Working Draft -- Not for quotation
Final version to appear in: Marc Smith and Peter Kollock (editors).
1999. Communities in Cyberspace. London:
Routledge
In both academic studies and in common understandings, the connection between the body and racial identity is strong. From the 16th century, race has been used to denote common descent and was seen as carried by blood (Banton, 1987; Gossett, 1965). In the 19th century, genes replaced blood but still race was contained by the body. This connection still holds. Van Den Berghe (1993) distinguishes race as a bodily feature from ethnicity, which is a cultural feature: "Ethnicity is based upon cultural markers of membership, such as language, religion, and countless symbols such as clothing, holidays, music, literature, tattooing, and so on, whereas race is marked by heritable phenotypes" (240). Today being a member of a racial group is fundamentally a claim about physical features such as skin color, hair texture, facial features, and musculature.
Even when scholars conceive of race as a status, a class, or a social construction, still race is described as a biological phenomenon in which societies invest social meaning (for example, Lyman & Douglass, 1973). When psychologist test children to find out if they correctly label themselves racially or ethnically, the body is the independent variable. That is, if the child labels themselves white but they are phenotypically black, the former basis of identification is brought into question not the latter (Phinney, 1987). When sociologists study the phenomenon called "passing" they do not find that just because a person is living socially as a Latino that they are in fact Latino. Instead, the social circumstances are seen as hiding the actuality of the inherited lineage. The body’s phenotype, and when that fails its genotype, is the anchor of racial identity.
As with gender and age, establishing racial identity in face to face interaction relies heavily on physical cues provided by the body. Physical characteristics like skin color and vocal patterns are pivotal clues to racial identity that can eliminate the need for an explicit claim to racial membership. People expect others to take their race into consideration on "appropriate" occasions, and interactants may take offense when their race or gender or age is misidentified. Even if the offended party has not specified his/her race, there is an expectation that race should have been gleaned from embodied physical signals alone. In Goffman’s terms, race is a sign "given off" (1959:2). This makes race useful in interaction because it provides for stereotypical understandings based upon a racially immutable body. Once established, racial identity is a reliable social resource that organizes the behaviors one anticipates, allows, and accepts from another. Knowing another’s racial identity provides ways of understanding and acting toward the other. For example, Spaights and Dixon (1984) use racial and gender identity to understand the pathological motivations of Blacks and White entering into interracial romantic "alliances." White males are understood as having a set of potential motives for being romantically involved with a black female because of their racial identity:
"He may view her as the ‘earth mother,’ a source of spontaneous sexual play that he has not found among white women…He may view black lifestyle as having a richness lacking in a more inhibiting white social group. A liberal upbringing may lead him to identify with the underdog…He may take the pleasure from offending his friends or relatives. He may respond to a black woman out of guilt, to expiate the sins of his race against black people." (135)
More than a novel approach to the absolution of sin, this motive explains the action of interracial coupling through the racial identities of the participants. This is how racial stereotyping works, action is explained by reference to racial identity which is in turn based upon physical characteristics. However, the physical characteristics that indicate racial identity offline are lacking in online communication. Indeed, this textual medium would seem to render race an unreliable resource for understanding the other. Some social commentators are seeing racial identity as capricious or obsolete in online interaction. If that is true then the basis of stereotyping would seem to be in a precarious position.
While physical cues are lacking online, for better or worse racial identification is not lacking. Racial identity is a feature of many online interactions. There are, in fact, many online discussion groups specifically dedicated to the discussion of racial and cultural issues. These groups, known as soc.culture newsgroups, are perspicuous settings for exploring the organization of online racial identity. My focus was on a particular soc.culture group, soc.culture.african.american (SCAA), and to a lesser degree on two similar groups, soc.culture.jewish (SCJ) and soc.culture.mexican.american (SCMA). As participants in these groups describe and debate racial issues, they categorize themselves and others in racial terms that range from general racial categories (African-American, Chinese, European-American, White, Latino, etc.) to vernacular expressions (sell-out, banana, brother). Racial identity is a feature of these discussions, without the presence of the body. Because of the technological environment these online discussions allow the study of race in interaction in a way that removes the body and the propensity to see the body as the site of actual racial identity.
Race and racial identity are not capricious features of online interaction. The participants in these groups do not racial identify themselves or others randomly but in an orderly fashion as part of their on-going discussions. In private conversations some observers have suggested that online interaction creates an ambiguous social space. My argument is that such claims are not the experience of the participants. Ambiguity implies that reading the Usenet gives participants a doubt-ridden, hesitant and uncertain feeling. Reading a thread titled, "All niggers must die" brought with it no ambiguous social space. I felt I recognized the racially salient features of the interaction and the racial identities of the participants were unproblematic. Reading Usenet messages suggests that people are quite certain of the other’s identities, far from showing the hesitancy that ambiguity would predict, participants label, preach, advise, agree and disagree without equivocation. Racial identity is no more ambiguous online than offline. The resources of the medium are sufficient for participants’ determinations of racial identity. Offline, of course, people do not present themselves with their lineage documentation or DNA analysis attached. Certainty of racial identity offline or online is always contingent – absolute proof is not available and rarely necessary.
While the certainty of racial identification is not significantly affected by the medium, the achievement, maintenance, and use of racial identity is changed. The fixed reference of the body is online transformed in to the largely immutable text of the message. Most software allows one to quote but not otherwise alter the messages of others. As authors in soc.culture groups write on racial topics for particular audiences, their messages serve as an important source of racial cues. These messages offer the author’s understandings of self, audience, and topic. Responses quote parts of the author’s own message to join or invalidate the previous author’s claims and their words serve the discernment of identity as much as hair texture or skin color does in offline discussions. As discussions unfold, the most reliable foundation for categorizing an author is in the author’s message. It is the perspectives in those messages that reveal the participants actual racial identities. Without physical cues, racial identification is anchored to the perspectives on racial issues offered in authors’ messages.
The change from a reliance on a physical body to reliance on an author’s perspective has consequences for the usefulness of racial identity and for the way in which stereotyping proceeds. One consequence is that any discrepancy between author’s perspective and author’s stated identity may be resolved by adjusting the identity to fit the perspective. In offline interaction, individuals may use another’s racial identity to make assumptions about their perspectives, beliefs or attitudes. Online interaction uses an individual’s perspectives, beliefs and attitudes to make assumptions about the individual’s racial identity.
Online interaction does not create a confused social situation, nor does it give racial identity a chimerical quality. Racial identity is consequential in online interactions. This paper, after introducing the Usenet environment, uses observational data to look first at how racial identity is achieved, maintained, questioned, and reestablished. Next the consequences of online racial identity for stereotyping are considered. In fact, stereotypical notions of particular racial identities may be more immutable in online interaction than offline. Far from eliminating race as a salient characteristic, online interactants employ the limited resources available in a textual medium to establish a racial world online that resembles the offline world.
The Usenet, a global electronic bulletin board, comprises a set of "newsgroups" on the Internet. There are several thousand different newsgroups, each devoted to a specific topic or interest. Newsgroups are named in a hierarchical scheme: general categories like "comp" (computers), "rec" (recreation) and "soc" (social) identify the generic topic of the group. More specific terms are added until a complete newsgroup name is created. For example, a group that discusses a computer programming language called "PERL" is named "comp.lang.perl," a group devoted to producing plays is named "rec.arts.theatre.stagecraft."
A Usenet newsgroup is a site for the collection of messages. Participants send messages to a newsgroup where others can read and download them. About 125 Usenet groups have a particular culture as their primary topic. "Soc.culture" groups vary in size from apparently empty groups (soc.culture.welsh) to groups that contain thousands of messages (SCJ, SCAA). Large Usenet groups receive between 200 and 1,000 messages per day.
A group like SCAA may contain thousands of messages. Most readers have neither the time nor the inclination to read all the messages in a large newsgroup. Messages are often linked in "threads"-- chains of responses and counter-responses on a particular topic. Threaded messages are located under a "subject line" that allows participants to view only messages of interest.
The display of threads on the screen gives an illusion of orderliness that is not present in the posts themselves. Usenet discussion groups are not like conversations in which participants are present from the beginning and have heard everything the other participants have said, thus forming a single temporally unfolding discussion. Instead, threads are conversations in which individuals constantly enter and exit, speak on the basis of the last few exchanges, and go off to other conversations. In other words, the Usenet resembles a large cocktail party.
In face-to-face interaction an individual’s physical characteristics, from skin color to vocal patterns, help convey racial identity. Lacking such physical cues on computer networks, one might predict that discrimination on the basis of race, age, gender, sexuality, class, status, and group membership would disappear. Indeed, some participants use the lack of physical cues to claim any identity they want. An SCAA message suggests: "You are welcome here! Come on in. Would you like a beer or something? The only true color here is the monitor screen. Here I can be Black, White or Green."
The sense of freedom when establishing an online racial identity derives from a persistent belief that racial categorization is determined exclusively by corporeal traits. Although much sociological and anecdotal evidence has challenged this belief, race is still popularly seen as a characteristic of bodies (Spickard 1992). The body does not reveal race irrefutably. Multiracial individuals chronicle incidents in which their physical attributes were variously interpreted. The question multiracial individuals are so often asked-- "what are you?"-- displays the problematic relationship between physical characteristics and racial identity. The possibility of passing or being mistaken for a different race in face-to-face interaction is also evidence of the fallible relationship between observable traits and identity (Bradshaw 1992). Of course, answers to the question "what are you?" must be appropriate to the individual’s observable characteristics. Physical characteristics are a resource that permit and limit a range of interpretations, but they are only one medium among a variety of resources.
In online interactions, participants are reduced to textual resources, but these resources can be just as determinant as physical indicators are offline. The posts show that racial identity, although fixed differently than it is offline, is firmly established online. Racial characterizations of others are done with little hesitancy. For example, in a SCAA discussion concerning Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s race, the responder does not hesitate to "identify" the author of the quote:
>[Quote from previous post]: What? Clarence Thomas is not Black? I don’t know, he sure looks Black to me. What’s a "real Black" in this case?
Reply : Spoken like a true White boy.
Online communication, at first glance, intensifies the problem of verifying other people’s racial identities because it obscures many of the cues that people use in identifying self and others racially. This has led some researchers to focus on the possibility for deception in online discussions (Donath, this volume). However, participants in Internet newsgroups seem more concerned with being known than remaining anonymous-- they seem more interested in reception than deception. Many people put their names and workplaces at the end of their messages; other messages include home phone and office fax numbers. As interesting as the possibilities for deception may be, of equal interest are the ways individuals make themselves known, understood, and characterized in online interactions. The following sections sketch the way individuals come to know each other’s racial identity.
Each soc.culture newsgroup concerns a particular racial or cultural group around which members organize their participation. One aspect of participation are the subject lines in soc.culture groups which quite often mention a cultural, racial, or ethnic name, term in bringing a topic up for discussion. Even potentially race-neutral topics are made race-relevant in subject lines. For example, an SCAA discussion about women not properly appreciating "men who treat them right" was titled "Sisters please explain." "Sisters" here being an idiomatic reference to African-American women. In this way, the topic is framed as a question to African-Americans. Through the use of such "cultural frames" discussions start with an explicit connection to a specific racial topic.
However, subsequent postings may or may not pick up on the original post’s explicitly racial elements. This falls in line with Okamura’s discussion of the subjective or cognitive dimension of "situational ethnicity." This aspect "pertains to the actor’s subjective perception of the situation in which he finds himself and to the salience he attributes to ethnicity as a relevant factor in that situation" (1981: 454). The way in which race is made relevant in any posting is at the discretion of the author. The following responses are from a thread which concerned a report of the Nation of Islam caning two black youths whom they caught shoplifting. The initial post framed the issue as a racial topic concerning an African American group punishing African American youths. In looking to the cause of the youth problem the first author sees community and parenting as causes without mentioning race:
"I grew up in a household where everyone had carte blanche to whup (sic) my butt. Neighbors, teachers, older siblings etc.. The only rule was let my mother know what happened so she could get some later!!!….I’ve seen most of my friends children hit them more often than I’ve seen the parents hit the kids. In my house, that was a good way to get your teeth knocked out. Don’t get me wrong I wasn’t abused in the least bit, but it seems that somewhere along the line parents have substituted being a good parent with buying all the Power Rangers or doing what the kids want."
Another response characterizes the cause as parenting and the community but with race featured prominently. The problem is not community in general but the black community in particular:
"It is not easy putting up with many members of the black community. Without knowledge and understanding of the black condition, Black people will make you hate them. I know for a fact that the Muslims are trained not to be the aggressors. There had to be some kind of provocation for those youngsters to be physically disciplined. Too many people rush to the defense of the wrongdoer when authority is involved. If the children were wrong, they were wrong.
A woman by the name of _______ stated that the [Nation of Islam] was not the law enforcer of her choice. When our people are arrested by local or state police agencies and disciplined within the prison system little opposition is expressed. White discipline: Yes!; Black discipline: No!"
Responses can variously describe the salience of race. Over the course of a long thread, a discussion of residential segregation can shift to a conversation on "being a good neighbor" before ending as an exchange of ideas on home landscaping. Despite the newsgroup’s name or subject line heading, the relevance of race is not assured through the thread’s course.
While taking a position is at the discretion of the author, these positions are not without consequence. There is choice but not free choice. What can be missed in conceiving of identity as subjective and cognitive is the empirical dimension of identity as an intersubjective and interactional phenomenon. Identity is interactionally negotiated. The description of the relevance of race an author’s puts forth has consequences for how their identity is established. As a result of particular positions and ways of describing racial issues authors are racially identified, as in the next example of responses to an initial letter on affirmative action from SCAA:
[Initial Letter] I wouldn't hire a minority just out of principal. I would hire a woman but because of the fact that there are people out there trying to force me to hire minorities just because they're black or Hispanic or whatever else I would refuse to hire a minority out of principal. If you want a job then earn it or just live your life in poverty but don't expect white America to hire you just because your not white.
[Reply #1] And there you have it. A stupid white bigot….
[Reply #2] I thought the same thing, but this person is probably one of those Black people that got IN under affirmative action, and doesn't realize it! One must not assume he's white. There are so many Black people that are AGAINST affirmative action because they are brainwashed into believing that the "color of his skin is no more important than the color of his eyes!"
Recognition of this interactional dimension to racial identity goes against the popular sense that online racial identity is exclusively the crafted product of the author. If the reader cannot see the author, the reader cannot assert the author’s race with any certainty--the author seemingly has total control. Without disconfirming physical evidence, online authors may feel free of the usual constraints when establishing a racial identity. While many talk about the power of authors’ claims in online interaction, few have discussed the power of audience reception. Although any identity may be asserted online, such assertions can be disputed or differently received. Having concentrated on physical characteristics as disconfirming evidence for authors, it is possible to overlook the confirming evidence those physical signals provide. An author may claim to be "green" but getting others in a newsgroup to accept the claimed identity, without recourse to physical signals, is another matter.
As evidence of the limits of author’s identification choice, online authors cannot simply dispense with identity. A service known as an anonymous mailer sends Usenet messages that are virtually untraceable – readers cannot tell where anonymous messages originated or gather clues about the author’s identity from the heading. The removal of these identifiers does not undermine identification but instead offers the respondents a myriad of options to discredit the author. Anonymous messages serve to undercut the credibility of an author’s identity and argument. For example, as participants in SCAA debated forming a moderated newsgroup in which a central authority determines which messages are appropriate to post to the newsgroup, an anonymous response weighed in:
>[Quote from previous post]Who is to say what the purpose of the ng [newsgroup] is? It can be a place where people of all races come to discuss the effect of african american culture, as interpreted from the nobody actions of african americans, on school educational standards, violent crime rates, etc.
Reply: Anyone that's too cowardly to post under a name has no input anywhere except down in the slime with the rest of their ilk.
Anonymity, which might be considered an asset for authors, can instantly disqualify them.
The recognition of the interactional character of identity can offer some insight into the reason that racial identity comes up in particular situations and not in others. Authors offer perspectives, descriptions, and arguments on racial issues, with race depicted as an essential or incidental feature. As authors position the relevance of race, they also potentially reveal for others their own "true" racial identity. Thus, as a consequence of messages posted concerning racial topics, SCAA becomes populated by sell-outs, white supremacists, pro-Black-overkill Blacks, liberal-well-meaning whites, in-cog-Negroes, brothers-who-are-down-with-their-people, religious conservatives, and other racial identities.
Over the course of a single message, an author may racially identify himself/herself in several ways. In the following message sent to SCAA, which generated a small thread over a few days, the author employs a hodgepodge of identity cues:
"Hi. I find that many African-Americans where I live (northern California) tend to act in a way they think they should act, rather than just be themselves. I’m acknowledging this because the reality is, the behavior of the minority completely stands out, as opposed to the behavior of the majority. I must say, that I am part African-American. I don’t feel ashamed of this in any way, but I am ashamed of the African-American behavior of many citizens in my area. I am proud of all the ethnicities my gene pool possesses, while at the same time, I am proud of the ethnicities I don’t possess. I ACCEPT those who are different from me. Different is good: it is new. it is unique. it is you. it is me. Let me explain more of what hits home for me. I must say that I am extremely proud of my mom. She is African-American and she is an individual. She speaks proper english because she chose to get an education, no matter how difficult that path would be. She's had a tough life; she grew up poor in Michigan; her mother died when she was five; she lived in foster homes her whole life; she was looked down upon because of status and her pigmentation. She is a very beautiful person. There are many more hardships to tell about her, but my point is, she's African-American and she is an individual. I want to let African-Americans know that they don’t have to act "black." It doesn’t make you more of an "African-American" to do things you think "black" people should do. I’ve had friends who felt that acting "black" was cool, both black and white ones. Did you know much of what many people refer to as being "black" resulted from their overseers who were know as "poor white trash"? It’s true. They were the ones the slaves learned English from, yet many people don’t realize this. Please let me know that the majority of African-Americans are not like the ones I see on Ricki Lake. They don’t have attitudes, move their necks from side to side, wave their hands in people’s faces, speak loud and improper English, don’t listen to what people are saying, don’t speak out vulgarly, don’t resort to violence because they can articulate how they feel. I’m not trying to put down African-Americans, I want to recognize a problem in the United States. The more people group themselves in simplistic categories, based on skin color, the harder it will be for ALL of us to get along, live as the HUMANS we are… Ask me what my culture is and I’ll tell you "I’m American."
This post offers explicit self-identifications in racial terms, for example, part African- American, as well as more general identities like human and American. Descriptions of heritage, parents, hometown, and contacts with other racial groups imply specific features of the author’s racial identity.
The variety of cues leaves readers with many options for interpreting an author’s racial identity. One option is an "identity challenge." If all multivalent self-identifications brought challenges there would be little room left on SCAA for substantive discussion. Indeed, identity challenges do not occur often. However, when participants dispute an author’s perspective they often challenge the author’s identity. Though disagreements come in a variety of forms, one recurrent practice for disputing an author’s arguments involve challenges to author’s identity. In the following section I explore how such challenges are pursued.
What are authors doing by including cues to their racial identification in their messages? The above author’s goal is to inform African-Americans that they need not act "Black," a potentially controversial claim in SCAA. Perhaps, the author assumed that such advice to African-Americans would engender strong disagreement, especially if it came from someone other than an African-American. The author of the post makes numerous identifying remarks (e.g., "part African-American," etc.) and offers a short biography of the author’s mother. These self-revelations formulate the post as offering advice from within the African American community. Thus, I submit that the author uses these identity cues to guard against anticipated attacks, especially attacks claiming the author is an outsider. In general, racial self-identification is used by authors to establish a social position. These include positions from which to safely make potentially controversial comments.
Conversely, respondents’ challenges to an author’s identity dispute the social position from which the author makes his/her claim. Instead of arguing with the author’s view of the world by presenting a contrasting view, respondents attempt to invalidate the argument by invalidating the author’s claimed social position. The first reply to the above post mentions little on the issue of Africans-Americans acting Black, instead focusing on the author’s identity:
>[Quote from previous post]: I’m acknowledging this because the reality is, the behavior of the minority completely stands out, as opposed to the behavior of the majority. I must say, that I am part African-American. I don’t feel ashamed of this in anyway, but I am ashamed of the African-American behavior of many citizens in my area.
Reply: emphasis on the "part African-American"? why are you ashamed of people you don’t personally know? (unless of course, you are referring to the [African American] folks from your personal lineage?) do you bear the burden for speaking for the race you "partially" belong to?
>[Second quote from previous post]: I am proud of all the ethnicities my gene pool possesses, while at the same time, I am proud of the ethnicities I don’t possess. I ACCEPT those who are different from me. Different is good: it is new. it is unique. it is you. it is me.
Reply: ummm, excuse me but this little Pollyanna statement just negated the part where you wept tears over the behavior of total strangers. If different is good, you should absolutely love those [African Americans] that are causing you such embarrassment, doncha (sic) think? me thinks you bear more pride for the paler side of your life. perhaps that is who is speaking in this message?
This reply does not directly disagree with the description of African-Americans acting as Black or dispute whether moving one’s "neck from side to side" is an accurate or positive treatment of Black culture. Instead, when the reader cites the author’s "emphasis on part African American" and accuses the author of having "pride for the paler side," the reader is using the very identifying resources the author offered defensively to dismiss the author’s perspective. By modifying the author’s original identity from "part African-American" to "part African-American who has pride in her paler side," the respondent challenges the position from which the advice is offered and consequently questions its acceptability by the community at large. Thus, racial identity is employed here to dispute various formulations of the world in racial terms.
To the extent that these challenges are taken up they determine the course of the discussion. Challenging an author’s racial identity diverts attention away from the author’s ideas. In effect, challenging an author’s identity attempts to shift the other reader’s engagement with the thread’s original topic.
If a respondent gets others to join in challenging an author’s identity, or if the author feels sufficiently challenged to defend his/her identity, then the author’s argument may become sidetracked. Challenges may be ignored or other readers may join in to support the author’s stated identity. Clearly, no single reader determines the fate of a claimed racial identity any more than any particular author does.
In the following example, Sam challenges Lee’s claim that he is a pro-Black African-American by suggesting he is a "white racist troll." Toni’s contribution rebuts Sam’s recharacterization and defends Lee’s racial identity without defending Lee’s opinions.
Lee: > If you don’t like my dialog, then put me in your killfile rather than subject blacks who care about blacks to your pro-white agenda. Everybody here ain’t Toms.
Sam: Please post your non-Tom list, so we know who’s OK and who isn’t. Why do I get the feeling that this is another white racist troll?
Toni: You must have not been here, last time. [Lee] just got back. He’s got *lots* of problems, and when he airs them directly or not in this newsgroup, grab some popcorn and sit back- it’s *Showtime*! No cheaper entertainment can be found elsewhere.
Sam’s characterization of Lee as a white racist troll is diametrically opposed to Lee’s self-identification as a pro-Black African-American. By characterizing Lee as a white racist troll, Sam invites other participants on SCAA to re-interpret Lee’s perspective in light of a new racial identity. This re-characterization of Lee’s racial identity is an attempt to undermine the seriousness with which Lee’s comments should be taken.
The challenged author, Lee, has a long history and is known to others through his prior postings to the group. Lee’s identity for this group is solid enough to resist such a re-characterization. Although Toni’s reply dismisses Sam’s re-characterization of Lee’s identity, it leaves intact Sam’s claim that Lee’s comments should not be taken seriously . In short, Toni’s reply implies that Lee’s posts, formulated as entertainment, are pursuable in ways other than by challenging his identity.
In sum, racial identity does not necessarily change with each participant’s new claim. A participant’s history in the newsgroup counts and collaboration among participants is important for sustaining online racial identities. Just as authors cannot choose any racial identity (including a green identity), a respondent cannot recast the racial identity of another at will. Here we find that online racial identity is no more chimerical or fluid than its offline counterpart. Group history matters and re-characterizations of identity that are not grounded in an author’s present and past posts are typically ignored or dismissed, as in the case above.
Newsgroups are an important aspect of the online interactional situation. The technology that organizes newsgroups allows participants to post their comments or to re-post other’s comments to more than one newsgroup. This practice is called crossposting. Through crossposting, other newsgroups can be brought into a discussion taking place in a cultural newsgroup. Crossposting can greatly increase the volume of messages posted and the number of newsgroups receiving the posts. For example, a discussion among three participants on a marriage between an Asian-American woman and a Caucasian man was going for a few days in the soc.culture.couples.intercultural newsgroup. A message concerning the relevance of race in the couple’s relationship was re-posted to soc.culture.asian.american where 30 posters joined the discussion. A comment concerning the relative merits of Asian/Caucasian unions versus Asian/ Black unions was then re-posted to SCAA, where another 44 posters joined the discussion over a week’s time. Thus through crossposting, the audience reading a thread can expand from a few people in a single newsgroup to many people and then quickly shrink to a two-person correspondence. In a medium in which the audience changes quickly and without warning, how is the construction of racial identity affected? One initial observation is that group history can only be definitive in those instances where a single newsgroup is concerned. If a number of groups are participating this can change the appropriateness and relevance of particular racial frames, categorizations, and established identities.
By crossposting a message, a participant can bring other newsgroups into a thread. When this occurs, an ongoing discussion that may have had a relatively stable and identifiable audience can be radically transformed. There is a palpable change between a single "other" in a conversation and a new newsgroup joining a discussion –one white supremacist can be an annoyance, but 100 white supremacists constitute an altogether different racial environment.
Crossposting also can change the set of meanings attached to particular racial terms. For example, consider a discussion in soc.culture.mexican.american (SCMA) that gets crossposted to a thread in SCAA. An important distinction between Salvadorans, Mexicans, and Nicaraguans in SCMA may seem an unimportant geographical distinction in SCAA. The distinction between "Black" and "African-American" which can be a vital distinction in SCAA, may not be similarly understood in soc.culture.russian. Individuals who normally post in one newsgroup may be inexperienced with another group’s terms. Yet when groups are brought together they must work out enough common ground to carry out a discussion. Lack of familiarity with in-group racial distinctions can alter groups’ orientations to each other – the resources available for racial identification are limited. What resources do participants fall back on and how are their discussions transformed?
In a thread within a single newsgroup, fine racial distinctions are made, but such distinctions can be problematic in crossposted threads. For example, a thread in SCJ concerning lyrics from a Michael Jackson song that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic ("Jew me, sue me, kick me, kike me") was crossposted to SCAA where Michael Jackson’s racial status was a current topic of discussion. In SCAA, the discussion included many racial terms familiar to the newsgroup, such as "toms," "role models," and "sell-outs." In SCJ discussion concerned the ways in which Jews respond to anti-Semitism, with some participants characterized as too sensitive while others were chastised as "Jews without proper vigilance." Such in-group distinctions are lost on the newsgroups to which the discussions are crossposted.
Discussions not possible within a particular newsgroup become possible in discussions among newsgroups. In discussions within SCAA, participants posted as individuals, whereas in discussions with other newsgroups many participants framed their messages as emanating from the racial group as a whole:
"Speaking for African Americans...."
"We have always felt..."
One consequence of these generalizing practices is that messages in crossposted discussions are generated between those holding expected positions. In other words, responses are made to those author’s who identity and perspective match the stereotype expected by the respondent. For example, although many African-Americans and Jews agreed on both sides of the Michael Jackson issue, their messages did not generate responses. The messages responded to were mainly those from African-Americans who defended Michael Jackson and from Jews who denounced him. Even this is not specific enough. Jews who denounced Michael Jackson as anti-Semitic garnered responses those who denounced his androgyny did not. African-Americans who supported Michael Jackson as an African American being persecuted by Jews were responded to, African-Americans supporting artistic freedom were not. Reading this discussion gave the impression of an "African-American position" and a diametrically opposed "Jewish position," whereas the discussion within each newsgroup had allowed for more complexity. However, the complexity of within-group opinion atrophies in inter-group discussions leaving visible only the stereotypical positions. Discussion between groups, which progressive people might hope would alleviate racial stereotypes instead is a site where previously held stereotypes are made into self-fulfilling prophecies.
In online discussions, readers treat racial identities as entailing particular perspectives. Offline interaction has a name for the imputation of a characteristic, attitude, belief, or practice based solely on someone’s race—"stereotyping." An observer may use physical characteristics to impute a racial identity and from that impute a delimited set of beliefs and perspectives. For example, after I confirmed that I was Black in a recent conversation, the talk turned to professional basketball. My co-interactants assumed that a Black male would be interested in basketball. While this stereotyping is not surprising, imagine that, on hearing of their interest in basketball, I had assumed they were Black. This would also be stereotyping, but an unusual variety. Stereotyping in face-to-face interaction follows from an assumed racial identity. Online interaction differs in that the imputation tends to go in the other direction-- from stereotype to racial identity.
A discrepancy arises when a person identified as a member of a particular racial group by his/her physical characteristics offers a perspective that is inconsistent with the stereotype of that group. In face-to-face interactions, such an inconsistency can be resolved by modifying the stereotype or seeing the person as an anomaly-- rarely are the person’s physical racial indicators disputed. In online interactions perspectives resist modification because participants confront an immutable text, whereas racial identifications can be challenged.5
Thus, during online arguments, authors’ perspectives are used to challenge their claimed racial identity. For example, the following post responds to the author who was troubled by Blacks she had seen on a talk show and finds a discrepancy between the author’s identity as Black and the perspective she offers:
"…[And] it is a shame that you even have to ask these questions because I would hope that you see more blacks than on Ricki Lake, whether you are black or white. But being black, I am truly amazed at what you have asked. I will just guess that you are still a teen, (as opposed to a hick that has never seen a black person) and haven’t been out in the world and exposed to much; because many of us grew up like that. I will also say God made us all different."
The respondent states that "being black I am truly amazed at what you have asked," revealing a belief that a "Black" racial identity corresponds with a particular set of experiences. This poses a puzzle for the reader. How can the racial identity and the perspective be reconciled? The respondent in this case resolves this puzzle by modifying the author’s racial identity to adolescent Black. Because adolescents are inexperienced, they ask questions that more worldly adults would not ask. More generally, discrepancies between the perspective in the text and the author’s racial identity can be resolved by modifying the author’s identity so that his/her competence is consistent with the faulty perspective.
Resolving these puzzles by modifying the author’s identity allows readers to maintain the connection between racial identities and perspectives, much as labeling discrepancies as anomalies does offline. Online, participants introduce these discrepancies as ways of pursuing disputes, but the discrepancies are rarely treated as innocuous anomalies-- perspective and race are made to conform online. Far from being a site where race, racism, ethnocentrism, or stereotyping are banished, these phenomena flourish in newsgroups.
I have discussed some of the ways in which people’s interactional organization responds to and uses the Usenet environment. The technological organization of the Usenet changes interaction because of the inaccessibility of physical cues as a resource in racial identification. Lacking physical cues that normally are taken as the source of racial identity offline, racial identification online relies on participants’ perspectives as revealed in their posts.
Racial identification online occurs in a different context than that occurring offline. In face-to-face interaction, a situation can arise in which another individual’s physical cues and his/her perspective do not agree with the observer’s stereotypes. It is difficult to argue the other didn’t really offer that perspective or that his/her physical cues are not real. This creates space for anomalies and exceptions to a stereotype in offline interaction. In online interaction, readers are usually faced with explicit racial identifications and the person’s textual perspective. If these do not agree with a reader’s stereotypes, the person’s racial identity can be read so that racial identity and perspective fit the stereotype.
Race is no less relevant in online interaction than it is in face-to-face interaction. Instead racial stereotypes may be more influential and resilient on the Usenet. At the same time, individuals participating in Usenet newsgroups can experience a variety of people, ideas, and cultures that could supplant stereotypes. Although the technology may be revolutionary and expectations utopian, newsgroups are made up of people neither revolutionary nor perfect, armed with ordinary ways of understanding each other. The medium that technologically constrains participants’ interactions is also constrained by participants’ methods of organizing interaction.
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