Today's Reading, take two: Race and Gender

Ok, so I was so disappointed by my film readings today that I’m skipping ahead and reading the race and stereotyping essays I found for tomorrow today.

The first essay, by bell hooks, is titled Gangsta Culture—Sexism, Misogyny: Who Will Take the Rap? and is featured in Mass Culture and Electronic Media.

This is a great essay on race and gender issues in rap music, and it’s not what people would expect to hear. Ms. hooks explains that frequently, people call her to appear on television or radio shows to talk about her black, feminist perspective on rap music. Instead, what they get is commentary that doesn’t blame the rap musicians, but the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” She explains that to the white mass-media, the controversy over rap music is “great spectacle,” but that most people won’t look for anything more than what they expect. For Spin magazine, hooks interviewed rapper Ice Cube, and the interview never ran because he talked about the need to respect women. When hooks comments on the cover of Snoop Dogg’s record Doggystyle, she doesn’t criticize the artist or the musician, but the misogynist politics of the “powerful white adult men and women who helped produce and market this album.” She goes on to discuss how mainstream white culture doesn’t care about black male sexism and misogyny against black women, but it does pay attention when young white males utilize black pop culture to disrupt “bourgeois values.” This is some steep commentary, and hooks does not back down.

While I can’t really bring this back to new media (music isn’t really new), it does have a lot of value in a macro view. Does the status quo only take notice of a fringe element when it threatens to disrupt the way things are? This idea can be extrapolated in to tons of situations. Will newspapers finally take notice of the Web when it threatens to put them out of business? Yes, they will and have changed their views of the Web. Will the record companies take notice when peer-to-peer file sharing finally destroys their profit margins? Yes, they will, and they’ll start suing. There are so many new media issues to think about when you view this essay as a small example of a bigger-picture problem.

The next essay is by Patricia J. Williams and is included in the same book. In this piece, Hate Radio, Williams describes how the powerful new talk radio moguls (Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, etc.) are constantly making mountains from molehills and enraging the already-enraged middle-class-white-republican males. The magazine the Economist explains “Mr. Limbaugh takes a mass market—white, mainly male, middle-class, ordinary America—and talks to it as an endangered minority.”

I remember this controversy. I remember people on the radio becoming outraged about Mexican and African-American people taking their jobs and their money. I remember them outraged about Hilary Clinton and gays in the military. I remember them outraged about me: your typical left-wing feminist. And Williams remembers them outraged about her: your (in her words) “militant black woman, cranky femi-nazi.” She explains it’s a type of resegregation. The us-vs-them mentality. But in this case, it’s being taken up by the majority, not the minority.

But, she says, there are a few places radio is still used for good rather than evil. She recounts an anecdote from a KMEL radio show in San Francisco. A Samoan teenager was killed apparently by Pilipino gang members. The Samoans called the station threatening retaliation. Then the dead Samoan’s father called and said he couldn’t tolerate the thought of more dead young men. He said there would be no retaliation. And there wasn’t. After hearing this story, Williams says, you can’t help but wonder about the powerful advice ladled out by Limbaugh and friends daily.

This is another case where I feel like radio isn’t really a new media, that early-to-mid-90s right-wing-shock-jock phenomena was something interesting in retrospect. I’m glad most of those people don’t broadcast anymore, or were relegated to bad timeslots on worse frequencies. It isn’t because I’m anti-Free-Speech. I’m not. These people should get to say whatever they want, but not on MY radio. That’s right folks, the radio airwaves BELONG TO THE PEOPLE! Me and you. And the FCC regulates the broadcasters based on what they think we want. And apparently, the masses spoke, since Howard Stern is now on satellite radio and off my airwaves. I just don’t see the point of tolerance of this kind of ignorance and hate. And Williams doesn’t either.

I also think this is another instance that can be brought out into a macro view. If this type of speech is allowed, which it is, thanks to the first amendment, which also gives me the right to say this, what will it mean for the future of our country? “What future is it that we are designing with the devotion of such tremendous resources to the disgraceful propaganda of bigotry?” Williams writes in her closing sentence.

To what end will this go? And what other forms of media will it take with it?

The last essay I read on race and gender is titled Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction. The essay is by Lisa Nakamura and is included in New Media, Old Media.

Nakamura explains that who you are on the Internet is not always who you are. For example, she notes that most people who don’t reveal their gender or race on the Internet are assumed to be white males. And in many studies, even people revealing themselves as women or persons of other races are just white males pretending. This is so interesting because it totally marginalizes all women and all other races.

Furthermore, Nakamura says that since the Internet was developed by superpower countries, and we were the first to access it, it’s seen as the Western world holding dominance over developing nations. Right again.

Over time, Nakamura says, there has been proliferation of women and people of different races onto the Internet, and in response, the white men have made sites to sell us things. Oxygen.com, ivillage.com, and other women’s sites are supposed to be gathering places for women, who have not divorced their Internet selves from their physical bodies.

In another case, Nakamura explains, two African-American plaintiffs are suing a web-company that delivers products to people’s homes. The company, Kozmo.com, only delivers to zip codes with the highest rates of Internet usage, which can be seen as discriminatory to neighborhoods where not many people can get Internet access. However, it gets worse, as certain people in a specific Washington-DC-area neighborhood can’t get deliveries either, even though this upper-class African American neighborhood has equal Internet usage statistics to white neighborhoods being served by the company. Apparently, in some places, you can’t divorce your Internet self from your physical self.

This theme of fluid personification is very interesting when you apply it to race and gender, and even more when you apply it to other qualities. How about old people? Poor people? Illiterate people? Maybe the Internet can make us Post-Racial or Post-Gendered, but only for the people privileged enough to access it.

Nakamura concludes by saying that there are two ways to fix this. The people online can change how they think, or the people getting marginalized can get online with them. I feel like the real question here is access.

In all of these essays, groups being marginalized are the people without access. The rappers are being marginalized because they don’t own the record labels. The minority voice is being marginalized because they aren’t on the radio or the Internet. It’s easy, as all these essays prove, to talk about race and gender issues, but I think one of the real issues here is social class and economic standing. This is something we don’t talk about in America enough. There is plenty of attention paid to race and gender issues, but I feel a seriously lacking amount of attention is being paid to poverty. I’m going to try to look for essays on poverty and new media this week to see what might be being written about it. We’ll see.