01 January, 2016

The Web Is Not a Post-Racial Utopia | Al Jazeera America

The Web Is Not a Post-Racial Utopia | Al Jazeera America: "Why is it that the supposed lack of choice with regards to the player’s avatar only became a concern after people of color were added to the game? The reactions reflect a failure on the part of some gamers to recognize that whiteness is a race at all. These players appear to think of whiteness as a neutral type of embodiment, the universal category of humanity against which all those who do “have” a race (anyone who is not white) are compared. The backlash also confirms a theory posited by new media scholar Lisa Nakamura that, on the Internet, there is a tendency to assume that, in the absence of direct statements to the contrary, the people that we meet are white.  Indeed, as Nakamura writes in “Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet”:

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