Blog #3 - Cyber Racism

James Tungate

Blog #3

Effects of cyber technology on racism in society

            In a world where technology is advancing at great speeds, we can only hope that everything else can just keep up the pace. On the other hand we also hope that some things would become a thing of the past and just be forgotten. One of these such things is racism, for decades we as a global society have worked hard and struggled at eliminating racism from the world and would love to see it become a thing of the past and not of the future. Unfortunately that isn’t the case; Cyber racism is very real and is very dangerous.

            The great advances in the technology we use to communicate ideas and thought’s doesn’t exclude the idea of racism. The fact that the modern technology has been used so much to express racism has led to the creation of the term of “Cyber Racism” which is credited to being coined by the author Les Back. Cyber racism is defined as a situation where one that holds a belief that a certain race is far superior or inferior than others and uses the cyber world to express this belief, in the form of a webpage or other media applications. (L. Back, Aryans Reading Adorno)

            When we discuss how cyber technology has allowed the growth of racism and helped extend the racist messages, we must look at its foundation. Studies have shown that usage of cyber technology and the internet have mainly been called a white thing and are generally associated with white people by those belonging to a minority. This is attributed to being due to cultural differences, cultures such as those of the African American community have always been of the thought that the internet cannot be trusted and mainly use it for entertainment purposes. This overall unbalance in usage by racial groups is the main reason racism is seen as being heavily towards minorities as the user is generally not a minority. (Tavani Pg. 310)

Another main reason attributing to the reason why racism has been credited with flourishing in the cyber era is that the internet provides anonymity to the users for the most part, obviously you aren’t always hidden but for the most part people feel safer doing things they normally wouldn’t want associated with their real identities. Most people find it’s easier to spread racism via the internet because they will not face reprisals from those they are targeting.  One such example of a person who normally wouldn’t have spread racism in his real life but did online was the high school child in Louisiana who created a fake Facebook profile and used it to spread racism in his community and terrorized the African American students at his high school. The young man who was spreading the hate turned out to be a 17 year old African American student who never had shown any racism in real life but he felt he could do it online and felt safe doing so. (J. Daniels, Cyber Racism in High School)