Who Can and Can't We Be Online?

The website Blackplanet.com has 18.5 million members, countless forums, and bustling chatrooms. It's the fifth most trafficked stomping ground on the internet. And I had never heard of it until Sunday when I read Adam Banks's chapter “Taking Black Technology Use Seriously: African American Discursive Traditions in the Digital Underground.”

It's with a certain trepidation, then, that I want to detail how I ceased to be David Wanczyk—black-web-culture ignoramus—and became, for awhile, Incogdw82, the 18.5 + 1 millionth user.

Embarking on what could be considered an act of anthropological aggression (if not cyber-blackface), I had all of my typical academic guilt. Was I invading? Was I actively “othering”? Was I making exotic a simple social interaction? Had the internet allowed me to do this without me having to own up to the implications?

And, would my big mouth serve me in an unfamiliar community?



I also considered my on-again-off-again relationship with essentialism (“the view that categories of people [. . .] have intrinsically different characteristics or natures” (Apple Dictionary)). It's a relationship that helps me respect the singularity of cultures and divides me from those cultures at the same time. I dateessentialism; I hope to marry universality.

Essentialism has to be in the front of our blog-reading minds, though, considering some of the claims made in Banks and in Samantha Blackmon's “'But I'm Just White' or How 'Other ' Pedagogies Can Benefit All Students.” (Please click link to see pertinent passages from and further discussion of these articles).

Banks, for instance, lists the following (indivduating?) features of an African-American oral tradition he sees as analogous to activity on Blackplanet: “call and response, mimicry, signifyin', testifyin', exaggerated language, proverbial statements, punning, spontaneity, image-making, braggodocio, indirection, and tonal semantics” (79).

In my experience as a chatroom participant in predominantly white-populated spaces (I think), I've seen my fair share of those traits as well—especially call-and-response, more proverbial statements than you can shake a stick at, mountains of exaggerated language, braggodocio, punning, and punning about bragg0docio.

Is Banks, then, careful how he delineates African-American language? And when Blackmon writes about "deculturation and assimilation" (93), is she relying on an outdated understanding of total-racial-split and positing that black culture is fully outside the mainstream, "intrinsically different"?

To find out what's up with Blackmon, to see what Banks is really talking about, and to counter my simplistic essentialism, I logged-in.

Overwhelmed by the speed of the twenty-something chat, I tried the more staid thirty-somethings. Seven folks were having a relatively ribald conversation, so I asked if anyone had any advice for a guy who had just gotten engaged. Check that. I asked, “any advice for a guy just got engaged.”

As soon as I deformalized my language, I began to feel like a poser.

But what of all the talk in class and in the articles about being able to take on different identities on the internet??? In her book Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle goes even further than that talk: "The computer [. . .] enables us to contemplate mental life that exists apart from bodies [. . .]," she writes. "The computer is an evocative object that causes old boundaries to be renegotiated" (24).

Apart from bodies? Apart from skin?

If that's true, why did taking on this particular identity seem particularly taboo to me?



Some of the gentlemen in the chat suggested that I "RUN" from my engagement. "DON'T DO IT," said "WONT GET RIGHT." A discussion began about living with people before marriage, abstinence, and, eventually, certain R- and X-rated activities often enjoyed by thirtysomethings.

This irreverence seemed pretty par-for-the-course for chatroom material, and why shouldn't it be? Still, I felt myself consciously adapting my language. I never did attempt to take on a Black Identity (whatever that capitalized generalization is); but the default on this site is black (as Blackmon argues the default on the internet at large is white (94)), so I was deceiving by omission.

Blackplanet is a website that actively counters what Blackmon calls the “alienation of self as cultural being that gets replicated all too often in cyberspace” (96). Banks writes, too, that "those who become part of [such sites] truly do have a right to their own language" (71). He continues:

The presence of such spaces online [. . .] would be a repudiation of much early cyberspace theory that insisted race is and should be irrelevant online, that it would be made irrelevant by the fluidity inherent in online subjectivities. (71)

The blog forced me to have five lines of white space after the block quote, but that gave us all some good time to think about the quotation! It's an idea that helps us question how much identity-creating freedom is actually available to us as internet users.




Banks also writes, “[W]hat's fascinating about BlackPlanet, for me, is the degree to which users have written an oral tradition into cyberspace” (79).

If race is "not irrelevant" online because racial identification allows vocal freedom for a traditionally-oppressed group, then what other markers are not irrelevant as we construct online identities? Do we always carry our race/class/gender characteristics onto the web, even if we're the only ones who know it?

And, therefore, was my weak impostering some implicit knock against this underground space where a specific language finds its expression? Did race matter?

Did non-cyber me necessarily constitute cyber me?

I have to admit, as I discussed with the chatroom whether my ass is both fat and flat (the jury is still out), questions of identity were not always on my mind. But they weren't far from it. In what ways, for instance, do I develop online identities in order to escape myself? And in what ways does that differ from the instinct on Blackplanet as Banks sees it: the instinct to be more one's (authentic?) self?

Within a wider culture that completely values the general and linguistic experiences of white people, many (white) internet users create identities to escape themselves. In that same culture--the culture that (generally) does not value the general and linguistic experiences of black people--black internet users, according to Banks, seek a space where they can be themselves!

I'm thrilled and scared by the idea that internet communication can be both an escape from and an affirmation of the self. (Of course, sometimes our "unrealistic" role-playings are escapes and affirmations at the same time, but the question remains whether comfort (or lack of it) within the wider culture determines our need for those experiences).

Does writing in general have the same opportunities/pitfalls of escape and affirmation? This is an important question for me as a writer of nonfiction.

Also, What identities do you think we are allowed to have online? Is it limitless, as Turkle argues? Or does Banks have a point? Do some enclaves of cultural expression deserve to be left alone?

Thanks for reading. Don't forget to check out the DMAC video on authenticity, and to review Whale Hunt. Let's think about the ways both challenge what might be our racial presumptions.

Good Wednesday morning!