RACE IN CYBERSPACE

RACE IN CYBERSPACE
This is an article by Tara McPherson where she writes about race in cyberspace. She highlights how “cyberwhitening” takes place via the creation of new regional identities that refigure white southern masculinity by borrowing from the language of the civil rights struggle” (120). She starts by stating that she ended up with many outposts of Dixie in cyberspace one summer when she opened up the site of the Confederate Embassy in Washington, D.C. while working on a manuscript about race and Southern femininity. She writes that there are new media theories which cannot be reconciled to old theories. “Such theories often maintain that cyberspace functions as a kind of public theater, ‘a base for the cybog’ [who rewrite] the standard of bounded, embodied individual” (118). This shows that “prosthetic communication enables computer users to overcome the self/body binary” (118). Hence the conclusion thus far is that “prolonged exposure to cyberspace irrevocably produces multiple selves, or at least more selves than one entered the Net with” (118). Then she addresses what happens to this transformed embodied identity. She quotes Turkle who states that “life on the screen is also without origins and foundation” (118). Most especially uprooted is one’s rootedness to place. Though it may be seen as a positive part of internet on the other hand, this loss of rootedness to place is as a result of the “internet’s ability to overcome geographical boundaries, envisioning it as a kind of yellow brick road leading to a harmonious global village” (118). McPherson states that the neo-Confederates guarding the portals of the Confederate embassy in cyberspace seem to pay no much attention to the prosthetic nature of cyberspace. They do not pay attention to the internet’s capability to “many selves too inhabit one body” (119). She further states that the work of the neo-confederate in cyberspace reveals a very sincere attempt to make self in the world and to articulate a very particular and racially naturalized presence. This she calls “a very serious battle over the demands of place, race, and identity [in which] the cyber-rebels are reconstructing Dixie and its citizens. Then she states how cyber communities, like those of neo- confederates invoke a specific register of place which “evade precise discussion about race or racism” (119). Race is one of the focal points through which public discourse has turned on in this nation, especially in the south. She cites historical images of the first half twentieth century which insisted upon racial differences. Some of these differences included labeling “whiteness as independent and separate from blackness” (119).To illustrate these differences, she uses the ‘Overt’ versus ‘covert' labels. The difference between the two is that the overt “brings together figurations of racial difference in order to fix the categories while the [covert] enacts a separation that nonetheless achieves a similar end” (119). She further states that “this separation is very much in evidence in the neo-Dixie of cyberspace, a place which is nothing if not white” (119). The sole purpose of Dixie cyberspace is to preserve the Southern heritage. To preserve southern heritage however, “means one must be racist” even though this is denied by those that uphold the purpose. They abandon any overt imaging of blackness or explicit expression of racism, therefore, denying any labels on them as racist.
As I read through this chapter, my eyes were opened to see the internet in a different way. I have never thought much about it being used as a race media because so much racism is hidden in it that you cannot easily see it. This leads me to ask whether racism has truly ended. Most people say there is no more racism because they do not see such things as slavery that directly depicted racism. However, through reading such articles, I have seen that racism is still there though it is in what I would call a ‘diplomatic form.’ I say it is diplomatic in the sense that it cannot be easily seen unless you dig deeper for the diplomacy that was used behind the scenes. Therefore, we should all take it as a challenge upon us to educate others of the knowledge we have acquired in this class.