned Seattle out. I hit the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience (named for Wing Luke, Bettie’s brother and kick ass social justice activist) and the Northwest African American Museum. Along the way, Bettie spoke her living history, pointing out to me the stories behind the people on the walls, how activists occupied territory to create some of these memorial spaces, the back story behind how a biting public art commentary on the Japanese -American experience came to rest at Pike Place Market, and so much more. It got to the point where Bettie would say something awesome, and I would have to stop her, whip out my flipcam, and ask her to then tell the story, just so I would have everything on record.

Here’s one story, that I was able to upload to Vimeo:

Bettie Luke 3 from Latoya Peterson on Vimeo.

I’m laughing at the beginning, because Bettie goes, “Yeah, this thing is really cool – did you know Chinese opera is part of what brought Bruce Lee to Seattle?” I had been asking her all day to let me know when she was about to tell a cool story, but that is so not how it goes down with the elders.

Transcript:

Latoya: So Bettie, how exactly did Bruce Lee end up in Seattle, thanks to a Chinese Cantonese Opera singer?

Bettie: We are in the room of the Ruby and Ping Chow Gathering Space. This is an example of one of the Chinese opera costumes of Ping Chow. The was this whole kind of brotherhood among Chinese opera families and because of Ping’s connection to the father of Bruce Lee – and not only Bruce Lee, but his brother, Phillip – they were both sent to Seattle. I think the father wanted to get away from the bad elements and the drug elements in Hong Kong. So Bruce was sent here, and he attended school. He went to the University of Washington for a couple of years, before he developed his specialty of martial arts, and started teaching, and expanded from there, and went into films in Hong Kong. And really got involved with the movies and the theaters, and the martial arts. So yeah, he’s a piece of Seattle!

Bettie is a treasure of amazing knowledge, so I am going to put together a few posts based on the images and videos I shot, hopefully for next week. There is so much to discuss, from the Jazz history in Seattle and the Black and Tan club, to internment, to how one goes about preserving history, to the missing sides of the story, to how multiracial organizing was often in vogue, but not always remembered – it’s all amazing. And humbling.

We truly stand on the shoulders of giants.

I don’t know what happened to August, but September is staring us in the face and it’s the last week to vote for our South by Southwest Panels! (Voting Closes Friday, argh!)

Here’s my idea for this year:

Tech Power to the People! Digital Community Engagement

Latoya Peterson, Racialicious.com

How do we ensure no one is left behind in the tech revolution? This panel is designed to provide a look into the best practices for using media to engage with communities, particularly minority outreach and low income/low access areas. This panel will feature a variety of activists explaining the ways in which they have used mobile campaigns, apps, blogs, and other methods to engage their communities and transfer skills, as well as tips for evaluation and measuring results.

Questions answered:

1. How can I ensure that the community I am working with can actually utilize this technology?
2. Is advocating for broadband access the best way to engage with low income communities?
3. How can mobile campaigns (for both smartphones and dumbphones) be used to mobilize communities?
4. How can we tailor technology to work with transient communities (without stable addresses or consistent mobile numbers)?
5. What are the best ways to provide information on technology while dealing with issues of literacy and comprehension?

Level Beginner
Category Digital Divide
Tags community, media, workshop
Type Panel
Event Interactive 2011

(Side Note: SXSWi is doing something different with panelists this year, but I’ve proposed a joint session with Ariel Valdez and Miriam Perez.)

Please register and vote here.

Also, as a result of last year’s push to get more POC to propose panels, I am delighted to announce some other kick ass panels featuring kick ass people.

Jeff Yang, of Asian Pop fame, proposed a panel called E-Race: Avatars, Anonymity And The Virtualization Of Identity. He also tapped the ever amazing Lisa Nakamura to be on it!

Deanna Sutton, of Clutch Magazine, proposed The Elevation of Black Women in New Media, which is so necessary.

J. Smith, better known as Jbrotherlove, proposed Blogging & Social Media for Niche Audiences.

Renina Jarmon, also known as M.Dot, proposed Race, Sex and Blogging: Limits and Possibilities, which is all about exploring that online ridiculousness.

Joel Dreyfuss of the Root is running a panel on Whiteness on the Web. (Can’t wait to see how *that* will go over at SXSW.)

Erica Mauter, aka SwirlSpice (and part of the Racialicious community) proposed a How to Ensure a Diverse Tech Event panel, which is also extremely necessary. (I know I’ve been “the only” too many times in my short tech life…)

Rinku Sen is bringing it with a panel on Video Isn’t Proof Enough: Killing of Oscar Grant

Samhita Mukopadhyay is bringing the stories of WoC to the table with her panel on People Power: Leveraging Personal Stories to Build Influence – she’s also featuring Twanna Hines and Lynne D. Johnson.

There’s also a dope SXSW Latin American push for proposals (including this one on Serious Games and Learning Languages) and I remember LAtism was doing a 100 panel push. There are also some cool proposals on using technology to help the underbanked, I’ll try to get a full, updated list on Wednesday.

Until then, please register and vote!

Every time I dare to talk about race or class and MySpace & Facebook in the same breath, a public explosion happens. This is the current state of things.  Unfortunately, most folks who enter the fray prefer to reject the notion that race/class shape social media or that social media reflects bigoted attitudes than seriously address what’s at stake.  Yet, look around. Twitter is flush with racist language in response to the active participation of blacks on the site. Comments on YouTube expose deep-seated bigotry in uncountable ways. The n-word is everyday vernacular in MMORPGs. In short, racism and classism permeates every genre of social media out there, reflecting the everyday attitudes of people that go well beyond social media. So why can’t we talk about it?

Let me back up and explain the context for this piece … three years ago, I wrote a controversial blog post highlighting the cultural division taking shape.  Since then, I’ve worked diligently to try to make sense of what I first observed and ground it in empirical data.  In 2009, I built on my analysis in  “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”, a talk I gave at the Personal Democracy Forum.  Slowly, I worked to write an academic article called “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook” (to be published in a book called Digital Race Anthology, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White).  I published a draft of this article on my website in December.  Then, on July 14, Christoper Mims posted a guest blog post at Technology Review entitled “Did Whites Flee the ‘Digital Ghetto’ of MySpace?” using my article as his hook.  I’m not sure why Mims wrote this piece now or why he didn’t contact me, but so it goes.

Mims’ blog post prompted a new wave of discussion about whether or not there’s a race-based (or class-based) division between MySpace and Facebook today. My article does not address this topic. My article is a discussion of a phenomenon that happened from 2006-2007 using data collected during that period. The point of my article is not to discuss whether or not there was a division — quantitative data shows this better. My goal was to analyze American teenagers’ language when talking about Facebook and MySpace. The argument that I make is that the language used by teens has racialized overtones that harken back to the language used around “white flight.” In other words, what American teens are reflecting in their discussion of MySpace and Facebook shows just how deeply racial narratives are embedded in everyday life.

So, can we please dial the needle forward? Regardless of whether or not there’s still a race and class-based division in the U.S. between MySpace and Facebook, the language that people use to describe MySpace is still deeply racist and classist. Hell, we see that in the comments of every blog post that describes my analysis. And I’m sure we’ll get some here, since online forums somehow invite people to unapologetically make racist comments that they would never say aloud. And as much as those make me shudder, they’re also a reminder that the civil rights movement has a long way to go.

Race and class shape contemporary life in fundamental ways. People of color and the working poor live the experiences of racism and classism, but how this plays out is often not nearly as overt as it was in the 1960s. But that doesn’t mean that it has gone away.

There is still bigotry, and the divisions run deep in the U.S. We often talk about the Internet as the great equalizer, the space where we can be free of all of the weights of inequality. And yet, what we find online is often a reproduction of all of the issues present in everyday life. The Internet does not magically heal old wounds or repair broken bonds between people. More often, it shows just how deep those wounds go and how structurally broken many relationships are.

In this way, the Internet is often a mirror of the ugliest sides of our society, the aspects of our society that we so badly need to address. What the Internet does — for better or worse — is make visible aspects of society that have been delicately swept under the rug and ignored. We could keep on sweeping, or we could take the moment to rise up and develop new strategies for addressing the core issues that we’re seeing. Bigotry doesn’t go away by eliminating only what’s visible. It is eradicated by getting at the core underlying issues. What we’re seeing online allows us to see how much work there’s left to do.

In writing “White Flight in Networked Publics?”, I wanted to expose one aspect of how race and class shape how people see social media. My goal in doing so was to push back at the utopian rhetorics that frame the Internet as a kumbaya movement so that we can focus on addressing the major social issues that exist everywhere and are exposed in new ways via social media. When it comes to eradicating bigotry, I can’t say that I have the answers. But I know that we need to start a conversation. And my hope — from the moment that I first highlighted the divisions taking place in 2007 — is that we can use social media as both a lens into and a platform for discussing cultural inequality.

So how do we get started?

Photo credit: Moyix on Flickr

In a post Sex and the City world, everything involving a group of young women seems open for comparison to the mega-franchise. However, all the stories told about women do not serve the same purpose. While Sex and the City began as wry commentary on life in Manhattan (and morphed into something else entirely), more and more women are taking to indie media to tell stories about those of us who manage to live life sans Manolos. Enter The Real Girl’s Guide to Everything Else.

The story revolves around Rasha, a journalist who is dying to write The Women’s History of Afghanistan. Unfortunately, her editor believes that her Lebanese-American client could have a brighter future as a Middle Eastern chick lit pioneer, and advises Rasha that she could be dropped from her contract if she doesn’t turn around something fluffy. Rasha and her friends concoct a plan to write the chick lit novel in exchange for the advance to fund the Women’s History project and they throw her into a world of heterosexual dating (and the attendant Cosmo-ified stereotypes), which complicates things a bit – Rasha is scheduled to walk down the aisle with her girlfriend in less than two months.

Dating isn’t easy…

…especially when you neglect to tell your live-in girlfriend that bikini waxes, internet dating, and eschewing your boots for heels is all a part of the same research project.

The series takes an interesting twist when the writers introduce “Mr. Big,” a Republican with majorly deep pockets who inadvertently offers Rasha a shortcut to Afghanistan. By offering to fulfill her dreams and desires (and clearly expecting something more along the lines of a romantic French vacation) Rasha and Big end up sharing a tent in Afghanistan.

I have a particular love for this segment, because I love how the creators took the idea to address the idea of liberation. I need a little gif icon of this woman saying “This is your idea of equality,” while holding out a book that reads Love, Lunch, and a Macy’s Sale. Somehow, Big manages to befriend a warlord, figures out Rasha’s true aims, and promises to help her complete her research by showing her an underground women’s library. But everything is not as it seems…

After Rasha’s dramatic rescue from the arms of Mr. Big, she and her friends spend the last episode crowing over her finally finished project: “The Girl’s Guide To Covering War Zones Without Ruining Your Pedicure.” With Mr. Big staying in Afghanistan as a freedom fighter and Rasha at work on her next project, the series ends on a positive note.

It is very easy to pick up on the flaws in the series: Rasha is the only developed character – everyone else exists only in broad strokes. The plot is full of holes and takes major leaps to get through the story. But then again, this is an independently produced web series that can be completed in less than an hour. Considering the fate of professionally produced web series (like Candance Bushnell’s The Broadroom, which I eviscerated on Jezebel) The Real Girl’s Guide to Everything Else actually holds it own. Hell, it holds up better than some of the things actually greenlighted with major budgets:

Aymar Jean Christian interviewed the creators of Real Girl’s back in February, and they had this to say about the state of media for women, particularly women of color:

TELEVISUAL: How did Real Girl’s Guide start? Where did the idea originate?

REAL GIRL’S GUIDE TO EVERYTHING ELSE: The idea grew out of this aggravation I’d been feeling for a while about all the lame romantic comedies marketed to women. But it really crystallized when I went to see the Sex and the City movie. I actually had really liked aspects of the series itself and had felt it was quite innovative… but the movie felt more like a fashion show – with a little bit of story thrown in for fun. I saw the film with my co-producer Reena Dutt (who plays “Sydney”) and my friend Vivian Rogers (inspiration for “Vanna”) and afterwards we got into this conversation about the world of Sex and the City…the world of rich, white, straight fashionistas. And it started me thinking – what’s the inverse of that world? Perhaps a more ethnically diverse world where materialism is not valued, where being straight is not “assumed,” where a woman’s goals do not end at getting married or finding the perfect pair of ridiculously expensive shoes. Where perhaps the goal is to write a book, or have an art show or to run for political office or to save some small part of the world.

TELEVISUAL: Why do this series? What distinguishes Real Girl’s from what we see either on television or in film? I’m particularly intrigued by your ethnically diverse cast and storyline(s).

RGGTEE: I think Real Girl’s…is about real women. It’s about everybody who is not represented by this heightened, glossy, almost-drag femininity. It’s about women who do not fit neatly into the mainstream world of chick-lit… which honestly, I think, is most of us. In terms of the multi-ethnic cast, I think it’s really essential to show viewers a world that doesn’t utilize people of color in stereotypical ways. I love what Shonda Rhimes did with Grey’s Anatomy… where you have a multi-ethnic cast of characters who are not primarily defined by their race. Sure it’s a part of them… but their race isn’t continually being used to make a point. So often I hear from actors-of-color how difficult it is to get cast in roles where they are not primarily defined by their race. Reena (Sydney) for example is continually cast as medical personnel, while my Latina actor friends get called in for prostitutes, Black male actors for gangsters etc. But it goes beyond just wanting to create opportunities… I think how we represent people on the big and the small screen actually effects the way people see and treat each other in real life.

Over at NPR, the Real Girl’s crew appeared on Tell Me More, and got a little more explicit about the show and their goals for next season:

Ms. MITCHELL: Sure. So we are planning on shooting season two, which is going to be a 10 episode season, probably starting September or October of this year. In terms of a sneak peak, all I can say is that there are going to be musical numbers and maybe some dogs.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. DUTT: That’s a representative.

Ms. MITCHELL: And were going to tackle the marriage equality issues head-on this time. And let’s see, what else is fun?

COX: Well, you know, one thing that you don’t have, and I’m going to ask you if you’re going to, that the “Sex And The City” series does have it in is a child.

Ms. MITCHELL: A child. You know, that may be down the road. For right now we have a puppy.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Yeah, that about sums it up.

I’m extremely late in getting around to summarizing my experiences at South by Southwest Interactive 2010, but one of my favorite presentations was this panel by friend of the blog Baratunde. “How to Be Black” isn’t a discussion of identity and performance, but rather a discussion of how people utilize the internet, and how there are trends by race and class in terms of use. And, considering it is Baratunde, it’s typically hilarious. I’ve also got some really rough notes in the Cover it Live box below, for those who can’t hear/play the video – but I believe we were drinking and laughing to hard to get anything coherent.

These are the notes for “Gaming Masculinity: Video games as a reflection on masculinity in Computer Science and African American Culture.” The notes are from a paper by Betsy James DiSalvo, presented at the Texas A & M University Race and Ethnic Studies Institute’s Symposium exploring Race, Ethnicity and (New) Media.

The abstract to the paper reads:

There are a number of efforts to broaden participation in computing to include underrepresented groups. However, few of these efforts have identified African American males as a population with cultural and gendered values that may inhibit them from entering Computer Science (CS). In this paper we will explore masculine identities within computer culture and African American culture by using video games as an object of inquiry. We hypotheses that the technological agency exhibited with video games is based upon cultural and gender practices; and by exploring video game play practices we can better understand how to increase the technological agency of African American males and broadening their participation in CS.

The paper/project was funded to help increase participation in the computer sciences, with a particular focus on underrepresented groups.

The research (hosted at the Georgia Institute for Technology) began by examining video game use by African American males, sparked by an exchange with a student. The student lamented:

Me and some of my black friends were talking about the other guys in CS. Some of them have been programming since they were eight. We can’t compete with that. Now, the only thing that I have been doing since I was eight is playing basketball. I would own them on the court. I mean it wouldn’t be fair, they would just stand there and I would dominate. It is sort of like that in CS.
– Undergraduate CS Major

This led to the researchers (Betsy James DiSalvo, Sybrina Y. Atwaters, Jill Dimond, and Dr. Amy Bruckman) to re-examine the assumptions around what makes for a successful computer science graduate. They decided to take a closer look at play practices. Play practices of being outside are the norm in many communities, but are not conducive to computers/gaming which require long amounts of indoors/solo time to become proficient.

The researches also examined the dominant environment in CS programs. Hacker culture is privileged in the CS learning environment, meaning that many students are drawn to the program because of their existing skills. This marginalizes many students who decide to enter at the college level, and do not have years of experience experimenting with programs on their own. CS programs also tend to trend toward the strongest programmers in the class, encouraging a DIY approach to learning, and leaving behind students who are new to the discipline.

DiSalvo and the other researches created a model for the “Idealized CS Masculinity.” The researchers were looking at cultural influences and how our presentations shape our interactions with our peers. For those in the CS community, the norms there rejects the body. There is not a premium placed physical performance, personal appearance, or even in some cases, hygienic personal care. Instead, the community values technological agency and proficiency above all. Competitiveness is encouraged. This type of person is also heavily attracted to technology, computer parts, and the latest gadgets and inventions.

In contrast, the researchers noted Idealized African American Masculinity was very different than computer science norms. For one, feedback from respondents noted that there was a body centric emphasis. A premium was placed on athleticism, physical power, appearance, and physical performance. There was little value placed on technological agency. So, from the beginning, the divergence in values could contribute to why there are less African American males in computer science programs.

However, there was a strange quirk in the research: Young black males may play video games more than most other groups. However, DiSalvo notes this data is not statistically significant – with gaming becoming a ubiquitous activity, there is only a slight increase over other groups with reported play rates.

Connections between video games and CS have been documented, but not qualitatively, meaning there isn’t a definitive connection between a heavy interest in games and an interest in working with computers. “Hardcore” gaming also does not have a consistent connection between hours played and the interest in CS Major. However, research has shown that gaming practices can be leveraged into CS Interest – and since video games are a cultural touchstone for the Millennial generation, it makes sense to pursue that link.

Looking at the data also revealed more trends: young black males often participated in community of practice, where video game competition was also a form of bonding. Sportmanship was emphasized. From a tech standpoint, African American males are more likely to playing on consoles instead of PCs, which limited opportunities for hacking, cheating, and modifying. However, they did play console games online with using digital cable. In contrast to the CS respondents, they did not consider online gaming to be a social activity, preferring in person play.
Family members were considered important in game play, and game time was often multi-generational. Their gaming experiences were also heavily gendered, playing mostly with male friends. Solo play is considered practice time for family events.

With these differences in mind, Georgia Tech created the Glitch Video Game Testers program to introduce more technical concepts into gaming and to encourage more African American youth to enter computer science programs by demystifying the field.

Latoya’s Note: Clearly, Betsy and I had a lot to discuss with reference to her research. I am fascinated by the paper she and her co-authors produced, and the interesting potential to increase the ranks of blacks in tech through gaming outreach. However, post presentation, one factor stood out to me in particular as needing further exploration. The paper examines the role of race, but not class in the development of skills – and, just speaking from personal experience, class heavily influenced my gaming experience. We discussed the divides around the ability to deconstruct technological items in the home, and how for some families, there would not have been the opportunity to experiment with the family computer by taking it apart. The console vs. PC divide is also, in some ways, a matter of class – to purchase a game console means that the owners will be able to play all the games issued for that console for the next 3 – 5 years, if not more. If a new version comes out of a system comes out, the system will not become obsolete. However, in the 1990s in particular, there was a constant need to upgrade your computer to keep pace with the changing technology. This dynamic was not present with a console – though the desire for new games would be there, older games could still be obtained and played. I am interested to see how discussions of social issues and technology continue to develop.

Related: Can Video Game Testing Spark Interest in Computing Among Black Youth?

But first, I want to begin by thanking the Facebook data team for actually making this data available for public dialogue. Far too few companies are willing to share their internal analyses, especially about topics that make people uncomfortable. I was disappointed that so many academics immediately began critiquing Facebook rather than appreciating the glimpse that we get into the data they get to see. So thank you Facebook data team!

There are many different ways to collect quantitative data involving categories like race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, etc. None of them are perfect. Even asking people to self-identify can be fraught, especially when someone is asked to place themselves into a box. Ask a self-identified queer boi to identity into the binaries of “female/male” and “gay/straight” and you’ll see nothing short of explosive anger. Race certainly isn’t any prettier, let alone ethnicity or class. The salience of these qualities also depends on what we’re trying to measure, what we’re trying to say. For example, if we’re talking about people who experience being targets of racism, should we concern ourselves more with self-identification or external labeling? At the coarsest level, we often assume race to boil down to skin color, meaning that we have to take into account how people read race, how they experience race, how they identify with race. We must always remember that race is a social construct and one’s experiences of race are shaped by how one perceives themselves in relation to others and how others perceive them. And the very notion of race differs across the globe.

Of course, this is bloody messy. And ethnicity and class are even harder to locate because self-identification isn’t always the best measure. Heck, while Americans have learned to self-identify with race (thanks to countless forms), we aren’t typically asked to self-identify with ethnicity or class. So these are pretty murky territories. As a result, scholars and demographers and marketers and many others have different ways of trying to measure these categories. None are perfect. We can debate endlessly about which is better but, personally, I think that does the conversation a disservice.

In trying to measure race (and, partially, ethnicity) of its users without having self-identification, Facebook decided to use a statistical technique known as mixture-modeling to make a best guess as to the racial makeup of its user base. They go to great lengths explaining what they did, but it is this graph that we should be attentive to:

This graph highlights that those American users most likely to be white were overrepresented on Facebook until last year while those most likely to be Asian have been overrepresented as far back as they are measuring. Yet, the two lines that should pique our interest are the blue and red lines, highlighting that those most likely to be black and Hispanic have been underrepresented until very recently. In other words, 2009 is the year in which Facebook went “mainstream” among all measured racial/ethnic groups in the U.S.

Folks keep asking me if this surprises me. It does not. This very much matches what I’m seeing in the field. (It also confirms what I was seeing in 2006-2007.) But it also doesn’t tell the whole story. Numbers never do. MySpace has definitely declined among young users in the U.S., especially in the last 12 months, but race – and ethnicity and socio-economic status – still inflect people’s experiences with these technologies. Just because Facebook has become broadly adopted does not mean that what everyone experiences on Facebook is the same. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see Facebook data that broke down app usage by demographic data (age, location, gender, and their measure of race). Given what I’m seeing in the field, I’d expect you’d see variation. I’d also expect to see variation in terms of how the service is accessed – via mobile, web, 3rd party APIs, etc. As young people tour me through their Facebook experience, I’m regularly reminded that different groups have wholly different experiences with the same service. As Facebook has become a platform, it is no longer reasonable to simply think about access. There’s also a different issue at play… perception. People perceive certain practices to be universal because “everyone they know” is doing it that way. One of the hardest parts of my job is to explain to people that what they are seeing, what they are experiencing, is not the same as what others are. Even if they’re using the same tools.

When the “digital divide” conversations started up, folks boiled down the discussion to being one of access. If only everyone had access, everything would be hunky dory. We’re closer to universal access today than ever before, but access is not bringing us the magical utopian panacea that we all dreamed of. Henry Jenkins has rightly pointed out that we see the emergence of a “participation gap” in that people’s participation is of different quantity and quality depending on many other factors. Social media takes all of this to a new level. It’s not just a question of what you get to experience with your access, but what you get to experience with your friend group with access. In other words, if you’re friends with 24/7 always-on geeks, what you’re experiencing with social media is very different than if you’re experiencing social media in a community where your friends all spend 12+ hours a day doing a form of labor that doesn’t allow access to internet technologies. Facebook’s data provides a glimpse into how Facebook access has become mainstream. It is the modern day portal. But I would argue that what people experience with this tool – and with the other social media assets they use – looks very different based on their experience.

Many folks think that I care about access. Don’t get me wrong – access is important. But I’m much more concerned about how racist and classist attitudes are shaping digital media, how technology reinforces inequality, and how our habit of assuming that everyone uses social media just like we do reinforces social divisions that we prefer to ignore. This issue became apparent to me when doing fieldwork because of the language that young people were using to differentiate MySpace and Facebook. Adoption differences alone were never the whole story. Ever since I released my controversial blog essay 2.5 years ago, I have been working to write up my data and analysis in a meaningful way. Doing so has not been easy. I’ve been very uncomfortable handling my own data, trying to treat it in a manner that is respectful of the teens that I interviewed and the dynamics that I witnessed. Thankfully, Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White gave me the space to work out these issues. The fruit of my labor will be published in an upcoming Routledge anthology edited by them called Digital Race Anthology. With their permission, I am sharing with you a working draft of the article that I have struggled to produce:

“White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook”

In this article, I explore the themes I’ve been discussing for years but focus specifically on the language that young people used to differentiate MySpace and Facebook and how that language can be understood through the historical dynamics of segregation in the U.S. My decision to use the “white flight” frame is meant to be provocative, to encourage the reader to think about the rhetoric that we’re currently using and its parallels to earlier times. For example, how we employ “safety” as a way of marking turf and segmenting populations.

Given the conversations prompted by Facebook’s data, I felt the need to share this work-in-progress. Please feel free to comment or share your thoughts in whatever format makes sense to you.

(Image Credit: captain simon’s mandolin’s photostream on Flickr)