Thoughts on Race and the Internet

I've discovered a new thing I never thought of before... Growing up, I of course lived in a bubble, never thinking about myself as any less of a person than anyone else. It wasn't until high school that I began to see some people's hatred for others surfacing, at a religious high school in fact. (I suffered more harassment there than at any supposedly lesser public school amazingly... just shows you that not everything's what it seems I guess...) Anyway as i grew up, started puberty, all that stuff, I began developing my identity as an individual. Who was I? I knew I wasn't a reguar ol' white kid, so who was I? Black isn't really very cool to people... It's even more complicated now in a world based on stereotypes that I combat everyday. It's like that line in black hawk down, "when that first bullet flies past your head, politics and all that shit goes right out the window." I understand that in the quick immediacy of life, people make blanket judgments just to avoid any potential problems, a better safe than sorry kind of thing. Hell, I know I've avoided a group of black gangster looking guys plenty of times myself... tis understandable. Though I know who those guys are more than most whites probably do. There's a lot of those guys who are genuinely good people, but when I'm just not in a good enough mindset to decide whether to find out or not, I just don't. That's life...

Out here, I'm a goofy nobody.
Online I was anything I wanted to be and that's the danger of it I guess. It's hard for people to create a mental image of who a person online actually is unless they have some kind of reference in the real world. So when for example someone who's intelligent posts, they're automatically assumed to be white which is what happened to me many times in the past. This brought on some problems of its own when I guess someone who's kind of an elitist or whatever decided to treat me as they would another white person which I'm just guessing would involve a battle of wits to prove who's the better brain, the loser being shamed and therefore having to work harder and then prove himself. It's what I witnessed working at Target, listening to teachers and reading about white suicide rates. There's I believe an expectation to be the best or gtfo. So I don't know how then most whites view intelligent blacks online. I'm discovering more and more that blacks are voicing their own distaste for having to go undercover to post on forums and such because the immediate image everyone has of a black guy posting is of that street thug who somehow learned to type.

Then there's just your typical immature kids who express the world's true feelings on blacks through online games and websites. I never took it seriously when I heard tons of kids talking about killing niggers while playing my ps2 games, but as I get older, it's becoming clear to me that those kids mean it. Those kids will be there as cops, teachers, lawyers, men of power in some places...

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