Reading Post: Banks

This week's reading was "Oakland, the Word, and the Divide: How We All Missed the Moment", from the book Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, by Adam J. Banks.

Since this is going out to the internet, let me preface my statements by issuing a disclaimer that by all rights should be obvious (but we all know how internet people can be): As an upper-middle-class white male taking a higher education class called "Writing in a Digital Age", I have zero credibility when it comes to making statements on this topic. While reading the following, please keep in mind that I am aware of that - were this not a required post for the aforementioned class, I would probably just keep my mouth shut.

That said, my primary reaction to this article is that considering the Digital Divide as an issue of race is best described as treating a symptom. This is not to say that the Divide does not fall along racial lines, as clearly it does. But the core of the issue is not which races don't have access, it's that underprivileged, i.e. poor, children don't have access. And right now, in this country, we can draw the line between 'poor' and 'not poor' squarely along racial divides, and we all know it. Sure, there's crossover in either direction - and God knows the current recession is working hard to make paupers of everybody but the really really rich - but throughout the technological revolution we are experiencing, schools with a primarily Black population have had less money than schools with a primarily White population. This, to me, seems to be the core of the issue.

Now, 'treating a symptom' is not entirely appropriate here, because I think treating this particular symptom might well have a mitigating effect on the root cause. To wit - consider what the country would look like if every school had equal technology. New computers, internet connectivity, adequately trained teachers churning out adequately trained students, I think we'd start to see that line in the sand move. I'm not foolish enough to think we would obliterate it - I can't see how a capitalist system could avoid having poor people - but if we could blur it, and/or shift it, maybe we could obliterate the correlation of 'poor' and 'disenfranchised'.

But then, I'm an idealist. And as time goes on, I'm beginning to think I'm just a damned Socialist. I'll go ahead and quote West Wing here: "[E]ducation is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet."

But again, this is an etic perspective, and I get that Banks considers the repositioning of the Digital Divide as a class issue rather than a race issue to be obfuscation. So maybe I'm just missing the point.

I will note one thing that took a while to sink in. At the top of page 30, he references "Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)face" by Beth Kolko, an essay which posits that the supposed racelessness of the MOO/MUD interface created "a definitively White user". My first reaction was denial. I was there, you see - I spent years huddled in front of my computer with MOOs, MUDs, MUSHes, even the occasional MUCK. I lived for that sort of thing, back when, and I still have a sort of loyalist knee-jerk reaction to people criticizing it. But it's true - not only were most of us White, the mental picture of other users inevitably defaulted to White unless they specifically made a point of telling us. Once the WWW became more popular (and less 1400-baud), we started assembling pictures of ourselves yearbook-style, and you'll note that with a handful of exceptions that is indeed a pasty group. I have to add that this phenomenon hasn't really stopped since we left text-based VR behind for the greener pastures of multimedia. I'm reminded of a LiveJournal under the username 'blackperson', and the story of how that came about.

To recap, because I feel like I went about this argument backwards, the Digital Divide is real, and it does fall along race lines, but it looks to me like it really is a class issue - race is involved because you can't separate class and race at this point in America. But as noted above, I might be very wrong.

Regardless, I'm in favor of doing whatever it takes to put technology in everybody's hands - if we're throwing away billions on paying "retention bonuses" to AIG employees who aren't being retained, let's spend a few billion on computers (and computer teachers) for our students - all our students.