Technologies of "Race"

This site is about the technologies of "race." (Quotation marks intended as a disclaimer.) My own research does not specifically focus on "race" but I decided to work on this issue because I perceive a gap in the discussions about technology. Although we always talk about technology and its impact on culture and the production of knowledge, we do not seriously touch on the kind of racial dynamics that produce and sustain the current state and use of technology and, therefore, the kind of knowledge and culture that is produced.

This work-in-progress is currently in two parts: part 1 sets up a political/historical framework for understanding "race," and part 2 briefly outlines some of the fundamental problems inherent in the current trends in the manufacture and use of technology that reinforce racialization and racial divisions. Both sections are left as outlines, which I will flesh out when we all get a relief from witnessing wounded, burning and decomposed flesh.

A note: I will not stick to a single theoretical framework in this talk because as an interdisciplinarian (as in someone who's made a choice to not stick to a single discipline) I pick and choose and mix and match as a matter of routine. You may call this a tactical use of theory. Tactical engagement is a trend these days: tactics are non-localized, parasitic, mobile, unpredictable, marginal and comprised of everyday practices. What I call tactical use of theory intends to open up spaces otherwise unavailable within the rigid structures of institutions, so that we can think and respond more freely. Just as DV8 network does through producing alternative radio.

Part 1

Go to:

Blackness for Sale, Keith Obadike, 2001

http://obadike.tripod.com/ebay.html

Obadike's art piece, Blackness for Sale, is a brilliant example of what is called "tactical media" particularly in the parasitic way in which it uses existing systems – eBay – to get the message out. And I'm sure you're all intelligent enough to have picked up that he wasn't actually selling his blackness as you might sell a pair of socks as family heirloom (because anything goes on eBay), but intended it as a double attack on racism as well as the comodification of "race" in the U.S. Keep this work somewhere reachable in your mind because you will see shortly the specific social conditions that it somehow responded to.

"Race" is not a "thing."

Notions of inherent differences among different population groups on the basis of skin colour and other visible markers are culturally produced and scientifically unfounded.

Such views were partially rooted in a set of false assumptions, reinforced by ethnocentric evolutionary theory, old but still having a strong hold, about the ascent of humans from apes through Africans and Asians and culminating with Europeans or the "white race."

In fact, genetic science shows that variation within any "race" is much greater than between "races."

"Race" and "racial hierarchies" are cultural constructs as in "imaginings". But "racialization" and "racism" are specific discourses and practices (or more simply, ideologies, policies and actions) and, therefore, lived realities that probably many of us in this room have first-hand experiences of.

I contend that racialization and racism must be understood as practices of power that have been fundamental elements of Western economic, political, social and cultural life throughout modernity, and they cannot be simplistically explained through the concept of "prejudice," although prejudice and ethnocentrism are part of racialization and racism.

Specific forms of racialization and racism have developed along three major axis in modern political history: colonialism, fascism, and imperialism. These are not mutually exclusive, but distinct phenomena. I'm going to draw these in very broad and simplified strokes as a backdrop.

Colonialism: Also dubbed as Western European expansionism, roughly corresponds with the historical period between the 1100s and early-1900s. This is the period when Western European nations, all of them just beginning to take shape in the way we imagine them today – Spain, Portugal, Britain, France – begin excursions first inside and then outside European continent, invading and occupying Ireland and Eastern Europe first and later lands in the Americas, Africa and Asia through warfare and coercion. Although solidified in the latter half of this period, concepts of hierarchies of "races" helped politically justify genocide, exploitation and dispossession of the indigenous peoples in these lands while Europeans created their settlements and colonies and began exploiting natural resources and labour of the people they dominated. Cases: Invasion of the Americas and the massive annihilation and systemic dispossession of the aboriginal nations - misnamed through Columbus's geographic faux pas as Indians; colonization of Africa and the practice of slavery; and the colonization of much of the east, south and west Asia. I'm sure you're familiar to some extent with at least some aspects of these.

Fascism: We had a glimpse of fascism earlier this term when we looked at the use of media for propaganda in Germany and Italy during the 1920s through 1940s, that is the period leading to and including WWII. Racist conceptualizations in this period, placing the "Aryan race" at the top of the evolutionary ladder, led to the genocide of the Jews which you know about, but also of Roma and Sinti peoples (referred to as Gypsies) which is less often heard of. (Such historical exclusion is also a form of racism.) I will talk a bit more about fascism and its characteristics shortly.

Imperialism: Not exclusive of colonialism - in fact some would use the terms interchangeably or prefer imperialism altogether for its broader meanings. Imperialism, coined by Lenin. Neoimperialism is sometimes referred to in Marxist theory as the highest stage of capitalism. A quote from Michael Parenti:

By "imperialism" I mean the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people… The preponderant thrust of the European, North American, and Japanese imperial powers has been directed against Africa, Asia, and Latin America (in the 19th and 20th centuries, Japan has also been an imperialist power). By the nineteenth century, they saw the Third World as not only a source of raw materials and slaves but a market for manufactured goods. By the twentieth century, the industrial nations were exporting not only goods but capital, in the form of machinery, technology, investments, and loans. To say that we have entered the stage of capital export and investment is not to imply that the plunder of natural resources has ceased. If anything, the despoliation has accelerated." (e.g. Environmental disaster caused by Dow Company in Bhopal, India)

Imperialism, as a specific political and economic formation, establishes hierarchies of power among regions and nations – First World, Third World – that enable specific forms of racialization and racism to appear. In the latter part of the 20th century to the present day, these forms have included, among others, anti-immigrant policies and practices that undoubtedly sound quite familiar to everybody in the room. Current examples: at the municipal level, the propagation of the myth that crime in Toronto is an immigrant – particularly Jamaican – problem; and at the national level, the latest national security and immigration laws that single out people from the Middle East and subject them to unequal treatment.

A note: I said earlier that Colonialism, fascism and imperialism are not mutually exclusive periods in history. They are intrinsically connected and overlap. Let me give you an example that will also let me delve more into characteristics of fascism which I left out earlier.

Fascism is not a thing we left behind with WWII. In the contemporary U.S. "patriot politics", institutionalized in the USA Patriot Act of 2001, is arguably a new form of "fascism" in its formation. "A state level assertion of racism and racial profiling as policy; the erosion of basic civil rights for singled out groups of population; incarceration without fair judicial processes; deportation; a massive military formulation which is able to level massive force and technological destruction wherever it feels like; a media absolutely aligned with the state's position and through it the ability to marshal public opinion in support of the state's interests." If this sounds like Nazi Germany, it's because these are the markers of fascism.

My intention in drawing this grim background was only so that we could locate "race" within specific historical formations of power. Again, here my contention is that racism is not just prejudice, but an exercise of political and economic power that no "multicultural" display of food and craft, and no amount of skin colour in commercials can fundamentally reverse.

"Race" has also been a site of resistance and struggle, and I want to bring these in, even if briefly. Examples: Liberation revolutions in Asia and Africa against colonial rule; the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. These movements challenged the conditions under which racialized labour was available for exploitation in the former colonies as well as in the Western metropoles, and they pushed the limits of democracy. Present-day examples include the continuing struggles of aboriginal peoples in the Americas for self-determination, title to land and resources and for human rights. Some theorizers and practitioners of "race" as site of resistance: Frantz Fannon, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Aime Cezare, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, bell hooks among others). But this discussion needs another lecture, which, of course we don't have the time for.

Part 2

What is quite important to keep in mind is that imperialist political and economic domination flourished during the same period that concepts of modernity and democracy were developed. Conventionally, people oppose racism and modernity, racism and rationality and racism and democracy. However, the historical picture I drew shows that while European Enlightenment was developing concepts of rationality, equality, and the rights of "man" (sorry I can't use gender-neutral language here since women were not figured in until well into the 1900s), genocide and exploitation of other peoples were in full swing, excluding them from these presumably universal principles on the basis of "race." The Western emphasis on "universality," "progress" and "rationality" – as opposed to "tribalism," "tradition" and "irrationality" of the "primitive" native peoples of the colonies - justified the construction of an international economy based in exploitation, and the emergence of a global culture of exclusion. To understand how race was fundamental to the construction of modernity is of more than historical interest: it explains the present-day conditions and limits of democracy. And the violence and genocide of this earlier era prefigures contemporary atrocities like "ethnic cleansing," and totalitarianism.

Benedict Andersen (referred to in Cameron Bailey's article) theorizes nation as "imagined community." The work of imagining is mediated through print technology (i.e. early mass media). How? He looks at the way citizens in a modern state communicate. Since there are simply too many people clustered together in cities there is no way a single person can meet and have face-to-face interaction with even a fraction of the citizens. Therefore "nation" as a community is imagined. People feel that they belong to the same community even though they have never actually met. The only way to communicate with other citizens in a modern state is through mass media. But the mass media – print, radio and television - are one-way tools of communication - you can only receive messages but rarely get to talk back. Therefore, the construction of "nation" is biased by the power-elite who dominate mass media, and let's face it, the elite's imagination is limited by their privilege and their desire to maintain privilege. Two examples: the United States was originally conceived as the nation of "free white men" (most fathers of nation being committed slaveholders), and Canada as a nation is premised, to this day, on the recognition of the "two founding nations" (British and French). You do the math and figure who gets excluded while I'll pull up the clip that I want to show.

Go to clip on Florida election:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs/newsnight/palast.ram

Most discussions of "race" in cyberspace focus on how individual and group identity are constructed in online communication. Most discussions of "race" and technology focus on the "digital divide," that is narrowly interpreted to only mean on-line access for the haves and have-nots as differentiated on the basis of their racial identity. These discussions are necessary interventions. But I contend that they often lack comprehensive analysis and therefore fail to address some of the most fundamental economic, social, political and cultural problems inherent in the construction of the "global village" as a "nation of the technologically unified" and, consequently, in the technological developments over the past half-a-century. These fundamental problems include:

- first and foremost and the least talked about, the globally racialized division of labour, i.e. who provides the manual labour and makes the hardware (cheap labour in Third World countries provided by people – majority of them women, for those interested in thinking about the gender factor - who don't themselves get to benefit from the technology they produce)

- who profits from maintaining tight control over hardware (e.g. chips, box, etc.) and software (e.g. operating systems, etc.) reinforced through national and international laws and regulations (e.g. property, corporate and copyright laws) and the perpetual relations of dependence and hierarchies that these are meant to maintain;

- the ethnocentric (i.e. culturally-specific) assumptions that animate the imagination of hardware/software designers and, thus, shape and limit the forms and uses of technology as well as the direction of research and development (e.g. "indexing" as the basis of data organization many cultures don't think of knowledge as indexable data)

- the hegemony of English as the primary language of programming and global communication.

- the existing and established practices by the power-elite (i.e. governments and corporations) in using technology in their strategies of surveillance, control and exclusion (e.g. the election in Florida)

- the undemocratic corporate control in setting the priorities for research and development according to profit-making and marketing factors rather than based on social need.

- and last, but by no means the least significant, accompanying this division of labour and profit and decision-making power, the mythology created around the technology that masks these fundamental inequalities (e.g. World Wide Web, which is really not world wide when you consider that close to 70% of the world's population doesn't even have land line telephone, or "information revolution," or "more RAM leads to more democracy")

So, who's in the global village, and more importantly, who runs it?

Go to "IBM's imagined community"

http://www.lclark.edu/~soan370/global/ibmimaginedcommunity.html