The information architect Peter Morville discusses the importance of keywords in finding what can be known in technology platforms:
The humble keyword has become surprisingly important in recent years. As a vital ingredient in the online search process, keywords have become part of our everyday experience. We feed keywords into Google, Yahoo!, MSN, eBay, and Amazon. We search for news, products, people, used furniture, and music. And words are the key to our success.23
Morville also draws attention to what cannot be found, by stressing the long tail phenomenon on the web. This is the place where all forms of content that do not surface to the top of a web search are located. Many sites languish, undiscovered, in the long tail because they lack the proper website architecture, or they do not have proper metadata for web-indexing algorithms to find them—for search engines and thus for searchers, they do not exist.
Such search results are deeply problematic and are often presented without any alternatives to change them except through search refinement or changes to Google’s default filtering settings, which currently are “moderate” for users who do not specifically put more filters on their results. These search engine results for women whose identities are already maligned in the media, such as Black women and girls,24 only further debase and erode efforts for social, political, and economic recognition and justice.25 These practices instantiate limited, negative portrayals of people of color in the media26—a defining and normative feature of American racism.27 Media scholars have studied ways in which the public is directly impacted by these negative portrayals.28 In the case of television, research shows that negative images of Blacks can adversely alter the perception of them in society.29 Narissra M. Punyanunt-Carter, a communications scholar at Texas Tech University, has specifically researched media portrayals of African Americans’ societal roles, which confirms previous studies about the effects of negative media images of Blacks on college students.30 Thomas E. Ford found that both Blacks and Whites who view Blacks negatively on television are more likely to hold negative perceptions of them(selves).31 Yuki Fujioka notes that in the absence of positive firsthand experience, stereotypical media portrayals of Blacks on television are highly likely to affect perceptions of the group.32
As we have seen, search engine design is not only a technical matter but also a political one. Search engines provide essential access to the web both to those who have something to say and offer and to those who wish to hear and find. Search is political, and at the same time, search engines can be quite helpful when one is looking for specific types of information, because the more specific and banal a search is, the more likely it is to yield the kind of information sought. For example, when one is searching for information such as phone numbers and local eateries, search engines help people easily find the nearest services, restaurants, and customer reviews (although there is more than meets the eye in these practices, which I discuss in the conclusion). Relevance is another significant factor in the development of information classification systems, from the card catalog to the modern search system or database, as systems seek to aid searchers in locating items of interest. However, the web reflects a set of commercial and advertising practices that bias particular ideas. Those industries and interests that are powerful, influential, or highly capitalized are often prioritized to the detriment of others and are able to control the bias on their terms.
Inquiries into racism and sexism on the web are not new. In many discourses of technology, the machine is turned to and positioned as a mere tool, rather than being reflective of human values.33 Design is purposeful in that it forges both pathways and boundaries in its instrumental and cultural use.34 Langdon Winner, Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, analyzes the forms of technology, from the design of nuclear power plants, which reflect centralized, authoritarian state controls over energy, to solar power designs that facilitate independent, democratic participation by citizens. He shows that design impacts social relations at economic and political levels.35 The more we can make transparent the political dimensions of technology, the more we might be able to intervene in the spaces where algorithms are becoming a substitute for public policy debates over resource distribution—from mortgages to insurance to educational opportunities.
Blackness in the Neoliberal Marketplace
Many people say to me, “But tech companies don’t mean to be racist; that’s not their intent.” Intent is not particularly important. Outcomes and results are important. In my research, I do not look deeply at what advertisers or Google are “intending” to do. I focus on the social conditions that surround the lives of Black women living in the United States and where public information platforms contribute to the myriad conditions that make Black women’s lives harder. Barney Warf and John Grimes explore the discourses of the Internet by naming the stable ideological notions of the web, which have persisted and are part of the external logic that buttresses and obscures some of the resistance to regulating the web:
Much of the Internet’s use, for commercialism, academic, and military purposes, reinforces entrenched ideologies of individualism and a definition of the self through consumption. Many uses revolve around simple entertainment, personal communication, and other ostensibly apolitical purposes . . . particularly advertising and shopping but also purchasing and marketing, in addition to uses by public agencies that legitimate and sustain existing ideologies and politics as “normal,” “necessary,” or “natural.” Because most users view themselves, and their uses of the Net, as apolitical, hegemonic discourses tend to be reproduced unintentionally. . . . Whatever blatant perspectives mired in racism, sexism, or other equally unpalatable ideologies pervade society at large, they are carried into, and reproduced within, cyberspace.36
André Brock, a communications professor at the University of Michigan, adds that “the rhetorical narrative of ‘Whiteness as normality’ configures information technologies and software designs” and is reproduced through digital technologies. Brock characterizes these transgressive practices that couple technology design and practice with racial ideologies this way:
I contend that the Western internet, as a social structure, represents and maintains White, masculine, bourgeois, heterosexual and Christian culture through its content. These ideologies are translucently mediated by the browser’s design and concomitant information practices. English-speaking internet users, content providers, policy makers, and designers bring their racial frames to their internet experiences, interpreting racial dynamics through this electronic medium while simultaneously redistributing cultural resources along racial lines. These practices neatly recreate social dynamics online that mirror offline patterns of racial interaction by marginalizing women and people of color.37
What Brock points to is the way in which discourses about technology are explicitly linked to racial and gender identity—normalizing Whiteness and maleness in the domain of digital technology and as a presupposition for the prioritization of resources, content, and even design of information and communications technologies (ICTs).
Search engine optimization strategies and budgets are rapidly increasing to sustain the momentum and status of websites in Google Search. David Harvey, a professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Norman Fairclough, an emeritus professor of linguistics at Lancaster University, point to the ways that the political project of neoliberalism has created new conditions and demands on social relations in order to open new markets.38 I assert that this has negative consequences for maintaining and expanding social, political, and economic organization around common identity-based interests—interests not solely based on race and gender, although these are stable categories through which we can understand disparity and inequality. These trends in the unequal distribution of wealth and resources have contributed to a closure of public debate and a weakening of demo
cracy. Both Harvey and Fairclough separately note the importance of the impact of what they call “new capitalism,” a concept closely linked to the “informationalized capitalism” of Dan Schiller, retired professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, when viewed in the context of new media and the information age. What is important about new capitalism in the context of the web is that it is radically transforming previously public territories and spaces.39 This expansion of capitalism into the web has been a significant part of the neoliberal justification for the commodification of information and identity. Identity markers are for sale in the commodified web to the highest bidder, as this research about keyword markers shows. It is critical that we engage with the ways that social relations are being transformed by new distributions of resources and responsibilities away from the public toward the private. For example, the hyperreliance on digital technologies has radically impacted the environment and global labor flows. Control over community identities are shifting as private companies on the web are able to manage and control definitions, and the very concept of community control on the web is increasingly becoming negligible as infusions of private capital into the infrastructure of the Internet has moved the U.S.-based web from a state-funded project to an increasingly privately controlled, neoliberal communication sphere.
Black Girls as Commodity Object
Part of the socialization of Black women as sexual object is derived from historical constructions of African women living under systems of enslavement and economic dependency and exploitation—systems that included the normalization of rape and conquest of Black bodies and the invention of fictions about Black women.40 The constitution of rape culture, formed during the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, is at the intersection of patriarchy, slavery, and violence.41 bell hooks’s canonical essay “Selling Hot Pussy” in Black Looks: Race and Representation turned a Black feminist theoretical tradition toward the marketplace of culture, ideas, and representations of Black women. Her work details the ways in which Black women’s bodies have been commodified and how these practices are normalized in everyday experiences in the cultural marketplace of our society.42 Women’s bodies serve as the site of sexual exploitation and representation under patriarchy, but Black women serve as the deviant of sexuality when mapped in opposition to White women’s bodies.43 It is in this tradition, then, coupled with an understanding of how racial and gender identities are brokered by Google, that we can help make sense of the trends that make women’s and girls’ sexualized bodies a lucrative marketplace on the web.
For Black women, rape has flourished under models of colonization or enslavement and what Joseph C. Dorsey, a professor of African American studies at Purdue University, calls “radically segmented social structures.”44 Rape culture is formed by key elements that include asserting male violence as natural, not making sexual violence illegal or criminally punishable, and differential legal consideration for victims and perpetrators of sexual violence on the basis of their race, gender, or class. Rape culture also fosters the notion that straight/heterosexual sex acts are commonly linked to violence.45 I argue that these segmented social structures persist at a historical moment when Black women and children are part of the permanent underclass and represent the greatest proportion of citizens living in poverty.46 The relative poverty rate in the United States—the distance between those who live in poverty and those at the highest income levels—is greatest between Black women and children and White men. Among either single or married households, the poverty rate of Blacks is nearly twice that of Whites.47 Black people are three times more likely to live in poverty than Whites are, with 27.4% of Black people living below the poverty line, compared to 9.9% of Whites.48 The status of women remains precarious across all social segments: 47.1% of all families headed by women, without the income, status, and resources of men, are living in poverty. In fact, Black and White income gaps have increased since 1974, after the gains of the civil rights movement. In 2004, Black families earned 58% of what White families earned, a significant decrease from 1974, when Black families earned 63% of what Whites earned.49
The feminist scholar Gilda Lerner has written the canonical documentary work on Black and White women in the United States. Her legacy is a significant contribution to understanding the racialized and gendered dynamics of patriarchy and how it serves to keep women subordinate. One of many conditions of a racialized and gendered social structure in the United States, among other aspects of social oppression, is the way in which Black women and girls are systemically disenfranchised. Patriarchy, racism, and rape culture are part of the confluence of social practices that normalize Black women and girls as a sexual commodity, an alienated and angry/pathetic other, or a subservient caretaker and helpmate to White psychosocial desires. Lerner points to the consequences of adopting the hegemonic narratives of women, particularly those made normative by the “symbol systems” of a society:
Where there is no precedent, one cannot imagine alternatives to existing conditions. It is this feature of male hegemony which has been most damaging to women and has ensured their subordinate status for millennia. . . . The picture is false . . . as we now know, but women’s progress through history has been marked by their struggle against this disabling distortion.50
Making sense of alternative identity constructions can be a tenuous process for women due to the erasures of other views of the past, according to Lerner. Meanwhile, the potency of commercial search using Google is that it functions as the dominant “symbol system” of society due to its prominence as the most popular search engine to date.51
Historical Categorizations of Racial Identity: Old Traditions Never Die
European fascination with African sexuality is well researched and heavily contested—most famously noted in the public displays of Sara Baartman, otherwise mocked as “The Venus Hottentot,” a woman from South Africa who was often placed on display for entertainment and biological evidence of racial difference and subordination of African people.52 Of course, this is a troubling aspect of museum practice that often participated in the curation and display of non-White bodies for European and White public consumption. The spectacles of zoos, circuses, and world’s fairs and expositions are important sites that predate the Internet by more than a century, but it can be argued and is in fact argued here that these traditions of displaying native bodies extend to the information age and are replicated in a host of problematic ways in the indexing, organization, and classification of information about Black and Brown bodies—especially on the commercial web.
Western scientific and anthropological quests for new discoveries have played a pivotal role in the development of racialization schemes, and scientific progress has often been the basis of justifying the mistreatment of Black women—including displays of Baartman during her life (and after). From these practices, stereotypes can be derived that focus on biological, genetic, and medical homogeneity.53 Scientific classifications have played an important role in the development of racialization that persists into contemporary times:
Historically created racial categories often carry hidden meanings. Until 2003 medical reports were cataloged in PubMed/MEDLINE and in the old Surgeon General’s Index Catalogue using 19th century racial categories such as Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid and Australoid. Originally suggesting a scale of inferiority and superiority, today such groupings continue to connote notions of human hierarchy. More importantly, PubMed’s newer categories, such as continental population group and ancestry group, merely overlay the older ones.54
Inventions of racial categories are mutable and historically specific, such as the term “mulattoes” as a scientific categorization against which information could be collected to prove that “hybrid” people were biologically predisposed to “die out,” and of course these categories are not stable across national boundaries; classifications such as “Colored,” “Black,” and “White” have been part of racial purification processes in countries
such as South Africa.55 Gender categorizations are no less problematic and paradoxical. Feminist scholars point to the ways that, at the same time that women reject biological classifications as essentializing features of sex discrimination, they are simultaneously forced to organize for political and economic resources and progress on the basis of gender.56
These conceptions and stereotypes do not live in the past; they are part of our present, and they are global in scope. In April 2012, Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, the culture minister of Sweden, was part of a grotesque event to celebrate Sweden’s World Art Day. The event included an art installation to bring global attention to the issue of female genital mutilation. However, to make the point, the artist Makode Aj Linde made a cake ripped straight from the headlines of White-supremacist debasement of Black women. Dressed in blackface, he adorned the top of a cake he made that was a provocative art experiment gone wrong, at the expense of Black women. These images are just one of many that make up the landscape of racist misogyny. After an outpouring of international disgust, Liljeroth denied any possibility that the project, and her participation, could be racist in tone or presentation.57
Figure 2.17. Google search for Sara Baartman, in preparation for a lecture on Black women in film, January 22, 2013.
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