The Internet has often been touted as a utopia where racial differences are erased and people are judged by their ideas rather than their skin color. But rather than curbing racism, cyberspace may be perpetuating racial stereotypes for some users, a growing number of scholars say.

And until recently, they say, few researchers have studied issues of racial identity online -- even though so much attention has been paid to economic studies of the “digital divide.”

A recent batch of conferences and books are helping to fill the research gap, however.

‘What Seemed Liberating’

“When we deal with people face to face, the first thing we see is race,” says Kalí Tal, a professor of humanities at the University of Arizona who studies representations of race in chat rooms. “What seemed liberating at first about the Internet is that people couldn’t categorize you” based on race.

The vision of a raceless cyberspace was particularly prominent in early television advertisements for Internet services, in which people of many nations and many races were shown to be seamlessly connected. And, of course, there was the well-known New Yorker cartoon assuring readers that on the Internet, no one knows if you’re a dog -- suggesting an equalizing nature of the technology.

Rather than encourage diversity, however, the absence of visual markers of race has led to a “default whiteness” in cyberspace, says Ms. Tal. In other words, many Internet users assume that all other users they encounter are white, unless they are told otherwise.

“The problem began to emerge when people who were particularly activist about [their race] realized that in order to really be seen on the Internet, they had to keep saying, ‘I’m black,’” according to Ms. Tal. “And then other people say, ‘Why are you always talking about race?’”

“The initial exhilaration is turning, for some people, into a pretty strong frustration,” she adds.

‘A Dystopic Future’

One scholar who is frustrated by the vision of a race-free cyberspace is Alondra Nelson, a graduate student in American studies at New York University.

“A place without race to me is not a utopic future, it’s probably a dystopic future,” says Ms. Nelson. “Part of the utopian myth [of the Net] assumes that race is only a burden, when in fact the burden is racism.”

Ms. Nelson is the moderator of the AfroFuturism electronic mailing list, a forum where participants grapple with such issues as how digital technologies fit in with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and other intellectuals who have pondered race in society. Ms. Nelson also was an editor of Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (New York University Press, 2001).

Whether or not people can see you, race remains a factor in many online interactions, says Lisa Nakamura, an assistant professor of English at Sonoma State University. Ms. Nakamura co-edited a recent anthology called Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000), and she is now finishing another book on the topic. Ms. Nakamura also says racial differences should be celebrated, not avoided.

“I don’t really agree with the comment that because you can’t see somebody, that there isn’t race, class, or gender -- because there really still is,” she says. “I think that just because you can’t see somebody in cyberspace doesn’t mean they don’t still have distinctive ways of expressing themselves that are coming from their experiences offline.”

What troubles Ms. Nakamura the most, however, is when Internet users pretend to be of another race -- a practice she calls “identity tourism.”

Online Stereotypes

Some participants in text-based chat rooms, for instance, act out stereotypes of other races that they have seen on television or in movies.

That behavior is particularly prominent in MUD’s, or Multi-User Dungeons -- text-based online environments in which participants can move among virtual rooms and type messages that everyone else in a virtual room can see. Many MUD’s encourage users to role-play alternate identities of their own choosing.

The most common racial characters Ms. Nakamura has seen acted out are geishas, samurai warriors, and rappers.

“The worst part of it to me is that it makes people feel like they know what it’s like to be a minority now,” she says. “And they can say, ‘Oh, that’s not so bad, I was black once.’ I think it actually makes them less sympathetic to what it may feel like to be different.”

And sometimes online racism can be more overt.

“Often I found when I was online in live chat, people would assume that I was white because they couldn’t see me,” says Ms. Nakamura, who says she uses a “race neutral” nickname in online chat rooms. “And then they’d make some sort of offensive racist remark.”

A growing body of work is examining online portrayals of race. But some scholars complain of a research gap in studies of race online.

“There has been an enormous amount of scholarship about gender in cyberspace,” says Beth E. Kolko, an associate professor of technical communication at the University of Washington. “And there was a deafening silence when it came to race.”

To help fill the gap, scholars organized a conference this spring at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology entitled Race in Digital Space. Scholars tackled such topics as how to deal with hate speech in cyberspace, whether “authentic” cultural identity can be expressed online, and how the digital divide fits in with broader issues of racial inequality. The conference also featured an exhibit of digital artwork by African Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and other minorities. Samples of the artwork, as well as audio recordings of many of the sessions, are available at the conference’s Web site (http://cms.mit.edu/race/webcast.html).

Waiting for the Scholarship

“We were dismayed and annoyed that so little of the academic scholarship and public discussion about the digital realm seemed attuned to the consideration of race,” says Tara L. McPherson, an assistant professor of cinema and television at the University of Southern California, during the conference. In the pages of technology magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000, Ms. McPherson says, “the default mode of cyberspace seemed depressingly and familiarly white.”

Ms. McPherson, one of the organizers of the MIT meeting, is planning another conference on race in cyberspace next spring, to be held at the University of Southern California.

In the meantime, Internet users are already finding visual ways to represent their race online.

“We’re moving toward an increasingly visual Internet -- one that increasingly includes Webcams and videoconferencing and so on,” says Steve Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “So the representation of race will take on visual dimensions online in an interesting fashion.”

http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Page: A48