Net Raciality: How Racial Bias Pervades the Digital Space

Catherine Powell, Race and Rights in the Digital Age, 112 Am. J. Int’l L. Unbound 339 (2018). Mathilde Cohen “The adage ‘on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’ reflects a now naïve belief in the emancipatory potential of cyberspace,” writes Catherine Powell in her splendid new essay on race, internet, and international human rights published as part of a Symposium issue on the seventy-year anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In Race and Rights in the Digital Age, Powell critiques the belief according to which the digital space is a raceless and liberating utopia. She compares this online fiction to the offline ideology of colorblindness. Much like colorblindness has been used to conceal and perpetuate racial inequality, the supposed post-racialism of the digital world is a fig leaf masking the fact that it is pervaded with racial bias. In making this point, she builds upon Osagie Obasogie’s critique…

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