Race and the Digital: Racial Formation and 21st Century Technologies

Colorful Future

Your blog was very helpful in understanding Risam's work. Again she is yet another author/scholar that is aware of how the online world mirrors the offline world. The second question that you posed stood out to me, partly because the term "Retro-Humanities" includes a word in which I use to describe my personality and interests, which is retro (I like the twentieth century, though people of color could have been treated differently). I automatically thought of past decades when I came across that term, thinking of the eighties, seventies, sixties and so on and so forth. I then decided to investigate other definitions of the term, finding out that it means "denoting action that is directed backward or is reciprocal" and "denoting location behind". I proceeded to do the same thing with the word "humanities", which I found to mean "humaneness; benevolence" and "learning or literature concerned with human culture, especially literature, history, art, music, and philosophy". [I obtained these definitions by searching for them on Google]. What "Retro-Humanities" literally signifies using the definitions above is "human culture that retrocedes". But in my opinion, I believe "Retro-Humanities" asks and focuses on other points. They are the following: are we living in a digital age where we are not progressing, trying to create an equal world for all? Perhaps "Retro-Humanities" indicates our neutral circumstance for progress. We are not inclusive of all people, society is not welcoming everyone online. It is as if we are still living in past eras where this digital technology was not available, and where people were fighting for their civil rights. Very amazing that those scenarios still apply to people's lives in the 2010s. The fact that the term was mentioned once may be due to it being a first step for online inclusion for all.

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