Where Do You Want To Go Today?

In “Where Do You Want To Go Today?” Lisa Nakamura chronicles attempts by advertisers to extinguish or moderate racial issues through the use of the internet.

Nakamura starts out describing a commercial that claims that on the internet there are no infirmities, no gender, no age – only minds. It concludes by saying that (the internet) is uninfluenced by the rest of it (pg 4). Nakamura takes issue with the “rest of it” portion of the commercial. She states that the “rest of it” is racial and ethnic difference. The commercial seeks to bolster the claim that the internet will break down the wall of racial and social oppression. She goes on to quote many other similar commercials that make her point.

This article was written in the late 1990’s. It is very important to note that this was the time when the internet was coming of age. The advertising campaigns illustrated what the Chairmen of the Federal Reserve at the time referred to as “”irrational exuberance”. People were just starting to see the power the internet had, but were still unable to put things into perspective. Why else were internet companies with no hope of ever turning a profit trading with the like of General Electric, Phillip Morris, and Alcoa. We really didn’t have a grasp on things and were not able to make insinuations about “the rest of it”. The article has many of the trappings of McPherson’s article. Present in both are the ideas of the cyber-self being something other than your true being.

Nakamura draws an interesting connection between colonialism and tourism. The allusions made me put down the paper and think about what she meant, but she did not really clear up the issue. Since she didn’t elaborate I will. I see tourism as a powerful tool for understanding, tolerating, and celebrating other races, religions, and ethnicities. Colonialism was also a force for progress but it came at the expense of race, religion, and ethnicities.

I may have been successful at getting my arms around what Nakamura is talking about if I was able to actually see the commercials she refers to. At times it was hard to really understand what she meant and she made things more confusing by referring to other obscure commercials that I have never seen. I lived through this period of time, and I have to say that the sentiment held by the people on the cutting edge of internet technology was quite different from the average person. We didn’t understand the internet and they had wild eye notions (like what Nakamura details) that were ridiculous. I postulate that it is silly to think that the internet will deliver us into some post-ethnic utopia. It is another clear example of hopeful people irresponsibly looking for a magic bullet to solve the challenges of race and racism.

I’ll Take My Stand in Dixie-Net

In “I’ll Take My Stand in Dixie-Net” Tara McPherson details a new form of group identity over the internet. The main idea behind McPherson's article is that cyberspace often blurs the role race plays in identity formation
McPherson introduces us to neo-Confederates. Neo-Confederates are individuals and groups who seek to reconstruct the Confederacy in cyberspace. McPherson uses the example to illustrate how an individual in cyberspace can transcend race, gender, income, geography, and most other characteristics that determine what Johnson referred to as privilege. On page 123 McPherson makes a point that groups like the neo-Confederates do not use specific descriptions of race and tend to stay away from discussions of racism. She states on the bottom of the page that groups like the neo-Confederates are covertly racists rather than overtly racist. The group is not represented in any one given website but rather in a group of websites that each has a different focus. They all have some of the same iconography such as Confederate flags and music steams of Dixie. Some also have geographical maps delineating the 11 states of the Confederacy. McPherson gets away from specifics and asks what our online identity is. In her summary conclusions McPherson calls peoples participation in cyberspace as “non-traumatic multiplicity.”

By avoiding debate over issues of race those in cyberspace can avoid the negative connotations associated with groups like the Klu Klux Klan. In fact many less than tolerant groups like the neo-Confederates masquerade as benign organizations and even put anti-Klan icons on their websites. Essentially these sites attempt to white-wash history and only dwell in the elements of the “proper southerner” that they deem to be important, and overlooking the part about racism. They take the opposite side of the issue and defend against the degradation of white masculinity, as opposed to blackness. In the context of cyberspace the evasiveness detailed is quite effective when the source’s gender and race are not as readily apparent.

I found McPherson’s article interesting as I had never heard of neo-Confederates. I always thought that sinister groups could exist on the net, but I never paid any real attention to them. I think that they are sinister because they don’t come right out and say who they are and what they are all about, and they are definitely trying to advance an agenda. I also found the concepts of transcending or uprooting (pg 127) race to be quite interesting. I look forward to trying it some time in the future. I wish McPherson would have created a piece that was easy to understand. I thought that she was overly wordy and she spent way too much time quoting others and referencing what she assumed was commonly disseminated popular culture. It seems difficult to gage what shapes racism and tolerance will take on the internet, but I am now looking out for it more after reading this article.

Takaki Chapter 12

In chapter 12 El Norte: The Borderland of Chicano America, Takaki outlines the origins Chicano Americans. Takaki suggests that Chicano Americans were treated unfairly and discriminated against.

The challenges facing the Chicanos were unique to their group. They made their way north to the United States first to escape civil war and then to find work or trabajo. The circumstances are similar to the Japanese Americans that were immigrating around the same time. The work they engaged in was mainly unskilled agrarian jobs. They mainly received wages inferior to their Anglo counterparts, and were generally not represented in the supervision and management of the companies they worked for. Furthermore management used them as a fulcrum against ever more powerful indigenous labor unions. Chicanos were a unique minority group in America in that they shared an actual boarder with the United States, and crossed and re-crossed the boarder with regular frequency.

Did the Chicanos of the early century pose a real threat to the racial identity of the United States? The point can be made that they did not show lower rates of assimilation of other similar groups. Some (especially those who were refugees of the civil war) had no desire to assimilate, and were Mexicans living in America (pg 314-315). It is suggested that Chicano resistance to assimilation threatened to roll back the gains made in the Mexican American War. I have heard this suggestion made by modern protectionists such as Pat Buchannan. I do not think that non-assimilation poses the kind of threat to American culture that some would lead us to believe. The American culture unique and strong and the Chicano heritage only enriches that culture.

In this case I feel that Takaki is stretching to make his point that the Chicanos were oppressed. They came to America by their own free will. I understand that they were often motivated by the backward and primitive systems that Mexico’s government and society is founded on, but cannot this argument be made regarding most European immigrants. The difference I see is that those European immigrants essentially made a bigger commitment and from that commitment came a greater buy-in. Most gave up everything they have ever known in order to get on a boat and maybe find a better life in America. The Chicanos in comparison had to make a medium to long walk north to a part of America that wasn’t dissimilar from the land they vacated, and when they got there they lived in Barrio’s or communities that were nearly identical to those in their native country.