Introduction: Coded in Technology Literacy

Introduction: Google Cloud on the Horizon

Immigration, language, and racially marked difference will remain rhetorical commonplaces in public discourses as “minority” populations become the majority demographic in regions across the U.S. and gain increasing economic, ideological, and political capital. Across the nation, there are sites of activism, including Ferguson, MO, where images and various forms of narratives surrounding the #BlackLivesMatter marches and protests have been shared across Instagram, Vine, Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter social media platforms. Video posts, photos, and news articles have been “liked,” “favorited,” tweeted, and retweeted. Dominant media shorthand has represented these activists, who are exercising their rights to civil disobedience, as “thugs,” looters, and anarchists. At the same time, however, social media networks (organized and archived by hashtags), YouTube channels, vlogs, and e-mail listservs communicate the experiences in the form of images and voices from those who organize social activism in digital and physical public spaces.

Also on the horizon is a black and brown Google cloud with silver linings produced by the young folks of color communicating their experiences and realities (see Ito et al.). It is also participatory and requires social action that can be mediated by technology. It is also ever-evolving, as efforts for self-representation by communities of color are part of longer traditions that benefit from inventive application by new media composers. From these media emerge cell phone videos of those who “can’t breathe,” much less speak their truths. Using social media as their platform, many people of color are writing their lives and documenting the senseless deaths of community members. This collection is a part of the cloud filling with digitally archived images, voices, and experiences that continue the process of washing away the shorthand misrepresentations of communities of color.

Even when people of color are represented with some nuance in mainstream media, racist discourses continue to erupt on social media sites when whites do not see themselves as the dominant representation in the U.S. To illustrate this point, we need only look at the Coke commercial that was aired during the 2014 Super Bowl (see below). This commercial featured the song “America the Beautiful” being performed in English, Spanish, Arabic, and other languages. The lyrics of “America the Beautiful” appeal to U.S. patriotism, while the advertisement visually and aurally presents the diverse populations within the U.S. Following the airing of the commercial, Time magazine, online, characterized the social media responses to this inclusive demonstration of multilingualism as bringing out “America the Ugly.” The Time story cites Twitter responses such as “@CocaCola has America the Beautiful being sung in different languages in a #SuperBowl commercial? We speak ENGLISH here, IDIOTS” and “Dear @CocaCola : America the beautiful is sang in English. Piss off. #DontFuckWithUs” (Poniewozik). The negative outcry on Twitter regarding Coke’s Super Bowl commercial evidences the ideological power of monolingualism and what happens when the “Hollywood shorthand” of white representation reflected across media is disrupted.

“America the Beautiful” Coke Commercial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiMMpFcy-HU

Clearly, the responses to Coke’s multilingual Super Bowl commercial reflect deeply entrenched language ideologies that have implications for race and citizenship. The negative responses to Coke’s “America the Beautiful” commercial demonstrate what Paul Kei Matsuda refers to as “the myth of linguistic homogeneity—the tacit and widespread acceptance of the dominant image of composition students as native speakers of a privileged variety of English” (638). Racially motivated responses on Twitter result from assumptions about the prevalence of monolingualism in the U.S. In this collection, Octavio Pimentel and Laura Gonzales address this issue, which affects multilingual people in the U.S. by framing them as somehow deficient or less “American.”

We titled this collection Racial Shorthand because we set out to unpack the dominant narratives that undermine the media produced by communities of color, further erasing the rhetorical, oral, and aural traditions of these communities. This collection illuminates, disrupts, and challenges the “whole complex of ‘givens’ coded into a society” that function to subjugate communities of color (Van Sertima, qtd. in Banks Digital 23). These codes are a part of the systemic racism that “encompasses a broad range of racialized dimensions of this society: racist framing, racist ideology, stereotyped attitudes, racist emotions, discriminatory habits and actions, and extensive racist institutions” (Feagin xii). For many communities of color, social media has provided a space in which to mediate and create for the purposes of activism, critique, literacy documentation, and culturally relevant storytelling. Contributions hack and expose the coded language about the same deficit narratives traditionally told about these populations as the new media remixers rewrite what is possible with some access to apps, hardware, and liberated imaginations.

Rhetorically, these online instances of racism and activism demonstrate moments of kairos for critical arguments about race, language, education, and identity that media such as CNN¹ minimize and ignore, underscoring the complicit support of myths of white supremacy. In Miriam Williams’s chapter on the Black Lives Matter hashtag, she examines how Twitter provides a digital headquarters for social activism in response to the deaths of young black men. Fortunately, the democratic ethos of online and social media is such that these conversations take place in public forums; however, apologists for white privilege often argue that the erasure of black and brown representation is merely industry “shorthand” for producers of media. This shorthand relates to what Morris Young describes as the coded response by mainstream audiences to the literacy practices enacted by people of color. Young explains “[D]iscourse about literacy is also problematic because it is often a coded way to talk about race, citizenship, and culture in America by raising the specter of crisis” (6). The “specter of crisis” has evolved from the rhetoric of “Johnny Can’t Write” into reductive arguments about the existing digital literacies and practices of people of color, dismissing Black Lives Matter as yet another hashtag to be mocked and challenged by false equivalence with All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter.

By returning to the topic of crisis, most audiences ignore literacy artifacts such as those that Lillie Jenkins and Julia Voss examine in their contribution “‘Essence of Mom 2.0’: Media, Memory, and Community across an Extended African American Family.” In their chapter, they include Jenkins’s multimodal booklet detailing her mother’s non-digital literacy artifacts to document her mother’s role and influence on the family’s history, stemming from Jenkins’s participation in a collaborative video project documenting the black church’s role as literacy sponsor. This chapter underscores how the multimodal contributions of communities of color may have been overlooked because of the assumption that all multimodal compositions must be digital.

To enter into a project on multimodality and race, we must recognize how dominant representations of people of color and technology draw attention to the broader societal issue of how race is constructed, erased, and represented in online and social media. Examination of these online spaces is necessary because racist discourse about, and threats against, nonwhites continue to circulate in social media due to the fact that users believe they are hidden (or hooded) by cyber-anonymity. In Charise Pimentel’s chapter, “Miss American Terrorist: A Critical Racial Analysis of the Crowning of Miss America,” she examines the racist messages on Twitter about Indian-American Nina Davuluri after she was crowned Miss America. These tweets demonstrate the necessity for accountability when writing for online audiences (McKee), but even more, these tweets also illuminate how white privilege empowers speakers to attack communities of color as though nonwhites were excluded from online participation.

This collection disrupts the dominant shorthand by demonstrating how communities of color produce multimodal projects and leverage the affordances of social media in ways that extend the rhetorical traditions and literacy practices of these communities. These digital compositions are part of a growing body of similar activist campaigns online that include the Librotraficante, for Mexican-American studies in Arizona and Texas, as well as Dreamer and LGBTQ activism. This project is inspired by students of color who have used digital media to resist erasure on college campuses, as in the YouTube videos “The Black Bruins” and “I, Too, Am Harvard.” Through oral, aural, gestural, and visual modes, these digital compositions disrupt the dominant shorthand that purposefully conflates citizenship, education, and technology with whiteness.

Because of their popularity, “I, Too, Am Harvard” and “The Black Bruins” reveal embedded assumptions about what students at prestigious universities look like and confront expectations of their silence through the use of social and online media. In this collection, Alexis McGee’s contribution on Mattel’s Dolls of the World collection similarly interrogates the construction and misrepresentation of nonwhite women within the global reach of online spaces. In addition to critical analysis of mainstream constructions of racialized subjects, this collection includes chapters from contributors who engage in the analysis and digital composition of discursive productions by people of color for social justice purposes. In “Digital Latinx Storytelling: Testimonio as Multimodal Resistance,” Cruz Medina draws attention to digital writing for social change when integrating Latinx oral traditions into multimodal composition. Together, these contributions highlight new media objects by people of color and underscore how racist beliefs and discourse circulate online. Beneath the cool shorthand of new media are the same systems of oppression, and this collection begins to short-circuit the colonial logic organized in screens by turning attention to non-dominant traditions and epistemologies.

Review of Literature and Rhetorical Methodology

In addition to challenging inequitable representations online, this collection examines the media produced by people of color whose new media objects challenge dominant notions of race. By bringing together global and local media, this collection contributes to critical examinations of race and technology (Banks; Blackmon; Monroe; Nakamura and White; Pimentel and Gutierrez) and analyses of localized sites of critical intervention (Haas; Ito et al.; Jones; Medina “Tweeting”), and in doing so it breaks from the colonial binary, which forwards the assumption that “the First World has knowledge; the Third World has culture; Native Americans have wisdom; Anglo Americans have science” (Mignolo “Epistemic Disobedience” 2). Contributions focus on rhetorical traditions, strategies, and elements that enable and facilitate people in speaking as individuals and from communities of color while participating in the collective experience of social media networks.

Certainly, the research across fields on the digital divide (Banks; Bolt and Crawford; Compaine; Jaeger; Monroe; Norris; Ragnedda and Muschert; Servon; Warschauer) has helped call attention to the issue of access facing communities of color; however, narrowly focusing on the digital divide serves as a diversion that assuages members of the mainstream’s guilt for their lack of awareness of tech-savvy people of color and the rhetorical traditions from which they draw. As far back as 1997, Chicanx performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña characterized the feeling expressed by the trope of the digital divide:

I resent the fact that I am constantly told that as a “Latino” I am supposedly culturally handicapped or somehow unfit to handle high technology; yet once I have it right in front of me, I am propelled to work against it, to question it, to expose it, to subvert it, to imbue it with humor, linguas polutas—Spanglish, Frangle, gringonol, and radical politics. (192)

The low expectations of and lack of attention paid to digital compositions by people of color can be directly tied to white privilege. Mary Bucholtz explains that the “nerd” identity often associated with technology “may itself be a form of white privilege, since these practices were not as readily available to teenagers of color and the consequences of their use more severe” (96). Instances of racism online are nothing new in computers and composition scholarship (Bomberger; McConaghy and Snyder; McKee); however, the possibilities for social activism or composing digital media that somehow respond to, complicate, or bypass symbols of nonwhites in the colonial imaginary have found platforms that support alternative self-representations.

The contributors to this collection cannot and will not proclaim that access no longer remains an issue; anecdotally, we observe in our own classrooms how students of color do not always possess the best and newest technology. In Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, Adam Banks addresses the dire implications for discussion beyond the digital divide because:

[It] involves both contest and silence: debate over whether there is a Divide at all…debate over whether race is a factor in whatever problems in technology access might exist; and concern that the use of a term like Digital Divide represents African Americans unfairly and does more to further the erasure of Black people by continuing to cast them as the utter outsider. (31)

The sites of analysis in this collection identify some of the ways in which radically localized sites create media that resist the erasure that comes from focusing entirely on access.

The proliferation of media created by communities of color can be linked to the innovation of and increase in access to cell phone technology. In 2012, the Pew Research Internet Project concluded that “neither race nor gender are themselves part of the story of digital differences in its current form” (Zickuhr and Smith 6). Instead, Kathryn Zickuhr and Aaron Smith point to the example of mobile phone access as one of the factors that perhaps has contributed to the decline in difference: “Even beyond smartphones, both African Americans and English-speaking Latinos are as likely as whites to own any sort of mobile phone, and are more likely to use their phones for a wider range of activities” (Zickuhr and Smith 3). The following table breaks down the percentages for access across demographics.

This collection begins to fill in the broad gap in scholarship documenting the digital literacy of people of color in online and social media. In many cases, scholars of color draw from cultural traditions in which they are entrenched or by which they are inspired, many of which predate online media and stem from the oral and aural traditions of Blacks and Latinxs (Banks; Selfe; Villanueva). The critical lens employed by researchers in this collection demonstrates what Gloria Anzaldúa describes as la facultad, or the “capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface” (60). To critically engage with technology requires the capacity to see how the efficacy of different assemblages of images, sound, text, video, and animation can be, and have been, informed by diverse rhetorical traditions.

The framework for this collection is described as a decolonial methodology in part because the exigency of this collection is firmly rooted in presenting traditions of knowledge that have been marginalized and misrepresented through ideologies of racial supremacy embedded in digital practices of framing nonwhites as lacking. Contributors identify and critique the misrepresentations forwarded online and in social media to resist those narratives positioning nonwhites as “Others.” At the same time, the contributions enact an important decolonial role by presenting knowledge from rhetorical traditions that have been denied, dismissed, and ignored in favor of championing the centrality of whiteness in the myth of Western modernity.

With regard to misrepresentation and nondominant knowledge traditions, this methodology follows what Angela Haas outlines when she applies a decolonial approach to a course centered on race and technology in “Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: A Case Study of Decolonial Technical Communication Theory, Methodology, and Pedagogy.” Haas explains,

decolonial methodologies and pedagogies serve to (a) redress colonial influences on perceptions of people, literacy, language, culture, and community and the relationships therein and (b) support the coexistence of cultures, languages, literacies, memories, histories, places, and spaces—and encourage respectful and reciprocal dialogue between and across them. (297)

Although pedagogy is not a primary focus of this collection, Haas’s definition parallels how the contributions critically focus on moments when power has been exerted through race and technology to reinstantiate dominance as well as on the presentation of alternative ways of knowing. Haas’s schema also eloquently delineates the simultaneous work a decolonial methodology must perform.

By problematizing dominant narratives about cultures, literacies, and epistemologies of people of color and presenting multimodal examples of meaning-making from these overlooked traditions, this collection digitally composes an archive that has been curated to redress colonial perspectives. The attention to archives follows Ellen Cushman’s call to consider “the problems and promise of digital archives” such as the platform that Computers and Composition Digital Press offers as a curated repository for peer-reviewed research (116). We apply this decolonial methodology as we consider how multimodal compositions contribute to how “[d]ecolonial digital archives have built into them the instrumental, historical, and cultural meanings of whatever media they include” and we seek to demonstrate how “such media need to be contextualized within the social practices that lend them these meanings” (Cushman 116). These kinds of decolonial digital practices are important because they follow what Walter Mignolo calls the “decolonial path,” which shares “the colonial wound, the fact that regions and people around the world have been classified as underdeveloped economically and mentally” (3). Consciously collecting and calling attention to the digital work of people of color provides evidence that exposes the deficit narratives about these communities and technology as a part of oppressive colonial projects, which subjugate through taxonomies of authorized knowledge. This collection does not altogether “de-link” (a la Mignolo) from existing literacy, technical communication, and composition and computers scholarship; however, the contributions break from colonial narratives that dare to ask whether nonwhites have rhetorical and epistemological traditions.

The decolonial exigency for this collection undergirds the rhetorical analytic methods that can be traced throughout the contributions. Though not all the contributions self-identify as decolonial, situated methodologies in each chapter allow for resistance to the dominant narratives communicated in public social media discourse. Though sites such as Twitter can provide platforms for inequitable constructions of people of color, the social media component of the Black Lives Matter movement has also been supported by the Twitter hashtag that archives knowledge about this activism. On digital writing environments, Adam Banks makes the point in Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age that writing is simultaneously an act of archiving, evidenced through his discussion of the digital griot as a DJ whose knowledge is curated in the crates and remixed in the composing and delivery of rhetorical excellence.

It is important that contributors to this collection identify, capture, and document prevalent forms of racist and sexist discourse and representation because these exhibits evidence the necessity of counter-hegemonic and decolonial work. Digital technology facilitates the archiving of both discriminatory and generative new media objects, which can be overlooked in the deluge of news clickbait and social media updates. By focusing primarily on online projects and social media discourse, the contributors to this collection make use of the digital book platform by highlighting important self-representational media. These new media objects remix dominant symbols and create altogether original objects that present perspectives from diverse rhetorical traditions. In both cases, this collection seeks to expose the shorthand of dominant representations as complex systems of coded messages that marginalize and subjugate. Online and social media continue to play a dual role, transmitting both mainstream discursive productions embedded with media shorthand (read: racialized assumptions) and productions by radically local sites of self-representation. Many times these self-representative media producers first must resist media that overwhelm people of color into becoming docile audiences and consumers. Media produced in radically local sites provide critical examples of hope in contrast to Hollywood’s media industrial complex (Wayne). The tension between self-representation and dominant shorthand is further complicated by the localized networks of distribution social media facilitates.

The goals for this collection are as follows:

• Highlight how social media such as Twitter circulate racist discourses that perpetuate myths of white supremacy, attack the citizenship of nonwhites, and enforce linguistic homogeneity online;
• Identify misrepresentations of and self-representations by women of color in social media and online spaces;
• Demonstrate the affordances of Twitter to provide a virtual headquarters and network while distributing information for the social movement of #BlackLivesMatter;
• Examine the literacy artifacts of communities of color that demonstrate traditions of multimodal composing that have been previously ignored;
• Reimagine linguistic difference as an advantageous technology rather than as a deficit;
• Present a digital curriculum with culturally relevant implications for Latinx students.

Description of Chapters

Examples of racist outrage online, such as the response to Coke’s “America the Beautiful” commercial, demonstrate how myths of white supremacy and linguistic homogeneity seek to maintain dominant representations and provide exigency for the chapters that follow. In line with Coke’s “America the Beautiful” commercial, Sebastien de la Cruz’s performance of the national anthem at the 2013 NBA Finals in mariachi regalia elicited racially driven outcry on Twitter. Octavio Pimental critically analyzes this social media response in “Not the King: Cantando el Himno Nacional de los Estados Unidos.”. Pimentel shows how de la Cruz’s performance of Mexican-American ethnic identity, while wearing traditional mariachi attire, drew racist responses because his appearance challenged shorthand notions about what an “American” looks like. Visually representing Mexican-American culture, de la Cruz’s appearance also raises questions about the myths of monolingualism undergirded by systemic racism. The subsequent support for de la Cruz demonstrates how social media facilitates public discourse and online activism that precipitates action in real life.

Twitter captures moments that highlight how dominant beliefs about race circulate through online discourse when the shorthand representations of “Americans” is unsettled. The 2014 crowning of an Indian-American Miss America provoked racist responses via Twitter because the event celebrated “American” womanhood; however, in this case, whiteness was not upheld as the ideal. Charise Pimentel’s “Miss American Terrorist: A Critical Racial Analysis of the Crowning of Miss America” evaluates this eruption of racist social media posts and demonstrates the hate perpetuated in defense of white supremacy. Comments such as “And the Arab wins Miss America. Classic,” “Ummm wtf?! Have we forgotten 9/11?”, “How the f*** does a foreigner win miss America? She is a Arab!”, and “More like Miss Terrorist” provide data for racial analysis of and discourse around the pageant, thereby informing the sociopolitical context wherein racial discourse freely flows through media. To frame this discussion, this chapter highlights the Smithsonian digital exhibit “Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans’ Shape the Nation,” a physical museum and online space that encourages viewers to learn more about Indian-American heritage and contributions to the U.S. By providing accurate representations, Charise Pimentel juxtaposes the histories of a community and how they are willfully misrepresented in social media.

Moving from a pageant that has historically objectified women to one of the most well-known misrepresentations of womanhood, Alexis McGee analyzes the representations of racial Others in the world of Barbie® online. McGee’s “Barbie® Goes Abroad: Feminism, Technology, and Stereotypes” problematizes the enduring legacy of the Barbie doll in online space despite the false ideal of female representation. McGee specifically examines Mattel’s Dolls of the World collection, which embraces stereotypes about race, gender, and sexuality. She explains that the designs of the World collection rely on phenotypical characteristics of dominant Western hegemony to (mis)represent non-Western cultures, and hypersexualized images of hypereffeminate women. This chapter raises important issues about cultural representations shared across geographical borders, where inherently false depictions of women move from the West to non-Western cultures, reaffirming colonial influence. The critical analysis of these influential misrepresentations of feminine ideals reveals how womanhood is falsely constructed; however, women of color have also taken advantage of online space to underscore the accomplishments of individual women.

Moving on from the misrepresentation of nonwhite women online, the contributors focus on the self-representation of people of color and how communities of color use social and online media in line with how these rhetorical traditions have carried out activism, storytelling, and other literacy practices. In “‘Essence of Mom 2.0’: Media, Memory, and Community across an Extended African American Family,” Lillie Jenkins and Julia Voss use a case study to focus on the production processes and purposes behind a literacy artifact Jenkins created to memorialize her mother within her large extended family. Jenkins’s multimodal booklet uses her mother’s letters, folk tales, dreams, stories, poems, photographs, and hand-crafted folk art objects (quilts, home decor, and embroidery) to document her mother’s role and influence on the family’s history. The chapter draws on Jenkins’s long-standing interest in photography; her postsecondary and graduate work in communications; her participation in a university/community collaborative video project documenting the black church’s role as a sponsor of literacy; and her strategic (nonmatriculated) enrollment in a subsequent university course in advanced digital media production. Jenkins’s booklet, as an artifact that remediates and recirculates her mother’s texts, 1) illustrates the complex network of literacy resources distributed across home, school, and work spheres that underpin such self-sponsored media production in minoritized communities, and 2) points to how this kind of grassroots media production has the potential to record and extend community-based literacy practices and the beliefs/stories contained within them using both textual and face-to-face interaction.

One of the most explicit ways in which communities of color have been able to communicate stories about police brutality and facilitate collective action against the over-policing of people of color has been through the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Examining how Twitter provides a digital writing environment for social change, Miriam Williams conducts a quantitative rhetorical analysis of conversations about African-American online activism in “#BlackLivesMatter: Tweeting a Movement in Chronos and Kairos.” Williams examines how African-American activists on Twitter use this social media platform as a virtual headquarters for a movement against excessive police force and over-policing within African-American communities. She does “argue[s] not about whether these people of color are innocent or guilty, but [that they are] unarmed and dead” (Williams). Williams reflects on her role as a participant-observer with Twitter and the transformative effect of #BlackLivesMatter in informing followers of developments that may not be covered by cable news or other media. While Twitter has provided a digital headquarters for social activism, it has also served as an archive of racist discourse circulated in response to publically discussed events. Looking at tweets coded with the hashtag, Williams offers quantitative data related to Twitter users’ support of or disagreement with the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

The use of hashtags for social activism demonstrates how communities of color employ technologies that support culturally relevant literacy practices. For Latinxs in the U.S., translanguaging is a literacy practice with implications in digital spaces. In “Multilingualism as Technology: From Linguistic ‘Deficit’ to Rhetorical Strength,” Laura Gonzales makes the argument for translation as a technology–a technology used by multilinguals in both physical and digital spaces. Drawing on discussions about linguistic diversity (Composition Forum and the Blog Carnival on language and multimodality that Gonzales edited for the Sweetland DRC), Gonzales argues that individuals who move between languages to communicate have an inherent rhetorical dexterity that can teach us about language, technology, writing, and culture. Gonzales’s site of analysis is the Language Services Department at the Hispanic Center of Western Michigan, and she articulates how multilinguals strategically move between English and Spanish in pursuit of specific goals. In this chapter, Gonzales highlights what she terms “translation moments” to demonstrate how translation functions as a technological and rhetorical activity that is often overlooked in the deficit models used to describe multilinguals in academic and professional settings.

Traditional forms of technology, such as digital multimodal compositions by communities of color, also reveal important literacy traditions that offer potential for digital writing pedagogy. In “Digital Latinx Storytelling: Testimonio as Multimodal Resistance,” Cruz Medina draws on the culturally relevant Latinx storytelling practice of testimonio (testimony), which has a tradition of “speaking truth to power” in Latin America. Specifically, Medina applies the Latinx Critical Race (LatCrit) methodology for producing digital testimonio practices that intersect with digital storytelling and non-digital storytelling traditions in rhetoric and composition. Medina includes a digital testimonio that comes from his professional blog (AcademiadeCruz.com), to which Latinx scholars in rhetoric and composition have contributed posts that illuminate interconnections among storytelling practices. In addition, Medina includes his own example of digital testimonio as a site of analysis that was inspired by his vignette in College Composition and Communication’s 2013 special issue on the profession. Digital testimonio offers a culturally relevant new media framework that addresses issues of audience, genre, recursivity, and digital writing. At the same time, digital testimonio presents individual Latinx perspectives while contributing to a broader understanding of diverse Latinx experiences across the changing face and demographics of the U.S.