Cyberspace enables new modes of racist harassment and celebrates real racist violence.

Evidence

The combination of intimacy and distance found in cyberspace provide a new context for racist harassment through abuse or digital tools like “mail bombs.” They also provide a context in which racism can be simulated. Elsewhere I have talked about the use of computer games that offer the “pleasure” of simulated racial violence (Back et al. 1996). These technologies make new types of racist behavior possible. They combine all of the fruits of the digital era to produce interactive visual forms that are alluring and attractive to a particularly youthful audience. Virtual forms of racial violence relate to chilling lived experiences while remaining in the “other world” of computer simulation. They are politically slippery because they blur the distinction between social reality and fantasy. This issue was brought sharply into focus in April 1996 when a photograph of a young black man, face down on the floor being beaten and kicked, was posted on the Skinheads USA website. The site is maintained by 28-year-old Dallas resident, Bart Alsbrook, known by his online name “Bootboy.” Another photograph entitled “Mexican Getting Smashed” showed two men beating a bleeding victim. The incident was reported in the local newspaper (Copilevitz, 1996). The Dallas police examined the possibility of using the images as evidence, and since this incident the web site has been closed down. Mark Briskman, a director with the Anti-Defamation League, commented at the time: “It reminds me of Nazi Germany and the way they meticulously documented all their atrocities in stills and on film.” This incident is a dangerous example of the use of the Internet to celebrate real incidents of racist violence. The tension between national chauvinism and the increasingly transnational matrices of neofascist culture can be managed within cyberculture. It seems possible for staunchly nationalistic sensibilities to be maintained while common images and icons are shared. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2556

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing interest in how new communication technologies reshape social harm, paralleling how the telegraph/soundscape work addressed technology-driven cultural change.
• SEED: Possible essay angle: how platforms from 1996 skinhead sites to modern livestreamed attacks show racist spectacle migrating across each new medium instantaneously.