{"id":96,"date":"2008-04-18T13:14:42","date_gmt":"2008-04-18T17:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/2008\/04\/18\/learning-race-and-ethnicity-in"},"modified":"2008-04-18T13:14:42","modified_gmt":"2008-04-18T17:14:42","slug":"learning-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-macarthur-foundationmit-press-se","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/2008\/04\/18\/learning-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-macarthur-foundationmit-press-se\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning Race and Ethnicity, in the MacArthur Foundation\/MIT Press Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

cross-posted from Dr. Palfrey’s blog<\/a>; full version with links here<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Learning, Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media is the fourth book I\u2019ve read in the MacArthur\/MIT Press Series on Digital Media and Learning. This volume, edited by Anna Everett, is the furthest from my own field \u2014 law \u2014 and, for me, the most challenging.<\/p>\n

Prof. Everett\u2019s opening essay, (which follows the excellent foreword by the series authors, as with each volume in the series), is an effective overview of what follows in the volume. She takes up the familiar debate about the term \u201cdigital divide\u201d and why it now rankles more than it helps. She also reminds us that the old joke about how online nobody knows you\u2019re a dog is no longer true, with the advent of rich media and other \u201cadvances\u201d in digital technology and how it\u2019s used. I was left, from her chapter, with one line resonating in particular: \u201cthe color of the dog counts.\u201d (p. 5)<\/p>\n

The rest of the volume consists of three clusters. Future Visions and Excavated Pasts is the first. Dara Byrne leads off with a piece on the future of race. She pulls in and incorporates a series of great quotes from message boards and other online public spaces; takes up (and takes on) John Rawls on the public\/private question that runs through so many of our discussions of online life, (p. 22); and digs deep on the future of whether there will be dedicated sites for different races as we look ahead. The punchline is that yes, \u201cminority youth must have access to dedicated online spaces, not just mainstream or \u2018race neutral\u2019 ones.\u201d (p. 33)<\/p>\n

Tyrone Taborn\u2019s \u201cSeparating Race from Technology\u201d is the other essay in this first cluster. Tayborn compares the likelihood of any group of students (\u201dmajority white or minority, rich or poor\u201d) knowing Kobe Bryant and Dr. Mark Dean, the African-American engineer involved in IBM\u2019s development of the first PC. His point is clear. As one of a series of possible solutions to the problem of too few minority youth having mentors and heroes in the technology world, Tayborn calls for Digital Media Cultural Mentoring (p. 56).<\/p>\n

The second cluster of essays take up art and culture in the digital domain. Raiford Guins guides the reader through a tour of the ways that hip-hop culture, art, and use of technology come together online in the form of \u201cblack cultural production in the form of hip-hop 2.0.\u201d (p. 78) It\u2019s a must-read essay; heplful to read with a browser open and a fast broadband connection on tap. Guins has an intriguing segment on the future of the music label, among other take-aways (p. 69 – 70).<\/p>\n

Guins\u2019 essay is well-paired with Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre\u2019s celebration and contextualization of Judy Baca\u2019s work at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in LA. (One wonders why LA gets more than its fair share of intriguing digital media production experiments and narratives?) Among other things, Sandoval and Latorre challenge the notion of \u201cdigital youth\u201d and the challenges of overly delimiting based just on age \u2014 a helpful reminder of a point too easily forgotten. (p. 85) In the final essay of the cluster, Antonio Lopez offers insights into (and concerns about) digital media literacy with respect to Native American populations, told largely in the first person.<\/p>\n

Jessie Daniels opens the third cluster with a jarring piece on hate, racism, and white supremacy online. Daniels picks up on themes about the fallacy of colorblindness established in Anna Everett\u2019s introduction. With a link to Henry Jenkins\u2018 work, Daniels argues for a \u201cmultiple literacies\u201d approach to shaping our shared cultural future online and offline. (p. 148 – 50)<\/p>\n

Yet more jarring, to me anyway, is Douglas Thomas\u2019s piece on online gaming cultures, called \u201cKPK, Inc.: Race, Nation, and Emergent Culture in Onling Games.\u201d Thomas draws us into gaming environments only to reveal a culture of wild adventure, first-person shooter games, acquisition, treasure, money, and hate all rolled together. The crux of his argument centers on the \u201cKorean problem,\u201d (p. 163-4), a blend of bigotry, nationalism, and competitiveness. The racists that Thomas exposes \u201care usually Americans \/ Canadians and white\u201d \u2014 and gamers. (p. 164) Along the way, Thomas distinguishes his approach from that of our Berkman colleague Beth Kolko. (p. 155-6)<\/p>\n

The final essay, by Mohan Dutta, Graham Bodie, and Ambar Basus takes us in a new direction, further afield, toward the intersection of race, youth, Internet, health, and information. The authors synthesize a great deal of disparate information in unexpected ways. The essay left with an expanded frame of vision, and a frame that I never would have come up with on my own. Their punchline: \u201cdisparities in technology uses and health information seeking reflect broader structural disparaties in society that adversely affect communities of color.\u201d (p. 192)<\/p>\n

On balance, this collection of essays hangs together very well. Each essay takes a on strong point of view. Overall, the collection both informed my thinking and provoked more by raising hard issues about the impact of growing up online for race, ethnicity, identity, and health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

cross-posted from Dr. Palfrey’s blog; full version with links here Learning, Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media is the fourth book I\u2019ve read in the MacArthur\/MIT Press Series on Digital Media and Learning. This volume, edited by Anna Everett, is the furthest from my own field \u2014 law \u2014 and, for me, the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1729,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17419],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1729"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}