All the readings for this week dealt with some sort of minority group getting their voice heard on the Internet. Whether it was women in Laura Miller’s article “Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier” or the gay community in Steve Silberman’s “We’re Teen, We’re Queer, and We’ve Got E-mail” they all dealt with relatively the same ideas. However, I would like to focus on the other two articles dealing with race. To me race is a non-issue on the Internet. I know, easy for me to say due to the fact that I am a white male and have never really experienced racism. As Nakamura notes in Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet, “users of the Internet represent themselves within it solely through the medium of keystrokes and mouse-clicks, and through this medium they can describe themselves and their physical bodies any way they like; they perform their bodies as text.” Relatively speaking I find that there appears to be an equal representation of all ethnicities on the web. Sure, it is probably not proportional to the actual population of the earth, but that is just the nature of the beast. And I am sure there are multiple comments on blogs or videos, perhaps entire sites devoted to racism. In Bailey’s Virtual Skin one participant in an African American forum said he did not identify as black and thought it was interesting to see how he was treated when he represented as white. Another commented on how much more bigotry and racism he experienced online versus in real life.

On one level I have suffered the racial wrath, and apparently dished it out unintentionally when I posted a video of my 7th grade self doing a report on Bats in the Philippines(http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=408934...). A couple of Filipino teenagers saw the video and thought it was offensive, when in actuality all I was doing was a report on an endangered species in the Philippines. If they had bothered to watch the video, they would have realized that it had nothing to do with race.

I do think the web has been able to bring us together as a global community. Even those racially charged, derogatory videos are helpful, in my opinion, to show the shallow aspects of those close-minded individuals who posted them in the first place. Now with tribute videos of Barack Obama or Martin Luther King, Jr. you can see what it truly means to be accepting of all comers and gain a better understanding of how race relations work in America. And the so called “Identity Tourism” Nakamura discusses in her article, I think is healthy. What is bad about someone trying to experience someone else’s culture? Even if it is based completely on stereotypes, at least they’re trying right? I of course do not support racial stereotypes, but there is no escaping them. They are all around us. They appear in television sitcoms, newspaper ads, etc. - there is just no getting away from them. If some creepy guy decides to hypersexualize his avatar, let him. Maybe he will finally find out what it is like to be hit on relentlessly like he is a piece of meat. All I am saying is I think the Internet can and is being used for far greater things than racism. If anything I think the Internet is helping to de-stigmatize our society from the race wars we have been in for, I don’t know, the last two hundred some odd years. Obviously this is a new frontier and there will be endless debate over how to regulate this medium.