Resources on Race, Ethnicity, and Class and the Internet

The following list was prepared by Dr. Kali Tal of the University of Arizona in Tuscon.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: African American Critical Theory and Cyberculture

http://www.kalital.com/Text/Writing/Whitenes.html

Cultural Uses of New, Networked Internet Information and Communication Technologies: Implications for US Latino Identities

http://sunsite.unc.edu/jlillie/thesis.html

Bridging the Digital Divide: The Impact of Race on Computer Access and Internet Use

http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu/papers/race/science.html

What it Means to be Black in Cyberspace

http://www.panix.com/~mbowen/cz/identity/blakCMC.html

Cyborg Diaspora: Virtual Imagined Community

http://ernie.bgsu.edu/~radhik/sanov.html

Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet

http://acorn.grove.iup.edu/en/workdays/Nakamura.html

American Emissaries to Africa: From John Barlow via James Bond to James Baldwin and Back

http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive/1292.html

What Color is the Net?

http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/97/11/index2a.html

WIRED 3.12: Idees Fortes - Race in Cyberspace?

http://www.wired.com/wired/3.12/departments/berger.if.html

Book Review: The African-American Resource Guide to the Internet

http://www.otal.umd.edu/~rccs/books/battle.html

Black Pioneers of the Internet

http://www.delphi.com/blackpioneers/

Forsaken Geographies: Cyberspace and the New World 'Other'

http://eng.hss.cmu.edu/internet/oguibe/

http://arts.usf.edu/~ooguibe/madrid.htm

On Digital 'Third Worlds': An interview with Olu Oguibe

http://arts.usf.edu/~ooguibe/springer.htm

The Virtual Barrio @ The Other Frontier (or the Chicano inerneta)

http://www.telefonica.es/fat/egomez.html

Cultural Survival Quarterly: The Internet and Indigenous Communities

http://www.cs.org/csq/csqinternet.html

Buying into the Computer Age: A Look at Hispanic Families

http://www.cgu.edu/inst/aw1-1.html

AFROAM-L Archives - February 1995: Race, Ethnicity, Culture, and Cyberspace

http://www.afrinet.net/~hallh/afrotalk/afrofeb95/0796.html

Possible Roles for Electronic Community Networks and Participatory Development Strategies in Access Programs for Poor Neighborhoods

http://www.unc.edu/~jlillie/310.html

High Technology and Low-Income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology

http://web.mit.edu/sap/www/high-low/

Losing Ground Bit by Bit: Low-Income Communities in the Information Age

http://www.benton.org/Library/Low-Income/

Falling Through the Net II: New Data on the Digital Divide

http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/net2/

Impact of CTCnet Affiliates: Findings from a National Survey of Users of Community Technology Centers

http://www.ctcnet.org/impact98.htm

Cybersociology Magazine: Issue 3 - Digital Third Worlds

http://members.aol.com/Cybersoc/issue3.html

Lastly, in case you're wondering why I even bothered to put this list together, one of my "white" colleagues said it better than I ever could:

"We're resisting the tired-but-still-commonly-accepted idea that the virtual world provides a somehow "level" playing field, in which race, gender, [and] culture(s) no longer matter. We think that such ideas are based on the false notion that there's a normative white male middle-class culture to which all folks can gain access, now that the barriers imposed by the physical body have been miraculously removed. We want [to see] essays, articles, and examples of work which show that the "politics of identity" is alive and well on the internet, and that instead of regressing to a sort of Eisenhowerian procession of the bland leading the bland, there are people out there using electronic technology to emphasize and celebrate and motivate and defend their own communities and cultural ideals.

"There's been a lot of talk (mostly by white men) about the "liberating" potential of the internet and of virtual spaces. What they usually mean is a liberation *from* the body, to some kind of higher plane. But we're interested in how folks whose bodies are usually threatened by the power structure (nonwhite folks, women, poor people, queer folks) are using the internet as a platform for making themselves more visible (a liberation *of* the body), and how that connects to other contemporary activist movements."

Kali Tal
Lecturer, University of Arizona