In Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, Adam J. Banks illustrates the ways in which access to technology is immersed in issues of race and racism. For Banks, existing discourses around access to technology fail to account for more systemic considerations about race and racism insofar as these discourses assume that proximity or material access to technologies is effectively all there is to understanding and practicing access. In giving more dialogic space to these systemic considerations within conversations in and about access to technology, Banks calls for more critically informed approaches to such conversations, approaches that ultimately problematize the notion that African Americans are somehow fundamentally "non-technological" (12), and contest the sort of "user-friendly racism" (45) that is programmed into the very foundation of what comprises technology access and use. In this sense, Banks calls for more studied, inclusive, and robust considerations of "African American rhetoric" and "Black Digital Ethos," considerations that promote a "larger, macrolevel awareness" (67) of design components that structure and overdetermine race relations inside and outside of various technological interfaces. Ultimately, a focus on such design components, in Banks' estimation, not only reveals underlying assumptions and prescribed uses and abuses embedded in technologies, but also provides more space to individuals to position themselves against overbearing and totalizing systems and structures that support and enable tacit racist activities in both the real world and cyberspace.
In an effort to provide a better understanding of Banks' project and overall argument in Race, Rhetoric, and Technology, I have selected three quotes that might help flesh out the critical ground he is attempting to navigate throughout the text:
1) ". . . more than mere artifacts, technologies are the spaces and processes that determine whether any group of people is able to tell its own stories on its own terms, whether people are able to agitate and advocate for policies that advance its interests, and whether that group of people has any hope of enjoying equal social, political, and economic relations." (10)
2) "All technologies come packaged with a set of politics: if those technologies are not inherently political, the conditions in which they are created and in which they circulate into a society are political and influence their uses in that society (Winner, 1986), and those politics can profoundly change the spaces in which messages are created, received, and used." (23)
3) "These debates all carry assumptions about what constitutes access to computers, the Internet, or any digital technology that, even when guided by the best of intentions, threaten disaster if not addressed. This danger exists because those assumptions will guide legal, corporate, and educational policies that can trap Black people into roles as passive consumers of technologies rather than producers and partners, and worse, lead to continued electronic invisibility and economic, educational, and political injustice." (31)
While Banks certainly raises a number of important issues in these quotes and throughout Race, Rhetoric, and Technology, there were two issues in particular that really stood out to me during my reading:
1) In an effort to provide a more potent and substantive vocabulary for engaging in discourses in and around access to technology, Banks references four prospective lenses through which to understand the shades and dynamics of access: material access, functional access, experiential access, and critical access. Meaningful access refers to the prospects for "equality in the material conditions that drive technology use or nonuse" (41). Functional access refers to "the knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools [technologies] effectively" (41). Experiential access refers to a brand of access that "makes the tools [technologies] a relevant part of their lives" (42). Critical access refers to the ways in which individuals might engage with technologies in such a way that they become "intelligent users and producers of technology," a position through which access comes to "mean more than mere ownership of or proximity to random bits of plastic and metal" (42). Insofar as these lenses provide a more robust and inclusive vernacular for discussing issues of access to technology, they serve as valuable mediums through which to further complicate and nuance matters of access beyond traditional emphases on proximity to technologies.
2) In placing a particular emphasis on alternatives to proximity to technologies in discourses in and around access to technologies, Banks locates a measure of liberatory potential in the design components of the technologies we use and navigate on a daily basis. In this sense, Banks suggests that "the most important work we can do on behalf of our students is not knowledge work or critical work, but design work, work in creating the spaces in which they will communicate" (84). By keeping design components at the forefront of considerations about access to technology, Banks frees students up to visualize and enact the prospects for freely navigating and contesting the systems in which they are embedded.
"B.O.B.B.Y." by RZA
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