infoscienceportal-blog

[infoscienceportal-blog]

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Sana Gujral relays her vision to help empower women in India through technology.

[infoscienceportal-blog]

An Asian American actress (Grace Rowe) discusses the limited roles of Asian Americans in the media - background actors, small actors with one line parts, or playing characters without fully developed lives. She makes a plea to Asian Americans to join her in making a difference in media representation.

[infoscienceportal-blog]

Understandably, Apple didn’t want to create caricatures, giving those emoji an afro or thicker lips. But the company had already done something similar. With the first batch of emoji, they clearly identified one character as Asian, giving it narrow eyes and a skull cap. Another was clearly identified as Middle Eastern, with browner skin and a turban. And many were identified as white, with blond hair and blue eyes. Apple should have simply removed the racialized emoji altogether. What they did instead was homogenize and whitewash them. And now, in an absurd twist, you can change the skin tone of emoji that were specified as Asian or Middle Eastern. It’s political correctness gone wild.

Tutt, P. (2015, April 10). Apple’s new diverse emoji are even more problematic than before. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/10/how-apples-new-multicultural-emojis-are-more-racist-than-before/

[infoscienceportal-blog]

More than one scholar has argued that as a concept, race should be “confined to the dustbin of analytically useless terms” (Miles, 1989:72) And yet it persists: race has been used to refer not just to physical features, but also to differences in “nationality, religion, ancestry, class and biological sub-categories” (McIlwain2011: pg.) The belief in race as scientific truth started in the 1700’s, with European colonialism, the slave trade, and pronouncements that Whites were the highest “race” of humans. By the twentieth century, advances in evolutionary theory and genetics utterly refuted so-called “racial science,” as scholars came to regard race not as biological fact, but as an ideological system for “thinking about, categorizing, and treating human beings” (McIlwain, 2011.)

Senft, T. and Noble, S. (2013). Race and Social Media. In The Routledge Handbook of Social Media. Eds. Senft, Theresa M., & Hunsinger, Jeremy. Routledge: NY. 

[infoscienceportal-blog]

Custer’s Revenge brutally objectifies women and disrespects Native Americans in a manner that words like “tasteless” or “crude” cannot do justice to.

Sharam, C. (2011, April 4). Native Americans in video games: Racism, stereotypes, & the digitized Indian. Retrieved on October 1, 2015, from http%3A%2F%2Fwww.projectcoe.com%2F2011%2F04%2F04%2Fnative-americans-in-video-games-racism-stereotypes-and-progress%2F

[infoscienceportal-blog]

Race & Representation Online

We generally see stereotypical images of people of color in mainstream media, Youtube allows people to show society more accurate representations of Asians, African Americans, Indian Americans, Latinos, American Indians, and ...