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

Race, Place and Identity

Race and gender take on a number of different forms when they intersect with technology, although most of those permutations resemble their "real time" counterparts, where atavistic attitudes and practices exist alongside progressive views and activities. This paper engages the topic through three different venues: the current discourse on race and technology (the digital divide), the experiences of black women who work in technology, and the figuration of race and gender 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 on the Internet, the myth of cyberspace as a "raceless, genderless, and sexuality-free" space is one that thrives in a variety of chat room and other on-line forums. Nakamura argues that "race is constructed as a matter of aesthetics, or finding the color that you like, rather than as a matter of ethnic identity or shared cultural referents. The fantasy of skin color divorced from politics, oppression or racism seems to also celebrate it as infinitely changeable, customizable; as entirely elective as well as political" (53).¹ All of these identities, of course, exist in and are constantly reconstructed through language, a medium that, even in the age of Java, still rules as the central means of signification on the Web. Indeed, the success of one's Web site, career, or product can often rest almost entirely on words—that is, whether they possess that magic combination that will earn them a spot in the top ten of a Google search. It also goes without saying that the language used in cyberspace operates in much the same way it does in the "real world." In a previous article, "Racism and Technology," I argued that our discourse on technology bears little resemblance to the reality. In the Western imagination, technology is the exclusive provenance of the West—it is by default always white, almost always male, and sexuality rarely emerges as an imaginative category. The reality is that technology is the product 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 cell phones. The reality of the digital divide, I concluded, 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 New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly on 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 slots of fastest-growing groups of Internet users, and given a variety of new ways of reading racial differences in Internet literacy in terms of access, computer sales, and what each group uses the Internet for. Depending on which article you read, Latinos occupy the top spot, with African Americans running a close second, or vice versa. An August study from the University of California, Los Angeles (http://www.racerelations.about.com/b/a/014892.htm) had the former in the top spot by tallying the number of times each minority group used the Internet per month. Articles that focus on the total amount in computer sales put blacks ahead of Latinos and whites, in that order (http://www.freep.com/money/tech/divide14_20010214; http://dir.salon.com/news/feature/2000/03/02/digital/index.html), but note that Asian Americans are far ahead of everyone else (a fact rarely mentioned in other articles). These articles appeared in 2000 and 2001, so it is unclear if this is still true. Yet another article dated January23, 2004, on http://www.BET.com noted that African Americans still lag woefully behind whites in Internet use and access (no other racial groups are mentioned). It must be noted, though, that the author argues that blacks comprise 13percent of the population and yet make up only 8percent of Internet users...