Erasing @ race

In Erasing race, by Beth E. Kolko, the correlation between race and technology is made. Kolko claims that technology allows people to decide explicitly who you are. This means that a person can say that he or she is white, black, or anything. This is because there is not face to face interaction between people when communicating with a computer. Kolko wonders if gender is constructed everytime someone looks at someone else, and mood is seen when everyone enters a room, should race be? When a person communicates online, she says, the racial identity could be displayed. She describes a program that has a person define the online character’s gender race and other things. Some cultures do not know the term race and can not work with that. The program uses the gender to give pronouns that are gender specific and inserts when race is not defined.

A question I would ask myself about this is what does this all mean? When reading through this article, it was difficult to understand the program Kolko was describing because of my unfamiliarity with technology. I am frequently confused with technology and I am not familiar with the racism that occurs through it. In a purely technological world, one can think that race will disappear through the internet because there will be no need to have race.