[Cyber] Conspiracy Theories: Internet Discrimination?

I'm going to be completely honest. I am a white, young adult student at a mostly white college in a mostly white region of the US. In addition, I grew up in a white dominant suburb of Minneapolis, and would say that most people I know and are friends with are, as you may have guessed, white. In other words, I have not been exposed to very much diversity in my young life. Consequentially, this makes me feel like the typical white snobby girl who grew up in the 'burbs and has no true exposure to people of different background or races. And yes, this does make me realize I need to grow more as a person and make efforts to diversify my life a bit more, although it is a bit of a challenge in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan as I've discovered the past year.

As Samantha Blackmon at Purdue University points out in her writing entitled, "(Cyber) Conspiracy Theories: African American Students in the Computerized Writing Environment," African American students are finding themselves more and more uncomfortable with the online community, and computers in general. It's not just African Americans, either. Minorities in general feel as though they are "misrepresented on and excluded from the Internet," as a whole.

 Upon reading the first few pages of Blackmon, my eyes were immediately opened to an issue that has honestly never crossed my mind. I would have never even thought of how minorities are represented on the Internet, and how they are affected by it.

Blackmon provides some interesting statistics on the matter. According to a study done at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI, "84% of 86 white and 65% of 52 African American students surveyed reported using a computer at home." In addition, 33% of African American students surveyed say that they have never used e-mail, as opposed to the 12% of the white students surveyed. This was where I started to think of the factors influencing these numbers. How could this be?

Blackmon goes on to provide support to these facts. In 1980 is perhaps where this all started. Computers were just emerging into the education system in America. Public school districts across the country were looking for the money to support the momentous shift in technology to keep up and perhaps even get ahead of the rest of the technological and educational world. Blackmon states that, "federal defunding of public schools led to inequality in resources and greater inequality among different school districts, depending on location and local tax bases."

Therefore, the poorer areas of the US lacked the resources to keep up with the computer craze. Historically, the poorer regions of the country are also those with the highest minority population. The Population Reference Bureau illustrates poverty as well as minorities in the US clearly (see below). And to this day it is affecting the computer comfort level of students in the US.

We also cannot be assuming that just because someone has computer access or Internet access that they know and can confidently perform activities on them, Blackmon adds. She then goes into more depth about how there is also a relation between the distrust of the reasons to have such knowledge about technology and distrust of those who have more knowledge of the subject.

As I thought more about it and considered why the comfort levels of minorities are generally so much different than the majority's, it seemed to all funnel down to the educational system in this country. I myself should not go into detail because I am simply not educated on the topic enough to make any valuable or valid points. But if I were to say anything, the education system here in the US is partially to blame for such lack of confidence among minorities online, which is almost another form of discrimination in my opinion. Blackmon's writing truly opened up my eyes to what a big problem this is and could easily snowball into. I don't have any ideas for a solution, but it is enough to say that it has come to my attention.