Rising East Online

Multiculturalism and the ‘war on terror’

Race and the New Digital Consensus

—Emmanuel Ohajah

‘If effectively applied, technology can reconnect the excluded, empower and enhance their opportunities.’

So said Jim Fitzpatrick, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, writing in Inclusion Through Innovation: Tackling Social Exclusion Through New Technologies (a Social Exclusion Unit final report), November 2005.

Despite the Dot Com crash of 2000, politicians still express great faith in the capacity of communications technology to change British society for the better.

One area of modern life currently receiving the technological treatment is race. Historically racial differences were largely condemned as being problematic and a barrier to non-white citizens gaining equal status in a British society that was largely characterised as white. Today the state seeks to celebrate what it sees as distinctive about its non-white citizens, and accept them on this basis – all in the name of multiculturalism.

An early example of the conjuncture where race meets new technology was back in 2002 when the BBC decided to brand a technology that few understood, with the imagery of multiculturalism. The promos for BBC 1Xtra DAB digital radio provided a menu of black urban stereotypes and passed them off as multicultural Britain. Ghetto-fabulous images of bikes, gold, dogs, cars and run-down, chaotic council estates full of testosterone-fuelled ‘youts’ charging around scaring people, in particular women, was set to a Hip-Hop soundtrack. The trailer was ostensibly a celebration of urban culture in all its complex diversity, yet to those of us who were targeted by it but did not identify with it, the message was old-fashioned, crude and simple: the culture of black Britain is criminal and dysfunctional and it is largely on this basis that we (the cultural elite) relate to it.

Similarly, in the successful programme Pimp My Ride, MTV, the global youth brand, is currently using the more established technology of television to confirm old stereotypes even as they are presented as new multiculturalism. This show takes the enduring image of the fur coat-wearing, flash car-driving, black male pimp, and gives it a new twist. If you are chosen from the thousands of hopefuls, a televisual pimp (the US rapper, Xibit) promises to transform your old banger of a car into a pimp mobile complete with sound system and pink dice.

The process of relating to blacks as stereotypes or in today’s parlance as culturally different members of society, is now so accepted that Pimp My Ride has now been remade for the UK market, with well-known English Wigga Tim Westwood cast in the role of chief pimp.

Unequal treatment of Britain’s non-white citizens is still a defining feature of British society. The fact that, despite this ongoing discrimination, there is little in the way of organised opposition to inequality, makes black marginalisation a safe commercial option that can be packaged up and sold as a product or used to brand products and services.

Ironically, the people behind BBC’s DAB 1xtra and the young lifestyle channel MTV are actually seeking to represent black people in a positive and empowering way in accordance with influential contemporary concepts of cultural diversity and multiculturalism. But somehow the song remains the same. Similarly, the cyclical association of ‘black’ and ‘crime’ remains unbroken in the urban myth of African email scammers.

It took a several years of hammering home a flimsy connection between Nigeria and online crime, but today to mention email and Nigeria in the same breath conjures up the bogeyman of the Nigerian email scammer. A representative article published by Slate at the height of the Nigerian Email Scam panic suggested that Internet Cafes in West Africa were full of criminals.

‘Walk into an Internet cafe in Lagos, and chances are that a good percentage of the terminals are occupied by men masquerading as Laurent Kabila's long-lost son or as a rogue official at the Central Bank of Nigeria.’
—The Nigerian Nightmare Who's sending you all those scam e-mails? Brendan I. Koerner. Oct. 22, 2002 Slate

BBC journalist John Simpson described a Nigerian scam which he uncovered. This time the electronic means of delivery was the old-fashioned fax machine. The fax Simpson received said that he had won £494,000 from a lottery he had not even entered. Most people would have put it in the bin, but he decided to investigate further:

‘All hope evaporated the moment the call went through, however. There was a Mr Bobby Williams at the other end, and he obviously came from Nigeria. Nigeria is one of my favourite countries on earth, but it has more than its fair share of scoundrels, and they have spread worldwide.’
—Simpson on Sunday: Had I won the Spanish lottery? Apparently, yes. Telegraph.co.uk 05/10/2003)

Today mainstream newspapers constantly reference articles relating to online crime with a remark about Nigerian email scams. The comments may have been toned down but still suggest that any electronic correspondence from Nigeria should be treated with either the utmost caution, or derision.

Whether it is black people in Britain or in West Africa, cultural diversity understands society as being composed of people who behave in culturally predetermined ways and relates to them accordingly. Through the prism of digital radio and other communications channels, black youth are seen as intrinsically dangerous and unruly, while Nigerians enter the electronic world as online scammers hard-wired with dubious moral standards.

Multiculturalism and diversity are concepts in keeping with the re-casting of inequality as part of the social order – natural or cultural or both, each now seems as fixed as the other. And as ‘new technology’ becomes old and mainstream, it is playing a part in confirming old stereotypes in this new consensus.

But as well as acting as an instrument of closure, communications technology is being called upon to open up the body politic to those who have not previously accessed it. The British government has bought heavily into the idea that it can use mobile telephony and the internet to entice the youthful population back to the democratic process. The idea is that technology can make voting for political parties as popular as voting in Big Brother. With research carried out during the general election 2005 suggesting that voter turnout amongst black and minority ethnic communities could have been as low as 47 per cent, and much lower for 18 to 24 year-olds, the political elite is particularly interested in using technology to relate to young black non-voters, patronisingly referred to as ‘the hard to reach’.

‘A host of television and radio programmes such as ITV1's Pop Idol and Channel 4's Big Brother encourage viewer polls using telephone voting, SMS (Short Message Service) text messaging or internet voting. With such a proliferation of the method, it is difficult not to conclude that there is popular support for e-voting, among a significant proportion of citizens.’
—Implementing Electronic Voting in the UK, Office of the Deputy Prime Minster, 2005.

That this approach to politics is akin to waving a shiny object under the beak of a magpie, seems to have escaped the author of this policy document.

But Britain does not have a monopoly on the multiculturalism debate. Indeed ideas of diversity and multiculturalism resonate differently in other national contexts. In Britain, ‘multiculturalism’ serves to recognise, organise and institutionalise the differences within society. On a recent visit to Malaysia, however, I noticed that multiculturalism was seen there as the means of stressing commonalities rather than differences. In a dynamic region like South East Asia, differences are the last thing politicians need to stress - not just when they require everyone to pull in the direction of development and nation-building. In the context of a commonly shared project, promoting ethnic differences is seen as a potential problem that could set communities against each other and deflect focus from the bigger picture.

21st century digital technologies suggest alternative ways of organising society. They also confirm that we do not need to live in the past: we have the technology for a different future. Unfortunately the British government, media and other institutions appear intent on bottling old prejudices in shiny new bottles. In doing so the idea of a global village based on the equal status of all has experienced deep fractures along lines of race and nationality. These require more than a technical fix to put right.

Emmanuel Ohajah lives in Leyton, London E6. He works in IT and community.

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