Color Behind the Screen

The Internet truly rules the world. To think that the Internet was not considered essential aspects of the society, well, at least in the First World such as America, even less than a decade ago is astonishing.


There is no doubt that the invention of the Internet will go down as one of the greatest achievements in human history, but when something is as widely used as the Internet, there are bound to be multiple aspects of problems. In the U.S, where the concept of race is heavily accentuated due to the diversity the country holds, the problems related to such topic are destined to transfer to different mediums.


Before the age of web connectivity, many platforms of expression have gone though various issues regarding the topic of race. Decades ago, literacy was not a part of the minorities because the dominating force, or caucasians, prevented other minorities from learning to read or write because they knew that education would play an essential part in realizing that the minorities were being treated unfairly. From the 1960s to 1990s, television as a platform was a topic of discussion when it came to racial stereotyping and misrepresentation of certain ethnicities. Considering that most of the contents were created by people of caucasian backgrounds, they utilized the generalized information about the minority groups to be portrayed in the media, which many civil leaders and scholars have fought against for decades.


However, racism that exists on the web is a bit trickier than the previous forms of racism because this time, it is not just major media producers that are problems, but rather, there are millions of people online who are free to express whatever the opinions they may hold because that is the nature of the Internet. Interestingly enough, even though the nature of the Internet does not identify the racial origin of each user by default, people tend to identify themselves when they express their opinions as if their racial identities verify their expressions.

 As Brock points out in his article 'Deconstructing Race on the Internet', "the commenters enthusiastically identified themselves racially in an online space where previously there was no need to do so."

Granted, most of the occasions when I see this type of behavior taking place is usually when the topic of discussion involves the concept of race in certain ways. If you take a look at the comment section of Youtube, you can observe many occasions where people identify their race on their own with such comments as "I'm black", "I'm hispanic", and "I'm Asian."


My question is that if we as a society are truly trying to move onto the post-racial society, why are we putting so much emphasis on the racial identities? There is nothing wrong with being proud of who you are. It just irks me to see so many people themselves with only one characteristic when they are so many other ways to describe themselves.