"Distributed Blackness": How Blackness is Represented in Digital Media

MC7019: Week 9 Blog

Credit: EMOJIPEDIA / APPLE / ZAK BICKEL / THE ATLANTIC

Is the internet really unbiased? Are the results that appear in our Google Search queries impartial, or do search engines actually suppress certain voices? How are minorities, especially Blacks, represented in digital media and its infrastructures? Critical theorist André Brock, Jr., discusses these questions in his book, "Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures."

Brock unpacks how more than 20 years after the birth of the internet, people once saw the online world as a "raceless utopia" that was uninfluenced by the cultures of its users. It's easy for us now to recognize that this is not necessarily true, as social media has made our once text-heavy internet world highly visual and in the hands of individual, diverse users. Safe spaces now exist online, too, such as Black Twitter. Brock explains that these digital spaces allow Blacks to use the internet to share the joys and pains of every day life through ways such as hair tutorials, dance videos and tweet storms, and now "out-groups" can see how "in-groups" interact and communicate with one another life never before. One of the biggest claims Brock makes in his book is that the "default internet identity is anecdotally white, male and middle-class" (p. 21). While he did not provide evidence proving this idea, his statement made me think of some examples to show how this could be true.

One example I instantly thought of was Apple's emojis. When Apple first created emojis for its devices, only the white skin tone was represented. It wasn't until 2015 that Apple pushed out racially diverse emojis (among new food, object, animal and flag emojis) after much criticism among the public, including youth organization DoSomething.org. I'm ashamed to say that as a white woman (a high school junior at that time), I didn't even realize it was hurting other races that they weren't represented in emojis. While I was researching this topic more, I didn't really see anything from Apple apologizing or admitting that they neglected to be inclusive with their emojis. Nor was there any heat from mainstream news media about how Apple wasn't inclusive before; rather, there was simply praise for finally diversifying the emojis. My gut says that because this change happened in 2015, issues of race, diversity and inclusion weren't as forefront or controversial as they are today in 2021 so Apple didn't receive a negative backlash to amending their mistake. Rather, the problem from the update came from how individuals, particularly whites, used the new emojis. Was it "appropriate" for whites to use Black skin-tone emojis? Was it "appropriate" for whites to use the white skin-tine emoji? Or, as writer Andrew McGill wrote in 2016,:

✊ is simple, uncontroversial. But what about ✊🏻?

McGill would agree with Brock's claim that white is the default on the internet, and whiteness does not actually need to be represented through the use of a a white skin-tone emoji. McGill said that skin-tone emojis were created for people of color to be represented online, not whites, so it feels unusual for many whites to racially identify themselves through emojis. This topic is very interesting to me since it's still at play today, and I hope more research comes from it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9Y2oBYAXYo

While Brock's statement about the "default white internet" is challenging and controversial, I feel that the solution to issues like Apple's lack of inclusion in emojis come from diversifying the field of computer science and software engineering. I'm hesitant to just point fingers at the initial developers of search engines, social media, etc., because they created those infrastructures based on either what their client asked for or how they themselves would use those platforms. Of course inherent biases were present, but we should be cautious in claiming that they were racist and intentionally created those infrastructures to suppress diverse voices. I would instead say that ignorance blinded them in recognizing diverse users' desires and uses online. We as a society should encourage more people of color to continue pursuing careers in technology and computer science, similar to how we're encouraging women to pursue careers in STEM. This will allow more voices to be heard and more users to be represented in the creation of those internet systems.