ABSTRACT
This chapter rests on a basic assumption: that considerations of race and the Internet must account for the relationship between the politics of race online and the politics of race as such. Many utopic visions of the Internet conceive of it as a raceless space, a space somehow beyond the politics of race, a frontier where people can remake themselves in their minds’ chosen images. Yet the vast majority of Internet users are still white (Hoffman); the very idea of cyberspaces “racelessness,” the belief in its separation from the racial politics of other spaces of everyday life is, as Joseph Lockard puts it, “unmistakably signed with Euro-American whiteness” (227). How did race get written out of computing? How did whiteness become a default setting for online culture?
