Cyber-Apartheid: White apathy and the literary children of James Baldwin

This is my first op-ed piece for Stephanie's Journal and I sincerely thank her for the opportunity.
- The Angryindian
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I was at first glance quite pleased with myself when I scanned my morning newsfeeds to discover that an American African entertainment blog took note of how blogs of colour are reaching readers and helping shape opinions on issues that affect the African community as a whole. I even experienced a brief rush of accomplishment and righteous vindication amongst my peers in cyberspace for my efforts as an autonomous and non-partisan newsblogger and Indigenist activist.

But it was short-lived. Reality set in after my second sip of honeyed fennel tea that while the author of the post was quite correct in his estimation of the growing power of “Black” bloggers, the fact that such an article needed to be written at all shows just how segregated the Internet really is.

On the whole, cyberspace is just as “White” as the physical day-to-day world we are all guided to accept as the only empirical reality. The culture and direction of the Internet without question operates solely within the paradigms of European-centred control and management. Created initially by the U.S. Military and used chiefly by scientists for rapid transmission of peer data, the Internet has since the mid-80’s grown-up into a gigantic sensory-overload capitalist’s dream universe that reflects more about people and society than many of us care to admit.

Take an hour and rift through the user-uploaded clips on YouTube or the ever expanding myriad of forums, blogs and websites and you are likely to come across something we are told young Euroamericans have supposedly learned to overcome: racism. YouTube and Craigslist in particular have been cited for their overwhelming White racist commentary in response to videos and current news and social events. Openly racist sites such as Jewwatch.com garner more than 1 million hits a month. Neo-Nazi sites abound the web and don’t seem to be receding. In fact, interest in such material has increased according to some sources as much as 400% since 2000 and the first Bush coup d'état in Florida that illegally removed thousands of American African male voters from their state elections register.

Not to say that their isn’t loads of questionable material available on the Internet, (such as pornography accounting for more than 80% of web traffic which says a lot more about people than it does about the genre) but the Internet simply reflects those that created it, maintained it, expanded it and currently control all the means of production and utilisation of the technology.

Even in the 21st century, most non-European homes in the First, Second and Third worlds still do not have PC’s let alone ISP service. It simply remains out of the financial reach of many minorities due to the usual culprits, economic marginalisation and under-education to the use and benefits of the technology. Amongst those that do have access, far too many of them spend more time downloading entertainment than pursuing political, educational or cultural knowledge. And again, even this highly generalised deconstruction I have offered still only amounts to less than 20% of all Internet usage globally.

This explains why the Daily Kos can enjoy such high ratings and acclaim among activists of various stripes while non-European political commentary blogs such as my own (Intelligentaindigena Novajoservo) are not read by much more than those uniquely concerned with very specific issues. My blog focuses on matters that concern worldwide Aboriginal genocide, political power and racial issues that impact everybody. But if discussing race and First Nations subjects in America candidly is just about impossible in the general public discourse, it is for all practical purposes a deliberate drag through the valley of indifference in cyberspace.

White people simply aren’t interested enough in Brown folks to engage us as anything other than entertainment fodder or the hyper-sexualised fantasies of historical White racist guilt. Their apathetic readership and support for Black/Brown bloggers proves this and arguments as to the legitimacy of this argument ca be verified by the Internet logs of no-European bloggers that do good work, yet are ignored by those who comprise the bulk of the Internet reading audience. In a world where print media is on a downward slide to oblivion, this is a very important issue.

Like my ancestral mentor James Baldwin, I believe everybody has a story. We all have something to say from a perspective all our own. African people are no less human than any other man, woman or child on this planet, yet we are constantly placed into positions where our humanity is challenged for no other reason than our otherness. And like Baldwin, many of us who have the ability to upload our observations of the Europocentric empire from the inside do so with one foot in the White world while tip-toeing in the territories where we really come from. Our commentary is biting, accurate and damming of what has been euphorically described as the wide, wonderful world of Europeanization brought to us by way of a necessary and on-going genocide and the institution of a racial/ethnic hierarchy that favours the fair of skin and cultural vanity. We are the faces of colonialism and genocide and we articulate the angst and antagonism of our endurance with an accent of “otherness,” in a vernacular that burns Euro-supremacist eyes and ears to a cinder.

Hence the delicate yet consistently applied apathy of White weblog readers towards bloggers of colour despite the qualitative content of their websites.

Who wants to read about socio-political issues that they might feel responsible for addressing when they could be reading about scandalous professional socialite- harlot Paris Hilton’s brush with the reality of the L.A. County lockup? Poor White and minority women go to prison and go missing everyday but it’s always more disturbing when it happens to someone they regard as representative of the “Master race”. The other paradigms of humanity simply do not calculate interest, compassion or respect.

Still doubt my assessment? Ask your nearest Palestinian, Iraqi or Afro-refugee from Katrina bashed Louisiana. Darfurians could tell you themselves, but many of them are dying from preventable conditions made worse by European and Euro-colonial unresponsiveness to human suffering. And they said it would never happen again.

Without the axiomatic “free exchange of ideas” mantra of the free-market PR gangsters applied to the Internet, the only ideas that will germinate will be White ideas in a world overwhelmingly populated by those or various hues and convictions other than White, or Eurocentric. Are those that control the levers of socio-political power fearful of letting “The market decide” in cyberspace, or are we just afraid to call a spade a spade and admit that the Internet is just the new Apartheid, Jetsons style.

- The Angryindian