In class we talked about a couple different ways that Snow Crash analogizes issues of race: “thrashers” constitute an ethnic identity; hackers, too, have unique social identities as well as somewhat unique physiologies. In this response, I guess I just want to add another example, but it’s one that I find particularly interesting: the figure of the “black-and-white person” within the Metaverse.

So if the “black-and-white person” is not immediately visible as at least analogously related to a racial identity, I guess I’ll suggest a couple ways in which the book presents him/her/it in that way. First is the issue of context. Snow Crash has an almost Faulknerian interest in multiraciality; not since Joe Christmas has a fictional character’s polyglot identity caused so much trouble—e.g., when YT is fleeing from the “jeeks” at The Clink, she considers briefly pulling into a New South Africa franchulate, but then decides against it: “Scratch that; Hiro is black, or at least part black. Can’t take him into New South Africa” (83). I guess the point that I would make is that racial identities are important to the book—it’s important that YT is white (not just as “whitey,” but also as a fifteen-year-old white female who, we’re told repeatedly, is in constant danger of being raped because of that fact; who hangs limp and Fay Wray-ish in Raven’s arms as he carries her onto the Raft); it’s important that Raven’s American Indian, and, what’s more, part of this significance is that Hiro can’t figure out what racial identity to give Raven—it’s the fate of the Aleut in this book to be the ignored or misrecognized identity. Someone who—like Hiro—represents “and” rather than “either/or” is bound to throw a wrench in the book’s classification system.

And, lo and behold, that is pretty much how things turn out for the “black-and-white person” in the Metaverse. Here I guess I should say that, obviously, anyone can be a black-and-white person; the black-and-white person is treated as an identity that inheres only in the Metaverse; at various times, many different characters of many different real-world racial identities become black-and-white people. Someone may appear in the Metaverse as a black-and-white person one day, and then as someone altogether different the next. So there are a lot of ways in which being black-and-white in the Metaverse isn’t like being black or white in the real world. But there is a sense in which the black-and-white identity takes over for real world racial identities; you can’t be both black and black-and-white; therefore, having a black-and-white identity in the Metaverse works as a substitute for the social work that’s done when one has a white identity in the real world. Right?

But some examples. The “black-and-white person” in the Metaverse is a universally spat-upon identity. This is unique in the universe of Snow Crash. New South Africans hate blacks, Asians, and Jews. Italians don’t really seem to like Asians all that much. American Indians—if Raven is a representative sample, which he surely isn’t—hate pretty much everyone. But point being: there really doesn’t seem to be a group that’s loathed by every other group. Except the black-and-white person in the context of the Metaverse. “ ‘Da5id,’ Hiro says, ‘I can’t believe you took a hypercard from a black-and-white person’” (72); “Going into The Black Sun would not be practical—it would look and sound terrible, and the other patrons would look at him as if he were some kind of black-and-white person” (106); “She knows that the people in the Street are giving her dirty looks because she’s just coming in from a shitty public terminal. She’s a trashy black-and-white person” (220).

So there are clearly historical analogies for all these examples, all of which have to do with racial hatred. In some of the examples of how black-and-white persons are disliked, one could imagine substituting either “black” or “white”—like, hypothetically, someone could possibly say, “She’s a trashy white person.” But basically these examples refer to racial hatred directed at black people in American history. Like, the fact that Hiro’s not welcome in the bar because he’s a black-and-white person sounds like the sort of segregation and intolerance that led to sit-ins in the 1950s. Anyway, that’s sort of beside the point, and it’s awkward to point these things out because, in a way, the book is sort of playfully flippant about the topic—the phrase “black-and-white person” itself is sort of a joke, I guess.

But if we go back to the last example I gave, we’re directed to most interesting account of what race looks like in the universe of Snow Crash. Again, I’m not suggesting that the black-and-white person is a racial identity, but rather that it functions similarly, just as thrashers and hackers function as identities that are in certain ways analogous to race. But in the last example, YT reminds us that the reason black-and-white persons are disliked is because, other folks in the Metaverse assume, they’re too poor to afford their own computer or are otherwise technologically disadvantaged—“she’s just coming in from a shitty public terminal.” This account literalizes the socio-economic assumptions that—Snow Crash avers—subtend racial judgments. There’s the cliché (it is a cliché, but one that’s almost certainly sometimes accurate) that when white cops see a black man driving a nice car, they assume it’s stolen; meaning they assume that black people in general can’t afford nice cars. In the Metaverse, the very fact that one appears as a black-and-white person means that one has somehow been reduced to the humiliating situation of having to use a “shitty public terminal.” Again, this is imperfect; YT isn’t really poor—although, it is true that, in a technocratic society, she wouldn’t rank very high; she’s only OK at guiding her avatar in the Metaverse and is constantly making fun of Hiro for the amount of time he spends logged on.

Anyway, I guess what’s interesting to me is that Snow Crash seems to make the case that total privatization will mete out racial hatreds when profitable and stamp them out when not, such that they eventually become a non-issue—or an issue, as I suggested above, that no one group especially suffers from (although Raven might take issue with this statement). But even in such a universe, the less-privatized VR space of the Metaverse reproduces absolute hatreds, where there is one group that is just so generally loathed as to not want to show his/her black-and-white self in public.