Race for Cyberspace
Blacks open digital battle for race equality

With style and enthusiasm, Black communities in Britain are adding a new instrument to their decades-old claims to race equality and justice. They are harnessing their cause to the power of the Internet, the dominant communications technology of the 21st century.

Women online innovators / Murchison Center, Toledo USA

People are creating innovative community-led media, websites, chat rooms and e-mail newsletters for power, profit and leisure. Many are using the Internet to fuel collective advancement. Others seek to interact with Government to improve the delivery of local services and e-democracy. All are concerned about linking up with their homelands and far-flung outposts of the African Digital Diaspora.

Peering into the future, we can discern some major trends. But first, in the African tradition, a libation for the ancestors.

Recognition of Africa's contribution to communications

In all this talk of modernity - of information technology and communications - it is easy to forget that humans have been transmitting and receiving messages and commands, whether in grunts or cries, by smoke or drums, for thousands of years.

Indeed, the peoples of Africa are no strangers to long distance mass communication. Master drummers Nigerian Babatunde Olatunji and Ghanaian Nana Appiah brought this awareness to western audiences in the mid 20th century. When Babatunde Olatunji beat out the message in Yoruba: "The chief says come ...and hurry up about it!" he was introducing a long misunderstood element of West African communication.

Drummers can send messages that carry five miles away, using a vocabulary of more than 500 words. When taken up again by a succession of skilled drummers stationed every five miles the chief's message could be heard over great distances, according to the authoritative International Encyclopaedia of Communication, Oxford University Press 1989.

Now, with the advent of the Internet, independent Africa is caught in a profound transformation set in motion by communications technology. In Sub-Saharan Africa, long isolated from the world by high costs of conventional information channels, the Internet is a powerful force for change, says the journalist G Pascal Zachary. Thanks to innovative voice-over-Internet systems, costs are lowered and all social classes -from villagers to urbanites - can make international telephone calls far less expensively than ever before, he says.

New trends in cyberorganising for success

In Britain, one can discern a number of trends that are of profound importance as Black people harness their cause to the Internet. Why? Because Black people in London, where most of the nation's 1.1m people of African Caribbean heritage live, are at least twice as likely to have no home Internet access as whites. They are less likely to own personal computers or use the Internet to build a future based on information and communications technology (ICT).

First, there is the relentless spread of innovative actions to share information. BLINK, the main online communications channel of the 1990 Trust civil rights body, headlines Black-related issues in politics and voting. Students in Afro-Caribbean clubs speak to each other from more than thirty university campuses. Servicemen, entrepreneurs and civil servants talk to friends, relatives and colleagues in the Americas. Congo London speaks to Africa, to Black Britain and the Black World.

Academics and media journalists are exploring the new eBlack Studies at a meeting organised by the Chronicleworld.org at the Black History Month celebration at City Hall, 18 October 2004. The respected US professor Dr Abdul Alkalimat discusses transforming traditional Black Studies education using information technology, computers and the Internet with Stella Dadzie, educator and trainer, Dr Hakim Adi, political historian, Lester Holloway, online journalist, and Temi Odumosu, cultural researcher,

Women are online innovators

Second, increasingly, women are showing their energy and daring online. They exude a ray of hope to women who want to build up their achievement. "IT [Information Technology] is not the sole preserve of the male and the nerdy," says Foluke Akinlose, creator of the interactive lifestyle magazine for women of colour, Precious online, www.preciousonline.co.uk. Dr Elizabeth Rasekoala, founder of the African Caribbean Network for Science and Technology, has pioneered the Ishango Science Clubs of Britain, www.ishangohouse.com.

Ros Griffiths founded the Employment Café a web based job vacancies initiative. She received the Carlton TV 2002 for outstanding contribution to community life and the most innovative Start-up award from the European Federation of Black Business Owners.

Women are revolutionising the provision of online housing and employment services. Sheron Carter, head of community development, catapulted the Ujima Housing Association into the limelight in 2003 when she opened the first centre of excellence for aspiring Black and minority ethnic enterprises.

Ms Carter hopes the centre, called First Base, will train students to manage businesses with a social conscience. "Social housing landlords and charities, like Ujima, have a big role to play in popularising a new approach to using Information Technology," adds Emmanuel Ohaja, editor of Admission: Your Ticket to the Digital World.

A new generation of Cyber-griots can create
Storytelling neighbourhoods to aid community cohesion.

Third, community groups, business leaders, political activists, and academics and students are set to form a frontline of uncensored net-linked Black voices. And they are taking tips from a range of innovations.

• With Vox Politics and Bloggers websites they can broadcast alternative views about the laws and social practices that affect black people.
• From their frontline Netville websites cyberorganisers can wire up whole communities. Internet-based Speakers Corners can give people a chance to have their say without passing through official or mass media channels. A new generation of Cyber-griots can create Storytelling neighbourhoods to aid community cohesion. eBlack Studies labs can encourage students to think in new ways about careers in science, technology and languages.
• Uniquely, homeless online websites can keep people without a regular abode connected; this is made possible as computers have become more available in community centres, public libraries and low-cost cyber cafes. The homeless can get mail electronically, meet friends and even store their points of view about social policies. Cyber centres can offer housing help and skills development to the increasing number of down and outers among Black people.
• Unsurprisingly, motivational web sites provide the "soul food" of net-linked Black communities, helping them to get serious about saving and building their heritage and history. God online web sites can help churches tap into the Internet to reach congregants, not just to watch Sunday services live online and pay their tithes but to lay a foundation for wealth building.
• In addition, cyberorganisers are keen to promote Blacks in government web sites that help people make decisions about things that are important to them: jobs, health care, music and cultural expression, the environment, and security. Advocacy websites can help Black entrepreneurs cut costs, reach new markets and improve their contributions to beneficial social and political change. London-Africa-Caribbean exchange websites can train regional instructors in technology, media and telecommunications (TMT).
• All over the Black World - of Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas - freelance, investigative journalists and courageous "citizen reporters" are creating popular websites as alternatives to official and business dominated websites, and are broadcasting to millions.

What "Going Digital" means

The trends explored here describe a new social phenomenon - the emergence of Blacks in Britain as Internet connected communities. They are groups of people within a shared geography (for example, a district, like Brixton, or region, like inner city London) and a shared interest (for example, in promoting race equality and best practices in urban development).

What is important is that they use the Internet to capture, amplify and connect local voices. This premise rests upon a moral and political, as well as technical underpinning of the future.

In the cut and thrust of urban politics and the fierce competition for uplift and scarce resources many people have already come to a profound conviction. If Black communities want a better future for themselves and their children, they will have to raise their public value using the new information and communications technologies.

Bid now for £14m e-Innovations jackpot

Why? Because "Going Digital" can reap tangible benefits. For example, bids put in now can garner a share of the Government's e-Innovations fund worth £14m overall that comes up for grabs in late 2004. What the funders want are proposals to "Bridge the Digital Divide". Potential winners are projects that demonstrate how e-Government can improve service delivery to socially excluded populations. (See http://www.govtech.net an official site dealing with "solutions for State and Local Government in the Information Age" and http://www.odpm.gov.uk, the website of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott).

Local e-Government Minister Paul Hope emphasised these points in March 2004 when he announced the first-round winners that are part of a wider £675m Local e-Government Programme. "E-Government is not just about computers or websites. It is about improving the way people use their local services and improving their experience of dealing with Government," he said.

e-Power to the people

Going Digital offers the means for Black people to reach new stages in the equality struggle. It helps them build co-operative cyber institutions for empowerment. Strategically, going digital is an effective means of expressing dissatisfaction with a society that claims to play by "race-blind" rules but tolerates de facto discrimination against people of colour. It can also be a valuable agency for mobilising Blacks to register and turnout to vote.

(But there are pitfalls. Cyberspace observers agree that it may be too early to talk of ending the marginalisation of Black communities by means of the Internet. Unemployment, lone parenthood and low wages are common among African Caribbeans, according to the official Family Resources Survey. And we know that access to and usage of the Internet depend to a large extent on social class and household income. Furthermore, James E Katz and Ronald E Rice in Social Consequences of Internet Use (MIT Press 2002) say: "The digital divide between the well-off and the disadvantaged may be worsening". Indeed, what we may see in future is "the triumph of corporate interests" over public interest, says Caleb Carr, in his online article Information poisoning. Salon.com January 8 2001. This is bad news, of course. If this pattern of information poverty and unyielding, insensitive corporate and bureaucratic influence persists, disadvantaged Blacks will find themselves dumped on the waste tips of London's information driven economy.)

Nevertheless, information researchers claim that Internet access offers great benefits to socially excluded people. "Internet access can enhance participation, reduce isolation and [increase] access to information and provide an entree to wider opportunities", according to a pioneering study called Connecting People published by the Mayor of London, November 2003. Sara Ferlander of Stirling University confirms "that there is a positive relationship between the use of ICT, social capital and local community development in her doctoral study of Internet Cafés in Stockholm, Sweden.

Confidence is growing

Many social theorists are growing increasingly confident in understanding how the Internet helps foster democratic social relations. Simon Wills in Connected Cities (Premium Publishing 2004) suggests that "wired up" cities offer "the prospect of a [electronically] connected democracy [and] presents us with the opportunity of giving greater power to the people".

Furthermore, in Britain, Black-led web sites are promoting respect for cultural freedom against the rising tide of race hate. Indeed, in Europe, where more than 10 million people of African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean origins reside after a long history of migration, the Internet is assuming a crucial role in strengthening their solidarity, according to researchers at the London School of Economics.

Recently, the Council of Europe, the main decision making body of the European Union, declared cyberspace to be a racism-free zone. This follows the advice of a committee of experts on criminal acts of racism and xenophobia. In addition, Mira-Media, a Dutch campaigning organisation, has launched a European manifesto for "more colour in the media", supported by networks of minority community media throughout the continent.

Cyberorganisers must leave a legacy of e-Knowledge and Action for the next generation

Afro-British communities are a part, therefore, of a significant continental and worldwide trend. Citizens from many backgrounds, Black, white and minority ethnic, are increasingly using the Internet and mobile telephony to re-engage with political systems and make them more responsive to popular demands.

Moreover, there is a growing awareness that the web is admirably suited to broadcasting alternative and irreverent views. Cyberorganisers say the Internet is not the sole property of any one nation, class or people. It is immediate, interactive and "owned" by you not media magnates or political controllers. Above all, they say, your access to the web cannot be prevented, certainly not without draconian illiberal state policies.

Internet-Connecting outposts of the Black World

This global perspective comfortably fits the Internet needs of trans-national diasporic peoples locked in the unwelcoming embrace of western cities. Blacks in Britain are part of a network of web sites connecting the outposts of the Black World, the tri-continental African Digital Diaspora.

One ideal goal is to join with the new African Union (AU) in an innovative mission: mobilising the African Diaspora in Europe to campaign for protection for immigrants and asylum, debt relief, and African and Caribbean Development. (The African Union, officially launched in Durban, South Africa, on 9 July 2002, replaces the Organisation of African Unity. Based loosely on the structure of the European Union, the African Union upholds the sovereign equality and independence of its 53 member states and aims to promote peace, security and solidarity on the African continent.)

Diasporic web sites are transmitters of social and cultural values. In many ways, they spread information and speak to the needs of people like modern versions of Africa's griots, Caribbean calypsonians, and African American gospel, soul, folk and blues singers. Eventually, when the far-flung Internet web sites are linked together, Black British communities may be able to communicate across the Diaspora and with Africa in a seamless dynamic narrative.

The strength of these initiatives flows from the fact that vanguard cyberorganisers in Black communities are determined to hand over a legacy of e-Knowledge and Action to the next generation. They will continue trend-setting and promoting innovative,uncensored net-linked Black voices.

The big challenge is steering Afro-British communities through the transition from information poverty to cyber-empowerment in a future world of "online broadband communications and connectivity".

But the road to fulfilment of these ideas and ideals is hard. Progress will require Government action and radical e-Policy reforms. It is in the interests of the Prime Minister and London's Mayor that the governing New Labour party devise an e-Manifesto that promises to build bridges across the digital and racial divide. Moreover,they should ensure that revised UK Online strategies are linked with a push for race equality and the fundamental redistribution of opportunities to the most disadvantaged people.

It is impossible to predict the precise consequences of these trends, innovations, and reconstructed e-Policies. But one thing is certain: Black people, and their supporters, are learning that the problem of the 21st century is the problem of creating cyberpower for progress and equality in the information age.

© Copyright 1997-2005 Chronicle World - first published 13/11/04
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