Ruminations on Cyber-Race
Kang, Jerry
I AM A KOREAN-AMERICAN law professor with two very different research agendas. On the one hand, I am deeply curious about technology and its impact on society. My undergraduate degree is in...
...On the other hand, as an immigrant and member of a racial minority, I am deeply curious about how race works in our minds and our society...
...It left me speechless...
...I assumed that my two areas of scholarly interest would not intersect in any theoretically interesting way...
...Let us go back to my carpurchase anecdote...
...Thus, even if cyberspace cannot (and should not) be colorblind, a short-term delay might make sense...
...Consider the following simplified model of racial mechanics, which draws from the literature of social cognition...
...Notwithstanding the huge real-world impact of racial mechanics, it's important to see that the categories, the mapping rules, and the meanings are made up, not given to us by deity or DNA...
...Racial mapping can be based on physical appearance, but it can also take place discursively, in the disclosure of a surname, for example...
...Some folks contend that cyberspace naturally generates ideal, anti-hierarchical environments...
...It's Brown v. Board of Education for the twenty-first century...
...Interestingly, cyber-mediated interactions are both more and less than real-space ones: "more" because they are not limited by arbitrary constraints such as geographical proximity...
...So I took a self-help measure to disrupt normal racial mechanics by employing a purchasing intermediary to prevent racial mapping...
...FWALLY, none of this contact will amount to much unless it has some permanence and depth...
...One summer during college, I was hired at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee...
...Such communities can be large...
...For example, no one argues for race-based affirmative action in car-buying...
...Just because race is not signaled in cyberspace does not mean that race ceases to matter in cyberspace or, certainly, in real space...
...Consider, for instance, the need for the social contact to disconfirm prevailing stereotypes...
...In contrast to a face-to-face encounter, text need not disclose morphology...
...My phone voice, grammar, and accent did not prompt them to flip out of the default assumption: white...
...If they don't, we have simply replaced geographical segregation (which is rampant, especially for African Americans) with electronic segregation...
...Perpetrator: Im not just dont like niggers thats all Perpetrator: white power...
...In real space, because residential segregation cuts across income, rich white folks do not live next to rich black folks...
...First, our law and culture provide a list of racial categories, such as black, white, Asian, Indian, through which we understand the basic idea of race...
...By contrast, in cyberspace, it is far easier to wear racial masks...
...This is a good thing...
...Third, mapping triggers meanings— cognitive beliefs about and affective reactions to people in these racial categories...
...In real space, this is hard to do...
...The relation of a "Mammy" to a white child did little to decrease racism...
...Is there reason to think that cyberspace might promote cooperative relationships...
...Can the potential of cyberspace for anonymity generalize this car story by abolishing race in cyber interactions...
...These advances have the potential to change everything, including racial mechanics...
...Even if abolition is not appropriate generally for cyber spaces, it makes plenty of sense for markets...
...Increased social contact will do little good if it is configured by drastic hierarchies...
...Perpetrator: eine mine mo catch a nigger by his toe and if he hollers let him go...
...The threshold act of choosing race may itself teach me something...
...Abolition I have bought my last two cars through a buying agent who tacks on a fixed commission...
...Perhaps this is a good thing...
...The transmutation approach finds this counterproductive because it removes the one specific dimension of identity experimentation— race—that needs the most tweaking...
...Moreover, the audience's credulous reception will reinforce my own stereotypes about what blackness means...
...Perpetrator: were are you at...
...Perpetrator: answer monkey boy Me: So why are you so filled with hate...
...On the other hand, if the audience discovers the cyber-pass, it will start questioning the value of the racial signal transmitted in cyberspace...
...If participants are treated differently, it is usually on the basis of their reputations...
...I do so primarily because it saves me time...
...In addition, text-only communication has little future, as the Internet moves to multimedia...
...Internet users who have gone deep into cyber community report their relationships there as remarkably genuine, deep, and significant...
...After race is disclosed, one DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 61 CYBER- RACE or both parties may be surprised, as my Ten-tity...
...In two more, cyberspace will allow us to navigate graphically mediated environments of stunning complexity, detail, and realism...
...And no bottom-up social or market forces seem likely to lead to widespread adoption of de-racing norms or technologies...
...they pitch to the mainstream...
...And if so, how might that disrupt the typical ways in which we think about race in real space...
...Of course, my assessments here depend on the current technology, which will develop in extraordinary ways...
...So I began wondering what happens when race is constructed through code, in cyberspace...
...The perpetrator had been sending me these mes sages privately, after disappearing from the room that I was in...
...For a preview, take a look at your kids' video games...
...often their members have never met face-to-face...
...But I also know the studies that demonstrate that car-purchase negotiations are racially discriminatory...
...Cyberspace, with its fundamental metaphor of hyperlink, invites exploration...
...A videocam is no more racially anonymous than a face-to-face encounter...
...A A N ENTIRELY separate mechanism with which to catalyze cooperation is to design short-term delays in racial disclosure...
...Second, when we encounter an individual, we collect data through our senses to map the individual to a category...
...Instead, we can "racially zone" cyberspace by adopting different environments for different spaces...
...Right now, we might find this bizarre...
...Transmutation has collapsed into abolition: the racial mask now functions as a racial veil...
...The thoughts I present here are not science fiction, but they are tentative...
...nessee roommate was surprised at the airport...
...What Role for Cyberspace...
...These may include, for instance, assumptions about foreignness ("Where are you from...
...Even skeptics concede that cyberspace is a powerful social force...
...In any social interaction, we map each other into racial categories that trigger associ 58 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 CYBER- RACE ated meanings...
...Implications Abolition, integration, and transmutation all sit in tension with each other...
...less" because the medium provides less information than a face-to-face interaction, making possible anonymity and pseudonymity...
...In addition, cyberspace also makes talking with strangers easier because individuals are less fearful: after all, one's physical body is never at risk...
...Given residential and social segregation, my knowledge will come from the mass media...
...TO BEGIN WITH, text does permit racial mapping, certainly explicitly ("I am Asian") and sometimes implicitly (consider cues from language, grammar, diction, names...
...Consider then the impact of abolition on large economic transactions, such as automobile purchases, insurance, personal loans, and mortgages...
...Consider also how cyberspace offers a way to increase direct interracial social interaction without the actual and perceived zero-sum conflicts inherent in, say, school busing...
...Over that summer, by cooperating with me as a colleague and roommate, his views of "Orientals" would likely have grown more complex, less exaggerated...
...Assume that my roommate would have resisted rooming with an "Oriental": suppose he envisioned a gallon jar of kimchi stinking up his refrigerator or, worse yet, a percursor to Wen Ho Lee...
...A boss's order to a temp worker is no less hierarchical because it comes over e-mail...
...On the one hand, if the audience never discovers the cyber-pass, then racial meanings may be reworked in dangerous ways...
...For example, consider how Americans along a broad political spectrum could agree on zoning most market places for "abolition...
...On bulletin boards and in chat rooms and MUDs, the vast majority of participants relate on equal terms, as if they were all patrons of a virtual caf...
...JERRY KANG is professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles...
...It's hard to express how I felt about this "fighting words" episode...
...the elderly console each other after losing loved ones...
...What design options do we have...
...Nonsense...
...Even the racists will not trust the racial signal...
...One could imagine society mounting an aggressive campaign to abolish race in cyberspace, even prohibiting racial self-identification...
...As for my name, they somehow heard "Jerry King...
...Even if racial minorities are in cyberspace, that doesn't necessarily mean they will interact with other groups...
...Virtual communities are centered around common interests, experiences, and fates...
...In the course of this "conversation," the assailant manipulated her avatar as well as other "physical" items in the virtual room as if she were striking me...
...Coercing people into an abolitionist environment would disparately harm people of color, for whom racial identity tends to be more important...
...Instead of avatars jumping from space to space by a click of a mouse, why not have them "walk" through a few public areas along the way...
...For example, Internet Service Providers, virtual community operators, and technology companies (both software and hardware) should develop user interfaces that promote some chance encounters with other people...
...Even if people start in isolated race-specific communities, which may be comfortable ports of entry, they will undoubtedly explore other cyber realms...
...In cyberspace, however, both groups will congregate in virtual communities centered around fancy wines, stock tips, and perhaps even vacation spots...
...These communication technologies not only help people maintain social relationships originally constructed in real space but also fa cilitate new relationships originally formed in cyberspace...
...I might intentionally play in Amos & Andy-like blackface, acting as an ignorant buffoon speaking "jive...
...Over many months of serious method acting of this new identity, the presumed connection between identity and biology might corrode...
...In this way, I avoided even subconscious triggering of racial meanings...
...In this environment of transmutationcollapsedinto-abolition, I will learn no lesson in empathy...
...Even in the news, we see photo editors disproportionately using photographs of blacks to illustrate poverty stories...
...And direct experiences are less stereotypical than vicarious ones because there is less economic pressure for racial minorities to perform stereotypically for any audience...
...There is, however, no perfect identity between one's race and any of these: think about hip-hop, golf, child rearing, on-line videogaming, cancer...
...Kang@law.ucla.edu . A much longer and detailed treatment appears in "Cyber-race," 113 Harvard Law Review 1131, 2000...
...On the one hand, I am deeply curious about technology and its impact on society...
...Ending today's disparate treatment would do nothing to rectify the material legacy of a racist past...
...It is true that virtual communities specifically designed for racial and ethnic groups are popular...
...Still, far more positive and progressive futures are possible, and imagining those futures must take place now if they are ever to be achieved...
...And how does it work...
...Cumulatively, these micro alterations pile onto the existing sediment of history to preserve significant imbalances in wealth and power across racial categories...
...One afternoon, a character who appeared as a white female asked me whether I was an "African American" in real space...
...Then, one day in cyberspace, something remarkable happened As background research on virtual communities, I was participating in graphical worlds...
...That is the seduction of cyberspace...
...Those drawn to the Internet are often drawn to its sociality, not its data...
...Plenty of anecdotal evidence speaks to impressive acts of cooperation based on common interests, experiences, and fates: pregnant women share experiences...
...For most discrete marketplace transactions, being race-conscious produces no net positive benefit...
...My undergraduate degree is in physics, and I write about communications...
...If we are coding a new "cyburban" reality, let us at least make new mistakes...
...There, I was broadcasting a different racial signal in cyberspace than in real space—what I call "cyber-passing...
...No doubt they will...
...By contrast, in cyberspace, we navigate less segregated communities, which means that we will engage in more direct experiences with other races—experiences with actual people, not mediated by third parties...
...In order to see how, we need to understand how cyberspace alters the ground rules of social interaction...
...Fortunately, a substantial amount of cybersocial contact takes place in contexts not configured by master-servant relationships...
...intelligence ("Must be good at math"), attractiveness or its opposite, and so on...
...Worse, transmutation has significant downsides...
...The Net's "killer app" turns out to be other human beings...
...Through e-mail, threaded discussion forums, real-time chat, instant messaging, Weblogs, collaborative gaming, P2P (peer-to-peer), and multi-user domains (MUDs), people interact with each other at great distances, often in groups...
...I was trying to get her to reappear.] Perpetrator: run nigger run <grin> [This was in response to my leaving the room, in which I was originally attacked.] Me: Are you afraid to show yourself even in the virtual world...
...Moreover, technological and demographic changes make blanket abolition infeasible...
...This defuses competition and highlights a common project rather than a common racial identity...
...The telephone delayed the triggering of racial meanings associated with the category "Asian American...
...As a threshold matter, will cyberspace increase social contact between the races...
...Vicarious experiences are, however, often stereotypical...
...In these contexts, cyberspace functions less like a fax machine and more like sidewalk cafés with different themes or milieus...
...Finally, abolition conflicts with transmutation...
...It also got my mind going...
...In twenty years, it may not be unusual...
...Abolition permits individuals to express every facet of their identity save one: race...
...How can cyberspace change something as monumental as race and race relations...
...But there are ways to encourage community, repeat-play, and persistent identity...
...But we should not exaggerate the problem of self-segregation...
...CYBER- RACE Given such conflicts, which strategy should we pick...
...Cass Sunstein, for instance, has worried in his recent book Republic.com about our cocooning off into factions...
...Current race literature emphasizes that "race is a social construction...
...It does make geographical proximity less relevant...
...therefore, our cache of racial meanings is informed mostly by vicarious experiences with other races—imagined experiences, provided by mass media...
...If we don't even imagine such possibilities today, we will look back upon cyberspace the same way that we look on television—with regret, at opportunities not seized, therefore lost...
...People would no longer be judged by the color of their (virtual) skin...
...As just explained, transmutation conflicts with integration...
...Recently I watched a touching and humane funeral service in an otherwise violent gaming world, in which a hundred characters declared a temporary truce and convened to honor the avatar and its real life person, who died of a heart attack...
...In real space, my racial category seems to be a natural, biological characteristic, based on immutable morphology and ancestry...
...HEHEHE Perpetrator: KKK Me: Why don't you come out to play...
...But this upbeat story relies on numerous However, the relationship will already have controversial assumptions...
...A Theory of Race We need to start with a theory of race...
...Could race, for example, be made to look dif ferent in cyberspace...
...In a greater number of social spaces, abolition would not only be difficult but also inappropriate...
...Race will continue to influence the content of one's communications even if the audience is not aware of the nature of that influence...
...If they were instead executed through communication systems that filtered out race and its proxies, then racial discrimination (of the disparate treatment variety, conscious or unconscious, based on personal animus or impersonal statistics) would decrease...
...Social Spaces...
...This partially lifts the choke hold that residential segregation puts on interracial social contact...
...Commitment to racial justice explains my shift from science into law...
...Me: I'm at the teleporter, near Temple St...
...Interest in such matters is powerfully shaped by socioeconomic class, gender, and age, and people drawn together by these commonalities will hardly all be of the same race...
...Although I've heard many epithets as a "chink" or "gook," I'd never been attacked as a black man...
...Another required condition is that folks interact on terms of equal social status...
...CYBER- RACE In real space, we navigate un-diverse communities (especially post-affirmative action...
...Marketplaces...
...Compare the spirit of University of California regent Ward Connelly's Racial Privacy Initiative, which is trying to abolish "race" in California databases...
...Integration also conflicts with abolition: the entire point of abolition is to be race-blind, whereas integration requires people to see each other's race (eventually) and to interact with members of different races...
...To evaluate its merits, we need to examine more carefully what lessons cyber-passing teaches...
...Ham-fisted abolition would undermine such politics just as cyberspace matures into a serious political medium...
...To get integration to work, we must build it, designing it carefully according to the principles already discussed...
...Transmutation Recall my fighting words episode...
...All this, of course, assumes that racial minorities have access to cyberspace...
...Typically, these relationships form in virtual communities of common interests, experiences, and fates...
...The transmutation approach argues that we should exploit this opportunity and all engage in cyber-passing to destabilize the very idea of racial categories...
...When I said "yes," I was sprayed with racist bile: Perpetrator: hey nigger Perpetrator: betta watch out we got an eye on you and others do to your reported to the aryan nation KKK mutherfucker...
...Doing so across the board, through official legal action, would be an unconstitutional, content-based restraint on speech...
...DISSENT / Spring 2003 • 63...
...Current cyberspace literature emphasizes that it's all about the "code"—not codifiedin-DC (East Coast) code but programmedin-Silicon-Valley (West Coast) code—and that code is also a social construction...
...Consider also the fact that collective politics must often organize around race to resist injustice based on race...
...He writes widely on communications, cyberspace, and civil rights...
...Integration So if race cannot and should not be entirely abolished in cyberspace, can we adopt an integration strategy instead...
...Still, this would not be a trivial contribution to racial equality...
...Let me give a real world example...
...If built right, cyberspace could provide these conditions...
...Consider the frequent complaint about people of color sitting together all the time (which we rarely hear when people of noncolor do the same...
...These meanings, triggered automatically and subconsciously, alter our behavior...
...gays and lesbians talk to each other about coming out...
...This approach captures important synergies and diversifies our policy portfolio of risk...
...No participant has any special power over the others, nor any special capacity to communicate in ways that others cannot...
...Also, as in my Tennessee roommate story, we could experiment with delays in disclosing racial cues, for example by encouraging the use of pseudonyms ("handles"), with first names, then last names, then photos available through successive clicks of the mouse...
...In one world, I played a young, muscular, bald black man...
...In these places, one picks an avatar (a graphic representation of the self), navigates visually depicted environments, and chats with other individuals...
...That is a risk we should take seriously...
...In telling a story in thirty minutes or thirty seconds, simpler characters that tap into pre-existing racial meanings work best...
...To strongarm them into repressing that self-conception, even if only in cyberspace, is to ask some Americans to silence a part of themselves...
...There are novel options here, configured not only by new technologies but also by new politics...
...patients fighting cancer provide information and support...
...What happens when a social construction evolves within a social construction...
...the behavioral changes can range from simply crossing the street, to voting for three-strikes-andyou'reout laws, to profiling Arabs as terrorists...
...Cooperation toward a joint goal is another important requirement...
...We know "race" when we see it, but what exactly is it...
...This prompts giddy speculations about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream Version 2.0—to be DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 59 CYBER - RACE judged by the content of one's text-characters, not the color of one's skin...
...One might complain that differences in socioeconomic status present in real space will surely manifest themselves in cyberspace...
...This is what's called the "contact hypothesis" by social psychologists...
...I AM A KOREAN-AMERICAN law professor with two very different research agendas...
...Increased social contact is necessary but not sufficient to reform racial meanings...
...I share them in the hope of provoking users, engineers, regulators, and lawmakers to think through cyber-race and to engage in a collective form of city planning...
...But in cyberspace, the racial signal I broadcast is the product of voluntary choice and intentional experimentation...
...I find such hopes naive...
...Over the phone, I arranged to live with a graduate student...
...The audience may nonetheless receive my performance as authentic because it will hold the same stereotypes that I hold...
...For instance, who been framed by the interaction that took place before disclosure...
...These transactions are today negotiated face-to-face, thereby triggering racial schemas...
...Accordingly, my performance seriously risks stereotype...
...This vitriol felt different...
...In the end, we may all unwittingly consume black/red/yellow-face, while believing it to be an "authentic" direct experience...
...Between integration and transmutation, I am more sanguine about integration...
...This might prompt me to look at race differently, as less fixed...
...But we have seen this argument before...
...By embedding delay into the architecture, we could prevent racial meanings, which are often biased, from setting (subconsciously, perhaps) the initial terms of the social interaction...
...Cyberspace enables multiple forms of computermediated interactions, which vary along various metrics: temporal engagement (asynchronous versus synchronous), communication initiation (push versus pull), audience scope (one versus many), media richness (text-only versus multimedia...
...Commercial broadcasters peddle products that will attract the largest number of viewers...
...However, this may be a blessing in disguise...
...Suppose that I decide to cyber-pass as an African American out of honest curiosity...
...Even without intentional parody, how do I know what it means to "act black...
...The telephone's architecture would have prevented those racial meanings from affecting his housing decision...
...Some fear that that force is negative...
...Many Internet interactions are casual, superficial, and transient...
...Luckily, we don't have to choose a single architecture for all of cyberspace...
...Because of bandwidth limitations, most cyber interactions still take place through typed text...
...Think how much our lives have changed since the Web came into being one decade ago...
...In particular, I might no longer see the ancestry and morphology of my single physical body as constricting my iden 62 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 has time to engage in serious transmutation...
...Why might cyberspace deliver more disconfirming data than real space...
...It can disrupt racial mechanics...
...Social psychologists have identified various environmental conditions crucial to fighting prejudice...
...Instead of trying to disrupt racial mapping through anonymity, can cyberspace help reform racial meanings by pro 6o n DISSENT / Spring 2003 moting social interactivity...
...It turned out that neither he nor my supervisor knew that I was Asian American until we met face to face...
Vol. 50 • April 2003 • No. 2
