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