The panelists: Journalist Laina Dawes, Writing is Fighting. Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Editor of Feministing.com. Jason Toney, Lead Producer, Disney Online (formerly blogster of Negro Please), and Lynne D. Johnson, Senior Editor of fastcompany.com
Wow. All black and brown faces on this panel. It makes me happy and sad to say that. Happy because diversity is good and necessary. Sad, because all the brown folk are lumped here in this one room, on this one day. The very special SXSW Interactive panel.
Here is a slice of the opening comments by panel moderator Laina Dawes who was kind enough to send them to me. This should give you a flavor of where the panel started.
“Since I first wrote this proposal for SXSW last summer, there has been a huge increase of racial incidents on online social networking sites. What is becoming more prevalent is that despite the topic that is being discussed, the ethnicity of a commenter is used as a way to negate their opinion.”
For bloggers, Dawes worries that this dismissal of opinion and thought can lead to self-censorship, or in the case of site publishers and editors, damaged reputations for those trying to build professional writing careers. Overall, any kind of shutting down creates silence, usually where dialogue is most necessary.
With all due respect to the panelists, I have to wonder: how come when the race issue comes up, panels like this are seeded with brown and black folks? Why do “we” have to be in charge of the conversation? Part of me realizes why. Like it or not, dealing with race, class and gender is part of our everyday reality.
Who do I want to see on this kind of panel? For one thing, I want to see a white person engaging in discussions of race and white privilege. I want to see more class diversity. I want to see some of the “stars” of SXSW interactive as panelists along with the brown panelists – some of whom are making their third and fourth appearance. I would like to see a clash of the stars — a visible, live conversation on the subject that ordinarily happens testily and under cover of the faceless Internet, front and center. I would like to see it open the conference as a plenary or a keynote. Beer should be involved. Okay. This should be a clear-eye conversation. But some humor. There should be humor. I’m ranting, somewhat. But I’m also tired of hearing the same riff: Racism is bad. Free speech is good. Censorhip is bad. Social networks are great. And then, the people show up.
Jason Toney had a good point to make when he suggested that a good place to encourage diversity and discussion of difficult issues online was to broaden the range of who was creating and using online tools.
Okay. Who, how and when does this happen? Can it ever happen or is the online environment inherently messy? Maybe instead of trying to “fix” the problem of online intolerance, it should be accepted as the true reflection of the off line culture. Maybe the real work happens off line and the measure of success will be that day, say at the 50th year of SXSW that people are offering a history of when racism and sexism and all the other -isms were par for the course and how sadly quaint that was. Maybe.
This article appears in March 9 • 2007.