Thursday, October 9, 2008

Additional Banks/DMAC question

Banks writes the following which I think connects to the DMAC video: “The construction of Black people and other people of color as non-technological and therefore irrelevant in the design and construction of technological tools continues even into the era of the Internet, even as those selling new technologies are quick to market a world of multicultural possibility”

“If things like the authentic trope can be disrupted resisted or remixed into demi-humorous animated arguments or quasi-academic pieces of new media that remixes those terribly sneaky and tacit racist tropes easily by relying on the very foundation of new parataxis like structures and the importance of delivery and remixing, great ok I’m all onboard Macs and flip cameras for everybody.
If on the other hand new media is used to replicate the same racist tropes in new dynamic ways, well bollocks to that. If we use new media to replicate old designs of oppression and undervalue what people bring to the table by opening up institutional space just wide enough to get new toys but do not go about actively sharing those toys or reproduce racist tropes like the ones described here then I have had enough of authentic to last the rest of my life. I don’t need a new way to see it and I can resist those things like I’ve always resisted and other racist technologies that were rammed down my throat, like graduate admission forms that made me put down only one ethnicity or English-only education.”

I think both of these points are argued with strong rhetoric, but I need more convincing examples of technological racism than graduate admission forms in order to really see their points. Can anyone help?

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