Blog Post Nine

The website “Race- the power of an illusion” is fairly interactive and the overall design is pretty good. Some of the features are nice; it has a lot of flashy rollovers and graphics that make it appealing. Many pages use interactive quizzes and activities to present the information and are lot more enjoyable than the “go deeper” text pages. The modern design and interactivity helps add to the presentation of the subject matter. The target audience of the site is more than likely young(er)) adults so most of the formal and apparently scientific data is presented in a more user friendly manner than on most sites.

In “Menu-Driven Identities: Making Race Happen Online,” the author, Lisa Nakamura suggests that, “even websites that focus on racial identities and communities often possess interface designs that force reductive ways of defining race.” Nakamura believes that, “this produces a new kind of cybertyping that encompasses the user’s racial identity within the paradigm of the “clickable box”- one box among many on the menu of identity choices. When users are given no choice other than to select the “race” or “ethnicity” to which they belong and are given no means to define or modify the terms or categories available to them, then identities that do not appear on the menu are essentially foreclosed on and erased. This limits the ways that can happen in cyberspace.” (Nakamura 2002)

I think that the site does a good job of going beyond a “menu-driven” concept of race. I think the drop down menu theme is suggestive of a racial lumping that occurs online. Typically a webpage is considered diverse if it has representations of the major races, or at least the major American races. On the sorting people section only five classifications are given and the pictures used for the activity don’t really fit in that closely with the categories. After completing the activity a window informed me of how the census was previously limited to those racial categories and that everyone was lumped into one of those categories. The rest of the site wasn’t as all encompassing and focused on the African American race and the white race.



Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity
on the internet. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.