Race is the only European invention they refuse to take credit for. It is a group superstition, and a deadly one at that. It is a color-coded witch-hunt. It is 15th century anthropology lingering into the digital age. It is as grotesque as sacrificing a virgin to the sun god at the advent of an eclipse. It’s as backwards as feeding Christians to the lions in Rome. When future cultures look back on this time, they will cringe at the wastefulness imposed onto the beauty of our genetic variance. The raw human potential squandered by this false hierarchy will tell a foreboding tale of our turbulent times.
When I went undercover for eight months as a white supremacist on the internet, I did not expect to be writing about the experience on Blavity. The TED talk that would come from this experiment was nowhere on the horizon, nor was the subsequent media attention. I was simply a man on a mission to understand how racism could re-emerge in a “post-racial” computer-literate society. My commitment to this investigation was one of life-or-death ferocity. It was 2015, and being a survivor of police brutality, I had to know how big this movement was. How many minds were being swallowed by these re-branded Mein Kamf ideas? Did Donald Trump have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning? Being born on the wrong end of a 500-year-old cultural hallucination breeds a pit-bull’s determination in the soul. I needed answers.
It all started in late 2014 when I began to make political videos of my own. In March of 2015, my first video went viral. It was based on Ta-Nahisi Coates’ article about the case for reparations. Needless to say, black people were feeling it, sharing it and discussing it. This success almost immediately attracted bigoted trolls. These faceless correspondents, pointed to African facial features and community violence as supposed proof of the inferiority of black people. At first, my blood boiled. The debater in me engaged in posting wars of biblical proportions, with replies into the triple digits. It was like these guys were living in another universe. It turns out, that wasn’t too far from the truth.
That summer, a friend who worked for an internet marketing firm informed me of target-marketing algorithms. When you buy a product online, it triggers a code to populate your news feed with similar items. This works with news. You can accidentally self-select a news narrative that simply mirrors your paradigm. My friend became Morpheus to my Neo. He handed me the red pill, and I tumbled down a rabbit hole so far and so deep, that you are now reading an article about it.
I made a fake account on social media and went in. I mirrored the anti-black sentiments thrown at me on my real page. It was amazing to see how these people thought. They really believed that because LeBron James, Obama and Oprah had more money than them, they were born into a raceless world. How could they not? They were the products of willfully edited American history lessons. No talk of Black Wall Street burning. No talk of Negro vagrancy laws, or the Sand Creek Massacre. No talk of how the last Jim Crow law was stricken from the books as recently as 1971 (Swann vs. Charlotte-Mecklenberg).
The way popular culture distorts time makes us over-estimate how long it’s been since segregation was the law of the land. My father remembers “Whites Only” signs. My mother remembers Emmett Till as breaking news. This also means that those sepia tone white goblins spitting on the Little Rock Nine also had not died yet. They had children, started careers and achieved public office.
Lyndon Baines Johnson could not force-integrate their dinner table, nor the conversations around it. Thus, no law could desegregate the hand that rocks the cradle. How long would it be before their progeny grew up, grabbed a keyboard and continued spitting on racial progress in America?
We cannot underestimate the lesson that digital racism is handing us. As a species, we are poised on the edge of yet another quantum leap: the leap into quantum computing. If digital made analog look archaic, quantum will make digital look like the stone-age — and digital is impressive. When computer transistors shrink to as small as a single electron, when we can back-up the entire internet on a single strand of synthetic DNA, will we be any less racist than today?
What kind of echo-chambers will we create with that kind of processing power? How dangerous will the trolls be, then? When we can code our group-superstitions into quantum bits instead of digital bits, how real will they become in our experience? If we do not ask ourselves these kinds of questions now, they will be answered for us when it’s too late. I only hope there will be something left of our humanity.
