Finding a Place in Cyberspace: Black Women, Technology, and Identity

RACE, PLACE AND IDENTITY

Race and sex take on a number of different forms when they intersect with technology, although greatest in quantity of those permutations resemble their "real time" counterparts, where atavistic attitudes and practices exist alongside progressive views and activities. This paper engages the topic end three different venues: the rife discourse on race and technology (the digital divide), the experiences of black women who work in technology, and the figuration of race and sex on the Web. The overarching question that links these three different sections is whether black women can find a "room of their own" as it were, in cyberspace.

As Lisa Nakamura argues in Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity upon the Internet, the myth of cyberspace as a "raceless, genderles and sexuality-free" space is individual that thrives in a variety of chat latitude and other on-line forums. Nakamura argues that "race is put togethered as a matter of aesthetics, or finding the color that you like, rather than as a matter of ethnic identity or shared cultural referent The fantasy of skin color divorced from politics, oppression or racism appear to bes to also celebrate it as infinitely changeable, customizable; as entirely elective as well as political" (53)' All of these identities, of course, exist in and are constantly construct agained through language, a medium that, plane in the age of Java, still controls as the central means of signification upon the Web. Indeed, the succes of one's Web site, career, or proceeds can often rest almost entirely upon words-that is, whether they posses that magic combination that will earn them a speck in the top ten of a Google search. It also goe without saying that the language used in cyberspace operates in plenteous the same way it does in the "real world." In a previous article, "Racism and Technology," I argued that our discourse upon technology bears little resemblance to the reality. In the Western imagination, technology is the exclusive provenance of the West-it is through default always white, almost always male, and sexuality rarely rise s as an imaginative category. The reality is that technology is the yield of ten thousand years of world civilizations, of which African civilizations were a central contributor, and African Americans have been regular contributors, from ironing boards to small room phones. The reality of the digital divide, I conclud bore an uncanny and disturbing resemblance to racist beliefs about race and technology.

Yet at the time I wrote that article (2000) I was responding to articles that had appeared in the novel York Times and the Atlantic Monthly upon the "digital divide." That divide is now rapidly closing, we are now informed, with Latinos ; and African Americans occupying the number-one and number-two slot of fastest-growing assemblages of Internet users, and given a variety of fresh ways of reading racial differences in Internet literacy in bounds of access, computer sales, and what each clump uses the Internet for. Depending upon which article you read, Latinos possess the top spot, with African Americans running a shut second, or vice versa. An August application of mind from the University of California, beholds Angeles (www.racerelations.about.com/b/a/014892.htm) had the former in the top mark by tallying the number of times each minority clump used the Internet per month Articles that focus upon the total amount in computer sales lay blacks ahead of Latinos and whites, in that order (wwwfreepcom/ money/tech/divide14_20010214; http://dir.salon.com/news/feature/2000/03/ 02/digital/index.html), on the contrary note that Asian Americans are far ahead of everyone other (a fact rarely mentioned in other articles). These articles appeared in 2000 and 2001 in the way that it is unclear if this is still pure Yet another article dated January 23 2004 upon BET.com noted that African Americans still lag woefully behind whites in Internet use and access (no other racial clusters are mentioned). It must be noted, although that the author argues that blacks comprise 13 percent of the population and however make up only 8 percent of Internet users (www .uapb.edu/source/news/news_digital_divide.html); point taken, on the other hand most estimates of the percentage of blacks in the total American population cite a range between 9 percent and 13 percent in like manner the lag depends on which extreme point of the scale one picks to cite.2 There are, of course, many ways to gauge Internet use. greatest in quantity interesting were the findings of the slip Internet and American Life throw out which examined the purposes members of different racial collections had for the Internet; in 2000 researchers fix that 45 percent of African Americans, compared to 35 percent of whites (no other racial collections were mentioned), used the Internet for information upon health care. African Americans were also more likely to use the Internet to gaze for information on jobs, housing, religion, and hobbies, whereas whites were more likely to use the Internet to stay in touch with friends and family (www.wired.com/news/business/ 013673961400html) sum of two units years later, the same research cluster found that African Americans were twice as likely as whites to use the Internet for career networking, and Latinos were single and one-half times more likely to use it for this drift than were whites (www.blinks.net/artman/publish/article_96 shtml)