September/October 2000 | Contents

ON RACE, ONLINE:
The Digital Afterlife of a Powerful Series

BY LAUREN JANIS

Their opinions are strong. Their comments are personal. Their reactions are thoughtful. Long treatises full of theories, statistics, and quotes alternate with intimate narratives. They are all talking about race. Yet they are doing it in a place where skin color can't be seen.

To accompany its recent series, "How Race Is Lived in America," The New York Times set up discussion areas on its Web site. Forums were keyed to specific stories, and, to prime the pump, kicked off with specific questions. For example, the forum for the feature about cops working in Harlem asks, "Do you think cops think about race too little or not enough?" The site also features a questionnaire that is more loosely connected to the series and which takes a more personal approach, asking questions like, "What was your most painful or uncomfortable moment having to do with race?" The Web site has given an online afterlife to the six-week series, which ran periodically from June 4 to July 16.

But can a real conversation about race take place in a faceless, raceless virtual arena? The answer seems to be yes. In early August, readers were still submitting comments steadily, revealing their thoughts and concerns about race relations. Conversations weave from affirmative action and racial violence to Jesse Jackson and James Baldwin. Topics broadly span slavery and discrimination, and then narrow in focus: one woman recalls the devastation she felt when her mother told her she could never be a Mouseketeer because of her skin color; another woman tells of the years she spent in Tanzania with her African husband, when children would touch her to see if the white would rub off. While participants speak freely and intimately, they remain hidden on the Web, known only by their user names -- someone2b, buddha232, hodgepodge9 -- and reachable only via virtual means.

Yet most people choose not to hide. I am black, I am white, they write. Many divulge their real names and where they live. "I think the fascinating thing about the Internet is that in a situation where people can be anything they want to be, most people behave like themselves," says Jed Miller, interactive editor at The New York Times on the Web and manager of the race forums. And with a topic as heated as race, he says the Internet provides a uniquely welcoming space: "The consequences of speaking out on race in what I call 'real space' are sometimes very heavy, very severe. So remarkably, that which allows you anonymity increases the chances that you're going to speak in a more personal way."

Sig Gissler, a professor of journalism at Columbia University who runs workshops on journalism, race, and ethnicity, agrees. In face-to-face racial forums, Gissler notices that participants often edit themselves. "People get clutched up," he says. "The white people are afraid of being tagged as racist, and the black people don't want to be seen as whining diversity nags. So there's a mutual withholding." While Gissler warns that real progress in race relations comes only from human interaction, he sees online discussions as a good place to start. "The Internet can facilitate some candor," Gissler says. "It opens up a valuable vein of conversation and new chambers of possibility."

Miller attributes the quality of discourse about "How Race is Lived in America" to the salience and sensitivity of the subject of race. In past Times forums on other subjects, from Elián González to the Yankees, Miller says he has had to edit more obscenities and personal attacks from the discussion. The race forums have been unusually respectful and civil. "They seem genuinely eager to take advantage of the space," Miller says. "Not just to express themselves, but to encounter other points of view and respond to them. This is definitely another level of eloquence and articulateness."

The Times is not the first paper to publish a series on race, of course, or to note how the topic inspires reader feedback. Back in 1993, when the Web was still just what spiders spun, The Times-Picayune in New Orleans published "Together/Apart: The Myth of Race." To accompany the six-part series, the paper set up a telephone hotline to invite readers' reactions, and ended up publishing fifty pages of the phoned-in comments. Jim Amoss, editor of The Times-Picayune, found an unexpected forthrightness among the readers. "I was surprised by the candor and degree to which people wanted to be named and identified by race," Amoss says. "People shared their deepest well of emotion and thoughts, both moving and ugly." Amoss says he would have used the Internet to keep the conversation going if it had existed then. "Talking will not solve the problem," he says. "But it's a necessary first step."

Lauren Janis is an assistant editor at CJR.