Figure 2.18. Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, Swedish minister of culture, feeds cake to the artist Makode Aj Linde in blackface, at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, 2012.
Figure 2.19. Makode Aj Linde’s performance art piece at Moderna Museet. Source: www.forharriet.com, 2012.
During slavery, stereotypes were used to justify the sexual victimization of Black women by their property owners, given that under the law, Black women were property and therefore could not be considered victims of rape. Manufacture of the Jezebel stereotype served an important role in portraying Black women as sexually insatiable and gratuitous. A valuable resource for understanding the complexity and problematic of racist and sexist narratives is the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University. The museum’s work documents all of the informative and canonical writings about the ways that Black people have been misrepresented in the media and in popular culture as a means of subjugation, predating slavery in North America in the eighteenth century. It highlights the two main narratives that have continued to besiege Black women: the exotic other, the Jezebel whore; and the pathetic other, the Mammy.58 Notably, the pathetic other is too ugly, too stupid, and too different to elicit sexual attraction from reasonable men; instead, she is a source of pity, laughter, and derision. For example, the museum notes how seventeenth-century White European travelers to Africa found seminude people and indigenous practices and customs and misinterpreted various cultures as lewd, barbaric, and less than human, certainly a general sign of their own xenophobia.59
Researchers at the Jim Crow Museum have conducted an analysis of Jezebel images and found that Black female children are often sexually objectified as well, a fact that validates this deeper look at representations of Black girls on the web. During the Jim Crow era, for example, Black girls were caricatured with the faces of preteenagers and were depicted with adult-sized, exposed buttocks and framed with sexual innuendos. This stereotype evolved, and by the 1970s, portrayals of Black people as mammies, toms, tragic mulattoes, and picaninnies in traditional media began to wane as new notions of Black people as Brutes and Bucks emerged; meanwhile, the beloved creation of the White imagination, the Jezebel, persists. The Jezebel has become a mainstay and an enduring image in U.S. media. In 2017, these depictions are a staple of the 24/7 media cycles of Black Entertainment Television (BET), VH1, MTV, and across the spectrum of cable television. Jezebel is now known as the video vixen, the “ho,” the “around the way girl,” the porn star—and she remains an important part of the spectacle that justifies the second-class citizenship of Black women.60 “Black women” searches offer sites on “angry Black women” and articles on “why Black women are less attractive.” These narratives of the exotic or pathetic Black woman, rooted in psychologically damaging stereotypes of the Jezebel,61 Sapphire, and Mammy,62 only exacerbate the pornographic imagery that represents Black girls, who are largely presented in one of these ways. The largest commercial search engine fails to provide culturally situated knowledge on how Black women and girls have traditionally been discriminated against, denied rights, or violated in society and the media even though they have organized and resisted on many levels.
Figure 2.20. One dominant narrative stereotype of Black women, the Jezebel Whore, depicted here over more than one hundred years of cultural artifacts. Source: Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, www.ferris.edu.
Reading the Pornographic Representation
This study highlights misrepresentation in Google Search as a detailed example of the power of algorithms in controlling the image, concepts, and values assigned to people, by featuring a detailed look at Black girls. I do not intend to comprehensively evaluate the vast range of representations and cultural production that exists on the Internet for Black women and girls, some portion of which indeed reflects individual agency in self-representation (e.g., selfie culture). However, the nature of representation in commercial search as primarily pornographic for Black women is a distinct form of sexual representation that is commercialized by Google. Pornography is a specific type of representation that denotes male power, female powerlessness, and sexual violence. These pornographic representations of women and people of color have been problematized by many scholars in the context of mass media.63 Rather than offer relief, the rise of the Internet has brought with it ever more commodified, fragmented, and easily accessed pornographic depictions that are racialized.64 In short, biased traditional media processes are being replicated, if not more aggressively, around problematic representations in search engines. Here, I am equally focused on “the pornography of representation,”65 which is less about moral obscenity arguments about women’s sexuality and more about a feminist critique of how women are represented as pornographic objects:
Representations are not just a matter of mirrors, reflections, key-holes. Somebody is making them, and somebody is looking at them, through a complex array of means and conventions. Nor do representations simply exist on canvas, in books, on photographic paper or on screens: they have a continued existence in reality as objects of exchange; they have a genesis in material production.66
Some people argue that pornography has been understudied given its commercial viability and persistence.67 Certainly, the technical needs of the pornography industry have contributed to many developments on the web, including the credit card payment protocol; advertising and promotion; video, audio, and streaming technologies.68
In library studies, discussions of the filtering of pornographic content out of public libraries and schools are mainstream professional discourse.69 Tremendous focus on pornography as a legitimate information resource (or not) to be filtered out of schools, public libraries, and the reach of children has been a driving element of the discussions about the role of regulation of the Internet.
Black feminist scholars are also increasingly looking at how Black women are portrayed in the media across a host of stereotypes, including pornography. Jennifer C. Nash, an associate professor of African American studies and gender and sexuality studies at Northwestern University, foregrounds the complexities of theorizing Black women and pornography in ways that are helpful to this research:
Both scholarly traditions pose the perennial question “is pornography racist,” and answer that question in the affirmative by drawing connections between Baartman’s exhibition and the contemporary display of black women in pornography. However, merely affirming pornography’s alleged racism neglects an examination of the ways that pornography mobilizes race in particular social moments, under particular technological conditions, to produce a historically contingent set of racialized meanings and profits.70
Nash focuses on the ways in which Black feminists have aligned with antipornography rhetoric and scholarship. While my own project is not a specific study of the nuances of Black women’s agency in net porn, the Black feminist media scholar Mireille Miller-Young has covered in detail the virtues and problematics of pornography.71 This research is helpful in explaining how women are displayed as pornographic search results. I therefore integrate Nash’s expanded views about racial iconography into a Black feminist framework to help interpret and evaluate the results.
In the field of Internet and media studies, the research interest and concern of scholars about harm in imagery and content online has been framed mostly around the social and technical aspects of addressing Internet pornography but less so around the existence of commercial porn:
The relative invisibility of commercial pornography in the field has more to do with cultural hierarchies and questions of taste: as a popular genre, pornography has considerably low cultural status as that which, according to various US court decisions, lacks in social, cultural, or artistic value. Furthermore, the relatively sparse attention to porn is telling of an attachment to representations and exchanges considered novel over more familiar and predictable ones.72
As such, Black women and girls are both understudied by scholars and also associated with
“low culture” forms of representation.73 There is a robust political economy of pornography, which is an important site of commerce and technological innovation that includes file-sharing networks, video streaming, e-commerce and payment processing, data compression, search, and transmission.74 The antipornography activist and scholar Gail Dines discusses this web of relations that she characterizes as stretching “from the backstreet to Wall Street”:
Porn is embedded in an increasingly complex and extensive value chain, linking not just producers and distributors but also bankers, software, hotel chains, cell phone and Internet companies. Like other businesses, porn is subject to the discipline of capital markets and competition, with trends toward market segmentation and industry concentration.75
Dines’s research particularly underscores the ways in which Black women are more racialized and stereotyped in pornography—explicitly playing off the media misrepresentations of the past and leveraging the notion of the Black woman as “ho” through the most graphic types of porn in the genre.
Miller-Young underscores the fetishization of Black women that has created new markets for porn, explicitly linking the racialization of Black women in the genre:
Within this context of the creation and management of racialized desire as both transgressive and policed, pornography has excelled at the production, marketing, and dissemination of categories of difference as special subgenres and fetishes in a form of “racialized political theater.” Empowered by technological innovations such as video, camcorders, cable, satellite, digital broadband, CD-ROMs, DVDs, and the internet, the pornography business has exploited new media technology in the creation of a range of specialized sexual commodities that are consumed in the privacy of the home.76
hooks details the ways that Black women’s representations are often pornified by White, patriarchally controlled media and that, while some women are able to resist and struggle against these violent depictions of Black women, others co-opt these exploitative vehicles and expand upon them as a site of personal profit: “Facing herself, the black female realizes all that she must struggle against to achieve self-actualization. She must counter the representation of herself, her body, her being as expendable.”77 Miller’s research on the political economy of pornography, bolstered by the hip-hop music industry, is important to understanding how Black women are commodified through the “‘pornification’ of hip-hop and the mainstreaming and ‘diversification’ of pornography.”78
Figure 2.21. Google video search results on “black girls,” June 22, 2016.
Although Google changed its algorithm in late summer 2012 and suppressed pornography as the primary representation of Black girls in its search results, by 2016, it had also modified the algorithm to include more diverse and less sexualized images of Black girls in its image search results, although most of the images are of women and not of children or teenagers (girls). However, the images of Black girls remain troubling in Google’s video search results, with narratives that mostly reflect user-generated content (UGC) that engages in comedic portrayals of a range stereotypes about Black / African American girls. Notably, the White nationalist Colin Flaherty’s work, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as propaganda to incite racial violence and White anxiety, is the producer of the third-ranked video to represent Black girls.
Porn on the Internet is an expansion of neoliberal capitalist interests. The web itself has opened up new centers of profit and pushed the boundaries of consumption. Never before have there been so many points for the transmission and consumption of these representations of Black women’s bodies, largely trafficked outside the control and benefit of Black women and girls themselves.
Providing Legitimate Information about Black Women and Girls
Seeing the Internet as a common medium implies that there may be an expectation of increased legitimacy of information to be found there.79 Recognizing the credibility of online information is no small task because commercial interests are not always apparent,80 and typical measures of credibility are seldom feasible due to the complexity of the web.81 If the government, industry, schools, hospitals, and public agencies are driving users to the Internet as a means of providing services, then this confers a level of authority and trust in the medium itself. This raises questions about who owns identity and identity markers in cyberspace and whether racialized and gendered identities are ownable property rights that can be contested. One can argue, as I do, that social identity is both a process of individual actors participating in the creation of identity and also a matter of social categorization that happens at a socio-structural level and as a matter of personal definition and external definition.82
According to Mary Herring, Thomas Jankowski, and Ronald Brown, Black identity is defined by an individual’s experience of common fate with others in the same group.83 The question of specific property rights to naming and owning content in cyberspace is an important topic.84 Racial markers are a social categorization that is both imposed and adopted by groups,85 and thus racial identity terms could be claimed as the property of such groups, much the way Whiteness has been constituted as a property right for those who possess it.86 This is a way of thinking about how mass media have co-opted the external definitions of identity87—racialization—which also applies to the Internet and its provision of information to the public: “Our relationships with the mass media are at least partly determined by the perceived utility of the information we gather from them. . . . Media representations play an important role in informing the ways in which we understand social, cultural, ethnic, and racial difference.”88 Media have a tremendous impact on informing our understandings of race and racialized others as an externality, but this is a symbiotic process that includes internal definitions that allow people to lay claim to racial identity.89 In addition, the Internet and its landscape offer up and eclipse traditional media distribution channels and serve as a new infrastructure for delivering all forms of prior media: television, film, and radio, as well as new media that are more social and interactive. Taking these old and new media together, it can be argued that the Internet has significant influence on forming opinions on race and gender.
What We Find Is Meaningful
Because most of Google’s revenue is derived from advertising, it is important to consider advertising as a media practice with tremendous power in shaping culture and society.90 The transmission of stereotypes about women in advertising creates a “limited ‘vocabulary of intention,’” encouraging people to think and speak of women primarily in terms of their relationship to men, family, or their sexuality.91 Research shows how stereotypical depictions of women and minorities in advertising impact the behavior of those who consume it.92 Therefore, it is necessary to cast a deeper look into the effects of the content and trace the kinds of hegemonic narratives that situate these results.
The feminist media scholar Jean Kilbourne has carefully traced the impact of advertising on society from a feminist perspective. She researches the addictive quality of advertising and its ability to cause feelings and change perspectives, regardless of a consumer’s belief that he or she is “tuning out” or ignoring the persuasiveness of the medium:
Advertising corrupts relationships and then offers us products, both as solace and as substitutes for the intimate human connection we all long for and need. Most of us know by now that advertising often turns people into objects. Women’s bodies, and men’s bodies too these days, are dismembered, packaged, and used to sell everything from chain saws to chewing gum. But many people do not fully realize that there are terrible consequences when people become things. Self-image is deeply affected. The self-esteem of girls plummets as they reach adolescence, partly because they cannot possibly escape the message that their bodies are objects, and imperfect objects at that. Boys learn that masculinity requires a kind of ruthlessness, even brutality. Violence becomes inevitable.93
In the case of Google, its purpose is to “pull eyeballs” toward pr
oducts and services, as evidenced in its products such as AdWords and the ways in which it has already been proven to bias its own properties over its competitors. This complicates the way to think about search engines and reinforces the need for significant degrees of digital literacy for the public.
Using a Black feminist lens in critical information studies entails contextualizing information as a form of representation, or cultural production, rather than as seemingly neutral and benign data that is thought of as a “website” or “URL” that surfaces to the top in a search. The language and terminologies used to describe results on the Internet in commercial search engines often obscure the fact that commodified forms of representation are being transacted on the web and that these commercial transactions are not random or without meaning as simply popular websites. Annette Kuhn, an emeritus professor of film studies at Queen Mary University of London, challenges feminist thinkers to interrogate gender, race, and representation in her book The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality:
In order to challenge dominant representations, it is necessary first of all to understand how they work, and thus where to seek points of possible productive transformation. From such understanding flow various politics and practices of oppositional cultural production, among which may be counted feminist interventions. . . . There is another justification for a feminist analysis of mainstream images of women: may it not teach us to recognize inconsistencies and contradictions within dominant traditions of representation, to identify points of leverage for our own intervention: cracks and fissures through which may be captured glimpses of what in other circumstances might be possible, visions of “a world outside the order not normally seen or thought about”?94
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