 Welcome, everybody. I do have to say that Lisa has one of the more interesting titles for her talks, as in comparison to a few other recent launching guests. Don't hate the player, hate the game, internet game, social inequality, and racist talk, this griefing. Lisa is the director of the Asian-American Studies Program, a professor in the Institute of Communication Research and New Media Studies Program, professor of Asian-American Studies at the University of Illinois. So welcome, Lisa. All right. Before I start, I want to thank the Berkman Center for inviting me. I really appreciate the hospitality, the place to show this work, and get some feedback on it. I also want to thank Dana Boyd at Microsoft, because I wrote this there just the other day. So I appreciate the support that they've given and the work they're doing in social media. So if you can't hear me, let me know, and I'll try and speak up. I'm doing the best I can to be louder. So who am I, and what am I talking about? I thought I was going to be talking about World of Warcraft, but instead, I'm going to be talking about Raffle Con. I do have another piece on World of Warcraft with a similar title, Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game, which is about some of the really egregiously anti-Chinese racist machinima that's to be found about gold farmers in particular. So if you're an MMO player, you know what this controversy is a little bit. There's a lot of really over-the-top kind of racist media going around made by players about how gold farmers are China men and how they need to be killed. But I'm not going to talk about that, because I've already written about that. And so I'm going to be talking about racism and representation in Twitter, in particular. How many of you went to Raffle Con? All right. So if you came a little early, you probably saw one of the slides I was showing here, which was, I'll just go forward then, which is it's from Raffle Con, right? So does anybody remember this in the Twitter feed at Raffle Con? No? OK, there were a bunch of these seven or eight tweets that came out basically looking like this, nigger, nigger, nigger, fat nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger. And I wanted to talk about that in particular and why it is this happens, why it's permissible, and whether it's possible to separate racism within the culture of griefing, which is what this is, from the kind of generative, culturally productive side of griefing, which is also part of the culture of anonymous and 4chan, right? So my research question is really, what are the ties between racism and cultural production in griefing as a culture as shown by this? Is it possible to find some way to separate the kind of rich being of productivity, which has given us things like lull cats, things white people like, and so on? Well, I'll exempt that. But the things that come out of 4chan, say, from this kind of behavior, and what's at stake in us failing to do that. So that's what I'm trying to look at today. So I call my paper, Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game, partly because I really like Jamie Foxx. I think he's funny, but also because it's really not my goal as a critic to start ragging on people for being racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and sexist online. That's kind of a bootless errand, right? It just takes a long time to do that, and you don't really get a whole lot out of it. Blaming people for doing these behaviors is not what I'm trying to do. Instead, what I'm trying to talk about is how digital social platforms like the internet, cultures like griefing, create occasions in which racist discourse is strategic. It accomplishes something. And also, when racist discourse like this not only reflects the racist discourse we have in society, but the problems we have talking about race and everyday life, right? Why is it that it goes here? But at Ralph O'Connor, there was no conversation about this. Nothing in the Twitter stream took note of this at all. If you were at Ralph O'Connor and say, you'd seen these tweets, what would your reaction have been? I really want to know, like if you didn't see it, or say you had seen it, right? What do you think you would have thought, done, or said about it, or tweeted about it? Are you guys going to address that? Pardon? Are you guys going to address that? Or like to use that as an example, like if it was during the panel, right? Yeah, this did happen during the panel. And that would be one of the tweets that I would have tweeted out. Really? And if you addressed that. Okay, yeah. Christina, hi, it's great to see you. There was a lot of that stuff both in Twitter and more in conference with people who were, you know, the link to a bunch of panels about 10 hours to be, and they were like, let's troll these on the panel. That's right. That's what happened, and like we understood that it wasn't people on the panel who there was very little we could actually do about it at the conference. Right, right, you're in one of these tweets, I hope you don't mind that I put it up. Okay, so right, absolutely, there's nothing you can do, right, Twitter's a public channel, that's what happens. And I don't think anybody thought the people who did this were at the panel, or at the event, right? I mean it was just griefing, straight up griefing, right? And in fact very traditional, kind of uncreative griefing. And what was interesting about it is it didn't happen during the race panel, which is when you might expect it to, that was the panel that Christina put together and that I moderated, it happened during the keynote. And the reason is that it was about specifically Moot, right, the person who is probably best associated with the public face of 4chan, he was speaking and it was a way to get into that event, right, to kind of grief him and to grief the event generally. Two years ago when I didn't go, I heard there was boombox disruption. So everybody knew there's gonna be something and this is what there was. So, all right, so, that's good to get the context. Any other responses, if you'd been there, what would have been your reaction, either mental or actual or networked or... So was this running in the background, like during the panel? No, because 4chan was used during the actual presentations, but people were basically looking at their phones too, I think, so I was following both Backchannel and Twitter. I think a lot of people were, right? Yeah, but Twitter was not, yeah. Just sorry to back up a little bit, but not sorry, but the context of this presentation, what was it you had asked initially of who was there, I don't even know what. Okay, well, I'll start at the beginning then. That's a good reminder. Griefing, griefing. Okay, that was a good reminder for me to start. Okay, so, Rafa Khan is a conference that was held earlier this year and it's about internet culture and means, which is to say the popular culture that's produced virally often by anonymous people and then sometimes can be marketed or commoditized by groups like Icon has cheeseburger, the cheeseburger network, right? So, lolcats, everybody knows what lolcats are, right? Came out of this culture and it's often spoken of in very positive terms. A moot, who is the public face of 4chan recently gave a talk at TED, which is the kind of hoi, poloi, fancy conference for people who are innovators in technology, yeah. To clarify, do you mean Christopher Cool? Yes, that moot, right, right, yeah. So, I saw his talk at TED and he really highlighted some of the almost philanthropic things that 4chan has accomplished, such as harassing the Scientologists pretty effectively, using collective intelligence to prosecute someone who had abused a cat, which was remarkable, it was an awful case of cat abuse, and producing this rich vein of culture, lolcats, all these other kinds of, I can't think of any other ones right now but there are lots of great cultural memes that have come out of 4chan. What he did not talk about, however, is things like the patriotic niggas which I'm gonna be talking about here, and this, because this also came out of 4chan, right? So what I'm looking at is, can we separate these two things? Is it possible to admire the accomplishments of 4chan, to view them as innovators in some way, but also to call this out, right? So, as I said, the lack of places in the public sphere where race and racism can be honestly talked about and talked through has created a vacuum that the internet is filling, sometimes like this. Particularly for young people, the internet operates on an attention economy model and the use of words like nigger functions as a form of currency that enables one to jump the attention queue, like it or not, all right? However, there are many other better ways to get attention online, and this one is troubling for a lot of reasons. It contributes to an atmosphere of incivility that's ultimately bad for online communities, free quality, and actually for internet businesses. So I'm gonna go back, oh, here's some books I wrote. So it's not a good ad for your game platform to be known like this. So this was a tweet that Christian Lander sent out, right? During the race conference, the race panel, which I thought was very apropos, that we know our platforms not only by what they cost and what content they have, but what forms of bigotry and racism they support. And so here it is, racism is for the internet, homeophobia is for Xbox Live. Then he's referring, obviously, to the promiscuous use of the word fag and halo and all these kinds of games. And you know this is really a widespread thing when NPR, not the media leader, when it comes to digital culture, air stories such as this one on Xbox 360's Modern Warfare 2. So I'm not gonna show it just in the interest of time. I'll put it up and if you want the slide, you can look at it. This is a short story that points out how pervasive racism and sexism are in online games, specifically Modern Warfare. And it warns parents that they should be worrying less about game content and violence and probably more about what they're hearing from other players, right? As pervasive racism, racism, sexism and so on. And it mostly points out the total inability of game companies themselves to regulate it, right? That when it's reported, it's never acted on right away. People don't get much sense that there is much regulation at all. And if it's an unfriendly environment for women and gay people, there's nothing really that women and gay people can do about it, at least through these channels. But I think rather than despairing of online games as spaces that are just going to be racist and sexist no matter what, due to anonymity, what I'm trying to do is to see what specific forms this takes, why and how it operates promiscuously, what its history is, how it might be checked and how its forms are themselves memes, right? Because racism is a meme. It works just like other memes do. Passed on from person to person, no formal kind of channel for it and so on, sexism too. Racism both is and isn't a big deal in virtual worlds and in games. The n-word is still the ultimate conversation stopper, hence its promiscuous use, though in my time it's gone from a word you could say if you pronounced it right, niga, not nigger, to one that cannot even be said at all or visually reproduced. I was talking to David the other night and you and I could say it, I think because we're of a different time, you know? But since then it's become a euphemism. I was looking at the iBook version of Conrad's novella, The Nigger of the Narcissus and they had reprinted it as the n-word of the Narcissus. However, Penguin and Dover still issue paper editions of the book that use the word, right? So clearly the word is absolutely toxic, very, very problematic. So, but it was used really commonly in online games and discourse. It's less of a former straightforward racism, right? And more as part of the culture of griefing and this is how people play it off. Like, oh, it's not really racism, it's just griefing. I'm just trying to bother you. Griefing has been around as long as the internet has been around. I think that's pretty safe to say. The first few emails were probably trolls, I imagine. These and other social irritants had become part of the culture of online worlds at the same time that our culture as a whole is undergoing a huge shift as to what racism is and what it means. And so I'm gesturing towards post-racial society here, right? The thinking that now we have Obama as president, we no longer have a race problem. It's no accident that these are happening at the same time. For griefing is about mocking those who take the internet too seriously. That's what it is, right? Just shouting the n-word at a conference about memes. The current racial formation works in the exact same way by making fun of people who take race too seriously, right? People who call it out. The paradox of online racism can be summed up as follows. We are currently in a moment of what I'm calling enlightened racism, a term I'm taking from Susan Douglas's book, Enlightened Sexism, which is a really good book, just came out in 2010. Enlightened Sexism is, according to her, quote, a response deliberate or not to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism. Indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved. So now it's okay even amusing to resurrect sex hysteria types of girls and women. So he talks about pussycat dolls and the swan and these kinds of really egregiously kind of retrograde entertainment. As Douglas writes, quote, Enlightened Sexism takes the gains of the women's movement as a given and then uses them as permission to resurrect retrograde images of girls and women as sex objects, bimbos and hoochie mamas, still defined by their appearance and biological destiny, end quote. So she says this works precisely because women have made significant gains in the last few decades. As she writes about this overtly sexist television programming, I'm just discussing, quote, on the man show, for example, does anybody ever watch the man show? Right, is this still on? Really? No, I didn't think so. For old man, we apologize. Okay, so on the man show, and it was really egregious, right? She writes, it was understood that it is sexist and ridiculous to have bikini-clad women jumping on trampolines and furthermore, the guys who wanted them to do this were morons. Therefore, the objectification of women is now fine while it's actually a joke on the guys. It's silly to be sexist, therefore, it's funny to be sexist. And we all know that funny is the real currency of the popular internet. Enlightened Racism is a form of racist behavior and speech only available to those who are known or assumed known not to be racist. You're the only ones who can do it. This is why it's okay for media products like the film Tropic Thunder. Anyone see this film? Okay, television programs like South Park in the office and the humor of Sarah Silverman to contain or at times be based on over-racism and sexism. For as Mary Beltran writes, this lets them both quote skewer and it sometimes appear nostalgic for ethnic and racial stereotypes. I always feel a little weird when I watch Mad Men. Honestly, I feel like it's also kind of resurrecting that nostalgia. This is characteristic of what she calls post-racial humor. And it's important that it's humor that gets to use race this way. You don't see other genres doing this, right? Because they would just be racist. There would be no backing up from that. As I mentioned before, humor is a social capital volatile interaction, especially social games, right? This is the way you make friends. The way you become well known, well liked is by being funny. However, post-racial humor is a confusing discursive mode for young people who are sometimes unable to separate and lighten racism from regular racism. So, paradoxically, the worst the racism and the sexism are, the more extreme and cartoonish it is, the harder it is to take seriously and the harder it is to call it out. Indeed, as scholar Rosalind Gill puts it, quote, the extremist of the sexism is evidence that there's no sexism. Right, the man show isn't sexist because it's so sexist it can't possibly be serious. If there is no more sexism, then there's no need for sexual politics, social movements and sexual politics can be mocked and attacked. So, the N-word is funny because it is so extreme that nobody could really mean it, right? And humor is all about not meaning it. So, if you take humor, plus the N-word, you get enlightened racism online and attention. So, I wanted to show you some of the Twitter stream here. And this happened during the plenary when Moot was talking, so I tried to highlight some of this for you. And there's some funny things to be seen here, right? You have tweets about China kind of coexisting with this. Here's another one, Bill Wagoner, another meme, right? I think it's funny to see this. How much more grounded, thoughtful, clear some of the repeat panelists are two years later than nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, right? This one, annontalk.com owns you. So, here's claiming of the N-word, right? It's a raid, a nontalk. And here is the announcement of the intention, what this is, raid, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger. However, okay, so the use of the N-word, the reference to raid into a nontalk made it clear the attack came from four-chan members, not people at the conference necessarily, but it was not taken seriously at the conference, no one responded to it in tweets, no one talked about it at the conference, because it was clear that they are not racist, right? It was so over the top, it was clear it was not racist. It was about griefing. There were several African-Americans at this conference including at that plenary session, Kenyatta Cheese was on the plenary, he's a black guy. Yeah, it didn't come up at all, right? Because this was enlightened racism, used for humor, there's nothing more to say about it. However, there was one lone tweet regarding racism on the Twitter stream. Well, not about this, but about something relating to one of the moderators. It's actually about sexism. So this person wrote that woman, which was Christina, sitting on the plenary panel, belongs in kitchen, not talking to Moot, fuck her. Then a day later, somebody responds, yes, and then you get little turps like I am kind of who think they are so cool, repeating the misogyny and racism they see on four-chan. So this was drawing a connection between the nigger, nigger, nigger raid and then the attack on Christina and then kind of all bringing it back to four-chan is the place where this had come from. So this is a different spin on four-chan than one sees in the world of internet culture, which is overwhelmingly pretty approving of four-chan. As I said, Moot's been a feature guest on TED, describing the political actions of four-chan and the use of collective intelligence. Racist raids like this one are ported over from the cultural virtual world raids led by a four-chan group who call themselves the patriotic niggers. So let me see if I can get this to work. Has anybody heard of this? Oh, what happened? Let me roll back and let's see if you can see there a little banner. This is called patriotic niggers, hello fur fags. It's a capture of an attack upon a place called Rainbow Tiger, which is a popular bar in Second Life, frequented by furries. Anybody want to explain what furries are? I don't want to go there. Can somebody do it? Okay. That's a good explanation. So this is about how you can use code, basically, to try and ruin somebody's Second Life experience. So there are lots of social videos like this from these groups that say ruining your standings. And here they're ruining it. They're filling in with these meaningless boxes and screwing up with social space for people who like to dress as animals online and some of them touch each other, right? And so they're trolling, right? They're destroying their sprees. They're crushing their sprees. In an interview with Ten Zen Monkeys, a pretty prominent blog, Mugkits Akronen, who's one of the spokespeople for patriotic niggers, told Luke Cibron that, I'm not going to deny, let me say a little bit, patriotic niggers is a troll group. We exist primarily to make people mad. Well, a few of us might be racist or something. A group has completely irrelevant to the cause. N3X15, our web-hosted guy and acting Second Life leader is a Republican. I probably disagree with him on a lot of things. We're willing to overlook that and the fact that we all lie to the same goal. I think laughs transcend party lines. So the laws, right? The justification for why all this griefing occurs. So what is a 4chan rate? We just saw two. You know, one on the Twitter stream, and the patriotic niggers are a group of griefers who delight in breaking Second Life and also in blocking parts of Habba Hotel. This is partly maybe how you know them. They make these black avatars and stand in public places and block access to things. So Habba Hotel is another place where they've done this. And they also fill places with garbage like Second Life are not African-American. I think it's pretty safe to say. But they resort to offensives, racist language and behaviors that show this route to the goal, which is the lulls, disrupting online community and social life for the lulls. You screw people who take it too seriously, right? So the stated purpose of this group is to skewer those who take the internet too seriously. However, the deployment of the n-word in their name and also during their raids conflates taking racism seriously with inappropriate social investment in online worlds. You're a big loser, right? Someone who wants to be in Second Life and thinks that you live there. If you are that person, you're somebody who takes racism too seriously as well. So calling out their racism makes you a person who doesn't get it. Because griefing is supposed to be about the lulls, not race. As they say that all the time, we're not racist. So if you do not find it funny to see furfags in online clubs have their space vandalized and you don't think that the use of the n-word is lulls, then the problem is not with your politics but with your sense of humor, right? So what's the problem with enlightened racism online? Enlightened racism online be in the form of these Twitter raids, racist speech, and MMOs. In fact, there's an interesting essay by Tanner Higan about Leroy Jenkins. You all probably know who Leroy Jenkins is a little bit, right? Can someone explain Leroy for others who don't know what Leroy is, what he did? He was at Raffle Con too, actually. He was working security. So I got his autograph in my badge. I thought that was very interesting. He was famous for his actions in World of Warcraft during basically very dark things. And then there was a YouTube video which was made of this happening and then he became famous. That's the thing about show. Yeah, right. And very famous. So famous that Leroy Jenkins appeared in a couple commercials on television. Blizzard incorporated the title Jenkins for people who had accomplished certain goals in the game as an honorific. He was at the first Raffle Con, I know, because Leroy Jenkins is one of the most viewed pieces of machinima from the game. It's very, very well known. What people don't talk about so much is the role of Leroy Jenkins as a minstrel figure, right? Using this kind of black, minstrel-like speech, using a black, kind of minstrel-like name. Tanner Higgins written an essay on this on games and culture that says, why is it that no one talks about this? Because it's the lulls, right? When it's the lulls, you can't talk about it, right? Because that's not part of the lulls. Then you're out of the... Can someone jump in? Can we use our collective intelligence to fill in what these memes are? How would you best describe the lulls? LOL is the answer, laughing out loud. So it's been turned into the lulls. Yeah, for laughs, right? The lulls. It's very internet-specific. Right? All-ULZ is different than LOL. What's the difference? Well, LOL is sort of an expression, whereas the lulls is sort of this entity that people aspire to. Okay, so you can say if there's currency in virtual worlds, the lulls is the currency. So it's not cash money. It's attention and the lulls. And the lulls is the way to get the attention, right? And so a lot of these things I've been talking about are justified as for the lulls. They do get attention, but they're also incredibly racist. So I'm trying to tease apart how is it that racism is implicated in the lulls? Is it possible to pull it out of the lulls? What does it matter to us that our online culture, which we care about and call our culture at RaffleCon, is this way, right? Why is it we can't even say anything about this in the Twitter stream? Well, if you do, then you don't get it. You don't get it. You're not in the culture. So part of the problem is that it's difficult. So when Blizzard appropriates the Leroy Jenkins meme, sells it back to us. It's our culture that's selling it back to us. They're legitimizing it, basically. So this is part of the problem. The other is that it's very difficult to check this kind of racism or call it out even without flying into the face of internet popular culture itself. That is, the ultimate justification for any act is the lulls. That particular type of attention, which is especially prized and especially valuable, right? LOL can be from anything. It can be sex in the city is LOL. But the lulls is truly an accomplishment. It's a creative act. It's unique in particular to a small group, which has a possibility to be commoditized for the mainstream, which is what law cats were, right? It's been who says he has 40 employees. All getting paid. That's a lot. So internet humor rules in the world of anonymous online communities like Twitter, 4chan, Modern Warfare 2, wow, any of these things. Or any other youth-oriented social space. So critics of enlightened racism online or enlightened sexism online may find themselves cast in the ungrateful world of the buzzkill or worse yet the humorless oldster. Hopelessly newbish and not to be regarded as an authority on anything. And I think my most sad moment at Raffle Con was going out to buy a t-shirt from Ben. He said to me, have you heard of IkaHasCheeseburger? Do I look that old? I bought a shirt, but I still felt like, oh, God, like I've been totally made. So this makes it very difficult to do anything about enlightened racism online because by protesting it, one becomes unqualified to protest it, right? You're not in it, so you can't say anything about it. As Douglas writes about enlightened sexism, it is essential that feminism be repudiated as something young women should shun as old-fashioned, withered, humorless, repulsive. So women with long skirts, gray hair, you know what I'm talking about. Likewise, nobody at Raffle Con called out the nigger raid for everybody knew what it was and knew that outrage is the oxygen of grief for communities. So to have called it out to give it any attention at all is to provide it with the oxygen that it needs. Everybody there knows that's how trolling works, right? So no one said anything. Minority and protest were rendered impossible by the cultural context of internet humor, which is how enlightened racism and sexism managed to survive and replicate. It's not cool to be a feminist, right? My students say, no, no, I'm not a feminist. I want to make the same money as men do, but I'm not one of them. That's not cool. Let me get back to my PowerPoint. Okay. So as games become more networked, English becomes a minority internet language after Chinese and other languages. In collaboration, social intelligence are more needed than ever in commercial and in everyday life. There's much at stake in our sorting out our problems with enlightened racism, online and offline. The problem is not so much its prevalent as its intractability, the difficulty of addressing it. It is in our own interest to make it clear to youth and others what racism is, what humor is, how to tell the difference and most importantly, how to respect it. So I'm thinking of the hysterias of children on the internet. Is it harmful for naked pictures of teenage girls to be circulating on the internet? Sexting. Is that harmful? Yeah, it's probably harmful. Is it harmful for a young person to be recorded in some way yelling nigger, nigger, nigger or bitch, bitch, bitch or fag, fag, fag and have that available for all time? Archived, you know, searchable, indexable. Yes, maybe it's more harmful, actually in my opinion than sexting, I think. I think that's very bad and there's really no way for us to do anything about it currently. So I already went over the context of this where it disappeared, which was at Raffle Con and so on. So many undergrad students at my own campus, University of Illinois are still unable and unwilling to give up their racist Indian mascot, Chief Alina Weck. Chief Alina Weck is, right, egregious, totally bad, gross. Because they view him as a symbol of respect for Indians. And despite what actual Indians have to say about this, we've actually had Native Americans come on campus and say, knock it off. This is not cool, we don't like it, we think it's dumb. But the students don't really care what these people, the Indians themselves have to say, right, because they know what they think respect is and they are going to stick to their side of that. It's enlightened racism again in some ways. You're taking this too seriously. They tell the Indians to come to campus. Lighten up. If network worlds, these virtual publics are where youth are learning how to be civil, are making the mistakes they need to make. And I think Sonya Livingstone makes an excellent point that youth need to make mistakes to learn. And she's concerned, as is Corey Doctro, that there are very few public spaces for youth at all, right? Youth aren't allowed to go to places they went when I was young, so they go where there are public spaces to interact, which is to say the internet, that's where they are going. Modern warfare too, right? It's the mall of the present day in some ways. This is where people learn to be civil, right? And it's our responsibility to make sure they can learn from these mistakes, an idiom that makes some sense to them. So I think that Xbox live banning them does not make sense to them because they don't want to be seen as the walls in the idiom of internet culture. They just see it as more ass-hattery to use the idiom. It's just more ass-hattery, it's more regulation, just nothing to get around. So it's more stuff to be creative about avoiding. This is a problem, right? How is it possible for you to tease apart enlightened racism from real racism and to learn about it, right? So I think a clip like the one I'm going to show might be helpful. Alternatively, a nice weekend spent with Cory Doctorow's novel For the Wind, which I really recommend, written from the point of view of gold farmers. So I'm just going to show you a really short clip from a documentary about gold farmers where somebody who is a gold farmer talks to an interviewer saying what he feels about this. So this is what he has to say. Okay, so one person's lull is another person's non-lulls. Let me just say, right? Really serious thing. And so as we become more transnationalized partly because of the internet, I think it's really more important than it ever has in some ways to think about how we can have interaction with people in other cultures, people who we may or may not have used inferior to us, how civility can be achieved in youth culture without totally alienating youth, right? And I speak as somebody who's in the crotch in the X and the Y generations. So I can kind of see the problem here, right? Which is that you can't really get youth to do anything unless you acknowledge their own cultural language, right? And how is that, how is that going to happen? So I'm done. Any comments, questions? Very welcome. Thanks. Chris, do you know how much, to what extent this light and racism type humor occurs in non-English speaking cultures? So is there the equivalent of people jumping in and using the N word and just screaming in Chinese? You know, I don't read any other languages, but yeah, you have the answer to that. There was a Berkman fellow, Donny who just went back to Hong Kong. He was saying that in Shanghai on a lot of message boards they had this one particular so do you remember exactly what he had said? There's this one particular thing they used to insult non-Shanghaiis and that's prevalent all over it. So it's not quite racist, but it's very something like that, yeah. Oh, right. The abbreviation is hard drive, hard dis, because the original thing was banned. There's some complicated explanation for why that's insulting for non-Shanghaiis, but that's one example I have heard of in non-English languages. I don't have any empirical information on this, it would be hard to know, but I think it's pretty safe to say the griefing is transnational. And that some version of it is wherever there are youth in internet or probably anyone in internet and that 4chan is also a transnational group of people, but not just Americans. So I would venture yes, but I don't know like I can't, I don't have any evidence about that. I know that among Korean youth there's kind of sort of a reverse griefing going on where they'll play in on American servers for MMOs and then tell people they're Korean children for the lulls, basically. So what are the lulls to be gained out of that? I'm curious about that. This annoying older people by being younger and better. That is annoying. And they think it's annoying. But that's what MMOs are. From my experience, I play World of Warcraft, that's all it is for me is constantly being around people who are younger and better than me. Welcome to World of Warcraft. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder, outside of this environment, I'm thinking about the average YouTube video and the strain of racist comments that I don't know about most, but a lot of videos on YouTube and it doesn't seem to be the same form of enlightened racism that you're talking about. There seems to be a slightly different phenomenon going on there because the kinds of responses they get isn't the same as the kind of griefing responses that you're talking about here. And then I also wonder if that kind of racism, if that's different than what you're talking about, if that kind of racism actually creates a kind of ethical framework for you when they view these YouTube videos, if it's not something that appears as like, oh, I accept that, but it provides a kind of counter narrative to what should be there within those YouTube comments. So it actually does create it. So in that sense, racism actually, racism in the sort of textual form, it actually functions as a nice sort of backboard or counterpoint to what they think is the sort of ethical thinking. That's a very insightful comment and I'm glad you brought in the word ethical framework because that and YouTube never appear in the same sentence. But I think it's just too easy to blow off YouTube comments as you say, it's over-the-top racism that aren't reflective of anyone's actual real thinking but are trolling, right? Partly because people do that on YouTube because they can't talk about race anywhere else, right? It feels too dangerous to do that. I think white people are terrified to talk about race, right? It is in fact one of the most anxiety-producing things in American society to feel like you might get in some kind of argument or conversation with somebody or offend somebody in that way. Which is partly what enlightened racism is about in some way. It's the only way people feel they can do it and they do it in such an over-the-top way that they almost don't even feel comfortable with it probably themselves. I'm not speaking for white people here, right? But I do believe this is part of it. It's the failure of multicultural education to help white people and other people talk about race in any kind of coherent or reasonable way. So I'm Christian Lander who knows more about race than probably anybody in some ways wrote. He said, or he tweeted there's two kinds of people okay let me get to there, sorry about this oh I didn't put up here, but he said there's two kinds of people on the internet. White people and people who find white people annoying right? And that's actually a very insightful thing to say. Because it really frames whiteness as not a desirable position in some respect. That white people are fearful all the time in some ways of being called out. And partly because of the behavior, yet the only place they can even talk about race is here and the convention for doing it sucks. You can't have a serious conversation about it really because somebody's going to troll you or come up with an unreasonable response. So I don't want to talk, this is why I say you don't hate the player, hate the game. I'm not saying these people are evil and bad and they should be banned at all. I'm saying they're a symptom of a situation we're in today where it's just impossible to have even a decent conversation about race with white people involved. So I think the panel that I moderated about race called I Can Has Dream was partly about people who are doing race humor but for people who within their own group. So there are two girls called My Mom Is A Fog which is all the hilarious things your Chinese grandmother says to you when she can't speak English very well, right? And there's a lot of those, we all know what they are. And people often ask her so can non-Chinese understand this and find it funny? Is it just for Asians? People ask Bartunde Thurston who is another panelist can black people, people who aren't black find Jack and Jill politics useful? Do they think it's funny? Bartunde is funny to anyone he's a stand-up comedian for his job so he is very funny and I think that's why the panel was so successful is that he was so funny but that's always the question like what is the place for whiteness in racial humor? Is there a place? What can it be? Can it be on the internet? And looking at these as kind of symptoms it gets folded into the lulls unfortunately and the lulls have this other baggage around being over the top and you know not serious ever. So this is what's so frustrating is you can never really question this stuff to these people they'll just blow you off totally. So you introduced this kind of new maybe even slightly innocent concept of racism but you never really made a qualitative statement about which one, this new one of the ordinary racism is maybe better moving forward to that and I mainly ask this because that's a good question though it really is. When we were working on Ralph O'Conn we were always thinking about the mainstream of the internet culture and I kept this cheeseburger as a really interesting case because it's taking a really sub-cultural media and kind of selling it into the mainstream but what you don't see in the opposition to low-cats for example are things like Pet-O-Bear or nigger stole my bike or these really somewhat racist memes being sold off into mainstream because they're entering out of that new innocent form of racism into the old ordinary sort of racism. Wow that's a good point. So you get both enlightened and regular version 1.0 and version 2.0 racism mingled together and as you say they get pulled apart because you can sell 2.0 racism but you can't sell 1.0 racism because no one wants that it's kind of embarrassing so it's not as if one succeeds the other in fact they kind of coexist at times and it's the disreputable racism that's part of 4chan like patriotic niggers nigger nigger nigger that you can't sell like no one wants to buy that it has another function but I think that question of which is better I don't think either of them are good you know I think that I think enlightened racism is very much a symptom though of a society that feels that racism isn't really a problem anymore which is why we can now talk this way there's really no sense of sympathy or empathy anymore I think for people of color having it bad because everyone's got a boss who's a person of color someone kicked their ass once who's a person of color and they just don't see color as being a big social problem anymore or gender I think that's where this comes from Christine whether you think this would change now it's funny to all fade away because they're all white at what point is it going to also be funny to be like a bunch of people who are blonde with pop colors you know like when is that I think that's already fun as 4chan right now I think you're starting to mean Christina do you think the walls are going to be this tradition that people have to join or is this something that they can find? That's a great question and you could say the lulls have always existed as long as there's been a white male majority right? Frat humor is the lulls any kind of humor that you cannot call out as a non-member of that group is the lulls I would say it's just the internet now has a word for that right so I think that question about can we have an invasion of blonde frat boys with pop colors that was your question right is this a culturally relative thing does it travel can it look different other places but is it still ultimately the same thing right so what do you think I'm really I don't know like could you do that could you start that meme I think definitely other points to the previous question like Locke and I were laughing over here because like we were saying there's not just one term for insulting some of the fashion I mean like probably 20% of online exclusionary terms which is about the same as us like 20% is a good number pretty much like Xbox Live is probably the same 20% is fact well I don't know like in the last panel at Rafflecon one of the most interesting things that came out was Jimmy Wilkinson said something to the effect of you know there's traditional internet culture and you know you no longer need to have the history to be a part of that but the thing is that you can't be part of that history unless you're a white male pretty much like that history did not exist for people of color and women until very very recently and so just say that you need that kind of authenticity to participate in that culture kind of creepy to me but like well that's a great question like can you appropriate for progressive purposes a culture which is basically a white male culture and that's the question of the civil rights movement right I mean there are white people marching with Martin Luther King you know Malcolm X died in the arms of a Japanese woman people kind of forget there are certainly ways for that to happen even if it has its origin in this kind of very exclusionary white male culture it's happened before but who's going to do it that's kind of the question of the internet who's going to do it anonymous is not going to do it I mean it's pretty clear that that's not going to happen so um yeah you haven't asked a question yet yeah yeah okay so I don't know if this is sort of getting away from fortune this kind of internet culture is a different one I don't know if people read news articles about the Arizona immigration laws and then there's all these comments afterwards that people can make and it struck me when you were talking about you know white people having this idea that racism isn't really a problem anymore and that in fact it's not just that um that everyone's equal it's that white people are now the ones who are underprivileged and that that's what we're losing out like men, the men's movement is the same right that women have everything in fact there's a Harper's magazine in Atlanta that says women are going to run the world oh dear lord okay worse than I thought anyway go ahead I'm sorry yeah I mean I kind of have a a dual feeling about um enlightened racism I guess um younger I never really thought about it that much I ended up working at a um in a housing development with primarily minorities and I started to realize that there are jokes you just can't make and they're not and they're jokes that white people make amongst themselves in order to prove that they're not racist right to each other can you say one though well for example if you're going through a neighborhood um where it's uh obviously lower income and there are minorities running oh no there are black people better lock your doors guys right that's enlightened racism um exactly or and often people do this around other white people who they assume are a little bit racist in order to mock them um and kind of form a bond with the other people who they assume are less racist in the car uh huh kind of weird uh huh no but I totally understand what you're talking about right so there's racism gets talked about offline too but in very again kind of lullsy and complicated ways but this is uh preceding the internet I would say sure sure sure yeah I think what's important to know about internet culture is that it's not separate right it's not this other world like we thought of the 90s of cyberspace you know um it's part of the world I mean very much rafflecon was this embodied event where people were looking at the screen and following what was going on there too so yeah yeah the lulls uh and this enlightened racism might eat itself because you can't question it from the outside because then you you don't get it but it seems like someone on the inside could question it like when you were putting up the uh the tweets and like there was the very uncreative kind of uh we're going to hijack this with the inward yeah and I would think that someone else in that community is like well this is just ridiculous this is just giving us a game so they would come up with a creative way to attack really kind of the griefers like reaping the griefers yeah uh and I was wondering if like that maybe if there's been any indication of that happen you had a um oh you had you you both haven't answered it so why don't you both talk about it I know that so with something awful um which is another internet community vaguely somewhat related to 4chan um there's a lot of calling out of members on it not just as in you did something awful but in a general like these are the kind of people we are let's stereotype ourselves and call ourselves out and make fun of ourselves for this thing for you know for who we are as a whole in the same way that some people are making fun of other groups as a whole but because it's of the self it's different or equalizing or something well what I'm wondering is it maybe like the enlightened races of me it's going to become tired and then they're just going to move on something maybe like racism 3.0 like something else entirely ah that's a good question I mean I would kind of trace the beginnings of enlightened racism um to Dave Chappelle who you may have watched and you know when he explained why he stopped doing his show it was because he had created a meme which he saw kind of getting out of control which he thought was really bad which was licensing people to talk in a way that he found actually really offensive given the context they were using it in right so it let people say things that they ought probably never say but that he said is a way to mock them so it's a pretty old formation I think and if you're just trying to see where else it's been I don't think it's brand new so will it will it eat itself and give way to something new probably but I don't know what that is right and you're the researchers who are going to figure that out because I don't have access to those worlds at my age right um but I hope that's research people will want to do I think that's a really important thing to follow up on yeah so I have a couple of comments uh first on Dave Chappelle there was a really interesting comment I read it before I heard somewhere I don't remember where that he didn't like the fact that black people were laughing at his jokes because they knew how ridiculously untrue they were whereas white people were laughing at his jokes because they thought it was true but on Christina what you said about means or about production of white people have you seen tea party I was kind of disappointed when I learned it was a Smirnoff thing maybe in the future more things like that but that is probably produced by white males but at least I think it could be a future and from Zuckerman's keynote address the Muck Monday thing I think it's just a matter of demographics once there are more people across the world on the internet you'll have things like Muck Monday when I bring up things like jerking videos no one knows what I'm talking about and like no one recognizes that as part of this culture that we're supposedly talking about despite the fact that this is also a community that is primarily online in that case it's just a matter of creating an entire other culture that can appreciate it that doesn't even need optimization or absorption into the mainstream white male generated meme culture again I think it's a matter of demographics it'll take a while but once there's enough of an audience that you don't need the participation of the people who currently are the majority of internet users or increasingly are no longer the majority then you'll have people who are not white males producing that culture but this is like a classic debate in science movement which is do we try to assimilate into the majority culture or do we become our own community and we're starting to I think because of the barriers of language there will be created independent communities just because they don't speak each other's languages they'll be isolated but so they already exist right so in China there's already an internet culture right so I mean what's the point if you've been having the conversation if those are going to grow up on their own I mean in a sense there isn't a sign on that or something yes I mean in a sense there's fears that the English internet could become obsolete that's absolutely correct and so all this discourse that we're having in the English language is irrelevant to what the vast majority of the action will be I mean there is a future where that's conceivable so then as Christina's worry that or concern that there's no one setting the agenda who is now setting the agenda not taking these memes into account is that just going to become just like a matter to be a moot point anyway because it'll be drowned out by I think again it's a conceivable future I can't really conceive of another future I think it's just a matter of time unless we have an energy crisis and we stop having power to run all the servers I think what I was trying to get at is that people socialize into this kind of humor into this culture may have a hard time of it in a more transnational world or in the workplace or in other situations where this is not the predominant idiom and so just for that reason it's probably a good idea to help people see that this is not cool with everyone that enlightened racism is actually just racism for somebody for me if you're in my class today and you write a paper that's just full of this you're not going to get a good grade from me it's just an instrumental thing to know you're not going to get hired by me to be my RA if you talk this way that's just a practical thing but there's also a moral ethical thing going on here which is that the internet was viewed as a way to reset society it was a reboot button for all the shitty things that were wrong with our culture we could kind of reboot it and do something new and Ralph O'Connor is a great thing because it calls out how that kind of isn't happening but it kind of is and that's where we stand now so how can we shape it a little right that's the question to that last point this type of humor seems to be particularly vulcanizing and isolating because a huge part of it is about shutting down surrounding dialogue not only is can you not confront it from the outside because you will just simply be viewed as out of the conversation but griefing itself is about shutting down conversation spaces you destroy locality or you kill the gold farmer and he gets sent back to a spawn point it's however long before he gets back to where you are and you're probably not there anymore so while I agree with the yes we probably should do something about that this type of activity specifically denies doing something about it except from within or at the point in which the practitioner has essentially aged out of the activity itself so yeah it's like a lot of things like spray painting stuff you know like you age out of that too but it doesn't stay around forever and that's what I'm concerned about is that kids who do this it literally is part of an archive that's going to be around forever and that's not really fair to kids in some ways that they're now kind of going to be known for the time they did this you know and they could grow up and learn that that's not cool to do how else are you going to learn in some ways so I take your point that's a very good point so yeah I'll just I'll ruminate on that this is a persistence of adolescent problem it's not the it's not the actor but it's the persistence of the actor's actions I don't know if I would put adolescents in there some of these people are pretty old you know but it's a mindset right it's true yeah actually following onto that sort of ambiguity the group is called anonymous from fortune and writ large those pursuers are anonymous there's been a lot of language that suggests male gender and white being key aspects of the demographics of this group of anonymous and I'm curious how accurate that is taken from the viewpoint of whom has access to the internet who are the likely participants I can see that being the construction but I guess just raising the larger question of what are the demographics of a group that embraces radical anonymity and how do you know who they even are at any given time and how does this even shape their interaction in some ways be a deconstruction of racism rather than the enlightened racism that you present I wish if I could find some way to read it that way I totally would right but I just don't see it I don't see this as a deconstruction of race particularly does anybody have a reading of it that could possibly kind of try and recuperate it that way I know the word deconstruction of race well when you were queer pride shirt in the 90s and you're gay right queer is the n word for gay people it was and it got recouped and now it's cool so maybe that's what you're implying that this could be that in some ways if the constituents the people were worried about this polluting in some ways and making them more racist instead of imprint on this as being the real deal on how human beings are see this as a sort of cannibalistic horrific anonymous creation of what society isn't and shouldn't be and instead on this as being wrong and this is what you don't write when you want to become an array this becomes a deconstruction of sorts of how seriously some people take this I think that's a very good point and part of what the issue is that young people can't do that I think that you and I can do that right because we went to college but I think that like 15 year old kids can't do that they can't figure that out like it's too subtle a distinction to make and so it's kind of unfair to ask people who don't have those critical tools to enter into a situation like this and navigate it very successfully right so yeah you're in that very back yet I was curious in terms of like what this enlightened racism how it impacts structural racism I mean racism on a larger scale young people talking about school down comments and the fact is that these young adolescents don't have the faculties to differentiate what is enlightened racism and what isn't enlightened racism and so they regardless they may internalize these ideas and what does that mean for us on a larger scale that's a really big question I think that irony has become a mode of that people retreat into when they don't want to have accountability for a lot of things right and it's very hard to have accountability for something like race which is so heavy like it's just a really heavy heavy thing so asking for a return to a culture of sincerity somewhat right taking things more seriously in a way flies in the face of what people already tend to want to do so I think that this is racism enlightened racism is still racism it's racism under a different guise but it's still racism there's no doubt I think the difference is that what Susan Douglas would say is it's a response to perception of black power or women power it's a response to that in an attempt to kind of tamp it down so women are a fair game because they make in some cases more money than men so let's beat them down a little bit because we can now whereas before it was just sexism that was just wrong so her argument is probably more complicated than I'm putting it out here she has an argument kind of based on television programming of the 90s and how it evidences this response to the rising power of women the rising economic power of women and so on I don't know if I can say that about African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians right now I don't think it's that but it's some kind of movement which is related right which is now licensed to do these things and say these things online as well as offline so yeah I wasn't at RaffleCon so I don't know the context specifically of these tweets is it possible that you are conflating several different phenomenon that end up having the same effect and taking a similar form like is this potentially just a particularly unfortunate choice of static that someone is throwing into the feed or and should be kept separate from something like griefing in an MMO where it takes a much more graphical and confrontational form so you're asking is it possible to read this with not racism more not honestly not racism but more as not intended to be racist but intended to be static intended to be disruptive but not racist it was just a particularly unfortunate form that it's taking yeah David please the games that I when I play tag and gay are the choices I don't want to figure all that often and you know I'm 59 years old I'm a white guy I'll say something I almost always do and responses are often but there's sometimes it seems like the kids and I'm guessing older than the next oldest person there will say that they'll be shocked that I'm taking the word seriously they don't care about homosexuals I'm talking about homosexuals the term has been removed in their mind from their gay friends I mean you know which to me is I can't make sense of but I believe so they're using it for something other than the term has terrible effects etc but it's not quite a simple case of homophobia just as it may be that you know 140 characters it's really hard to figure out whether it's static there seems to be a definite difference which means specifically going out to disenfranchise you know Chinese and I'm all players whatever their purpose in the game is and this the motivations seem different right I think you're right that's totally right I think that's what makes this online racism and not normal racism is that because you're not homophobic you can say to yourself and to others I'm not meaning this in a homophobic way fag fag fag fag fag right that's how you why and how you can say it it's because you know and you assume others know that you are not in fact homophobic right you have gay friends I don't know why that's the index of non homophobia now but it kind of is it's like I'm black friends it's like I'm not a racist right it's always been that it's like the evolution of the word right it's completely disconnected from the gypsy reference we just use it every day and that's the one we see everybody else use and most people don't realize even the connection when they're saying it right that's true I mean I mean sure that may be taking the evolution to the next step even but it's still in the same progress it's in the same evolutionary yeah yeah you I just wanted to maybe follow up on that and talk about this in terms of play and you know we can say that there is a that if we understand this in terms of play just like playing violent video games it's about it's about expressing something that's been that you're unable to express and so back to the idea of you know society has sort of created an anxiety around racial discourse in any form and then so we see it online a lot and so it becomes it has its power because it's been kind of tamped out in other situations so it's taboo but playing taboo is very fun you know so when we shoot people online doesn't mean that we actually want to kill people so maybe there's something like that going on here where this is a form of play where there's an established set of rules that the players know but the non-players don't know that's part of the rules and so you know they're playing it but I tend to agree that it may be separate from the content it may be a sort of procedural rhetoric taking place here very good I agree that Ian Boto is saying I agree on the other hand who gets to the side you know that's why I talked about Chief Alinawek right I don't think my students actually think they're racist at all they just really love the chief they've have them on their sweatshirt what not their mother went to you know University of Illinois they really aren't they really don't see themselves as racist but it's not their decision whether they get to have the chief it's the people who are the Indians who get to decide that right so even if you say faggot faggot faggot I'm not homophobic that's not really your choice to say now the word means this it's the people who are gay who get to decide that it seems to me and this is part of the problem with reappropriating languages that you can't do it by yourself you have to have the consent of the people to whom it refers so the queer movement could be queer because they decided if they wanted to be queer they were going to use that term I don't see people appropriating some of these words that way and I especially don't see this word appropriated that way I mean there's a huge controversy in the black community over whether this word can even be used I mean there are a lot of prominent black intellectuals who have said no you know I won't use it I won't let anyone else use it there's some famous comedian who went this route do you remember who it was pardon Paul Mooney but Richard Pryor too it's a kind of right of passage for a black community I mean for a black comedian to use the word use the word use the word and then be like holy shit you know I've been doing it and I'm not going to do it anymore and then back up from that right so it's not like this is new to the internet at all this struggle to reappropriate languages has been around for a long time but again I don't think you can do it just because you want to do it it has to be a kind of group activity so you know where is it we can talk about race that's not here that's an interesting question maybe now in the context of school which this kind of is or work but is it possible to do it other places I think that's the problem is that it's not really easy or possible to do other places you know could you do it in the hallway after this talk or on the bus talking to someone else it's difficult to do it yeah specifically with this instance seems like a word that has been appropriated by the black community completely walled off use especially by white males and then that way once it's incorporated it becomes radicalized sorry radicalized it becomes even more effective as you know a distraction right so what is your take on whether you know there's any role for it past I mean it seems to be completely outside being let in racism so why is it outside of this well in the way that once you know in the example of comedians it gets moved from you know incorporated within the community because it's accepted because it's been taken over to move past it is entirely not constructive so so what is the role between the community and it's relationship with the other right wow that's a deep question and probably a way bigger question than can probably answer using these examples I mean that's several books and a really good problematic to think through and I'm not really sure what to say about it all this to say though I think that all social movements have probably had to struggle with this right what is their stance going to be but it's the right way I don't know what is the right way but I am suspicious of claims that well I don't mean it that way but you can't stop saying it I'm suspicious of that I don't think that that's a good route to go and that's what anonymous often is about that you know you can't stop us you don't know who we are we're gonna say it and say it there's nothing you can do about it so yeah oh yeah okay well one thing that kind of occurred to me perhaps it's because the people that are in this room are predominantly white I don't know there hasn't been I feel a lot of talk about I mean people are kind of trying to discuss it from the perspective of the people who who say these things and you know it is a form of play it is something that people enjoy it's a lot of fun there's a pleasure in it there's a pleasure in saying the word fact like I get that but at the same time I feel like and this is something I find on the internet a lot like people don't care at all if what they say hurts someone else to the point that like they probably wouldn't care if the person killed themselves from bullying online like they really just do not care how another person is affected by what they say and do online and the it's the internet and it's not serious that's it's a form of communication between people how can it not be real right we're in this building which is called the berkman center for internet whatever right so obviously it's serious it's really serious I mean there's a whole building for it I don't know I need to just make him stop if someone's going to call you out it's because you're going to hurt someone I don't feel like I don't care at all okay well kind of a downer note but I know we have to leave the room so thanks for coming to this talk and uh