Farfetched? Well, consider this: blacks spend several billion dollars a year on consumer electronics, but relatively few plunk down for computers. As PCs rapidly rewire the ways this country works, plays, learns and communicates, blacks are simply not plugging in to what feels like an alien, un-welcoming place. Certainly economics and education are also powerful handicaps to computer ownership. The average household income for blacks is $25,409; for whites, it is $40,708. But dollars and diplomas don’t fully explain why some black professors let their university-issued computers gather dust. There are other important causes of this computer gap, reasons that are rooted in African-American history, culture and psychology.
Figures drawn from a 1994 Study for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration found that only 11.1 percent of black households had computers, compared with 28.6 percent of white households. Only 518,000 blacks have moderns-on-line on ramps–compared with 10.1 million whites. Like millions of Americans, many black people are simply baffled by the digitized mysteries of computers. Technophobia knows no color. But far more often, blacks are reluctant to embrace computers because they think cyberspace is a predominantly white, male domain. When Stafford Battle, coauthor of “The African American Resource Guide to the Internet,” was giving a recent pro-computer talk, he got this response from a black T shirt vendor: “That’s the white man’s thing.” Battle’s retort: “Is this the white man’s pencil?” But Battle understands that, in the way cyberspace is marketed to America, little except for the computers’ circuits is fully integrated. He says even popular nomenclature is off-putting to many blacks. “They talk about ‘surfing the Net.’ Well, most black people don’t surf. We cruise.”
Paranoia: Young blacks are the hardest sell. To them, computers and computer people are the epitome of white nerdiness. Too much Bill Gates and not enough of MTV’s Bill Bellamy. Darnell Yates, 16, goes to high school in New York’s South Bronx. He says he has no interest in owning a computer. Yet, like almost all his friends, he wears a pager to keep in touch with friends, and thinks cell phones are “hip and in style.” In an increasingly technology-driven society, his generation may be left at the curbside; black advocates say the challenge is as urgent as the need for blacks to conquer illiteracy a century ago. Eric Easter, editor in chief and publisher of ONE, a black alternative magazine on the Internet, is hopeful. He says the same kinds of marketing that move sneakers could repackage cyberspace with an urban flava. “If Snoop Doggy Dogg had an e-mail address and Notorious B.I.G. would rap about the Internet,” Easter adds, “it would blow up over night.” Already, black filmmaker John Singleton has given the decidedly cool rapper-actor Ice Cube a computer in his college tale, “Higher Learning.” And the upcoming Denzel Washington film, “Virtuosity,” features the actor in a sticky tangle with a computer-generated villain.
Computers also evoke a deep-seated fear, perhaps even paranoia, among African-Americans young and old. It’s something about the machines’ unblinking ability to pry. Some blacks say they don’t want computers in their homes because they worry that faceless functionaries might use them to spy, for instance, on the household finances. “There is more concern among blacks about Big Brother,” says Gregory Newbold, who has a fast-growing electronic newsletter called Black On Black Communications. And in the online world-much criticized for being hostile to women–blacks say they frequently discover that their race or views (or both) make them unwelcome. Gretchen Cook, 26, uses the screen name of Ebony Queen. But even so, she wasn’t prepared for the firestorm that awaited her on the Internet. She often defends affirmative action against a “conservative tide,” and she once entered a chat room and got flamed: WEL-FAREQUEEN.
Similarly, blacks can feel like interlopers when they venture into computer stores, crammed with software that seldom reflects black images or African-American tastes and habits. While popular CD-ROM discs are transforming computer screens into art museums of European and Euro-American art, few discs feature African or Latin- and African-American art. “Nothing reflects the doggone inner city environment, and that is a mistake,” says John J. Oliver Jr., chairman and publisher of the Afro-American newspapers, who has launched parts of his 103-year-old publishing empire into cyberspace.
Log-on hope: The solution may be the browning of cyberspace. That means more content and services that appeal to non-whites. Last month’s premiere of NetNoir on America Online will help close the gap. Now, for the first time, there is a major online site that offers anyone interested in black culture a way to plug into history, news, music, politics and education–from an Afrocentric perspective. Other way stations of African-American interest are cropping up all along the Information Superhighway, including an online service called MelaNet. Since April, Tony Brown, a New York journalist-media entrepreneur, has been on the radio preaching a gospel of racial uplift through better computing. Thursday afternoons, he convenes what he calls his “cyberspace club” on WLIB-AM. The program is a popular collection of interviews with black computer experts and Q&As about CD-ROM drives and Internet home pages. Next month Brown will launch his own online service.
There are black converts to be found in cyberspace. Anita Brown, known online as Miss DC, is one of the Net’s biggest proponents in her black community. She was a longtime skeptic (“I didn’t want Big Brother in my house”). But once her brother, a multimedia director at Pacific Bell, got her started, she was hooked. She’s now the online Stuart Smalley-sending out a daily inspiration to a growing ring of cyber-friends. She also markets her business, inspirational T shirts, online. Brown even sends out her own black computer newsletter/road map, called “Welcome to Da Hood.” But enthusiastic invitations like hers are still rare. Will many blacks heed the call? Hope is the log-on.
Digital Demographics Black households have the lowest rate of computer ownership of American ethnic groups. ASIAN OR PAC. ISLANDER 39.1% WHITE 28.6% AMER. INDIAN, ALEUT, ESKIMO 20.7% HISPANIC 13.1 BLACK 11.1 SOURCE: 1994 FIGURES, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
