Danah Boyd, the author of
“Inequality: Can Social Media Resolve Social Divisions?” explores how widespread
and domestic racism has truly become in America. To demonstrate how bad it has
become, she interviews students in a part of Los Angeles where segregation has reappeared
in the school. Parts of the school occupied by white students are called “Disneyland”
while parts occupied by black students is called “Six Flags” and races never
truly mix. She finds it surprising how the students have become to accept this
as a way of life and finds it ironic the people thought that all of this racial
bias would stop after the election of President Barack Obama. While doing this,
she also analysis how social media actually plays in these elections and how it
actually tends to reinforce these social divisions instead of solving them.
To
further back up her arguments, she not only uses personal experience and
interviews, but she also events that sparked a lot of controversy, not for what
happened, but for how people responded to it. She explains how during the 2009
BET awards, people notice names on twitter that were trending, such as Neyo and
Beyoncé, who are black musicians. As soon as people saw this, some started to
make racist remarks saying that they didn’t understand why so many black people
were on TV and that they would give up twitter for this. This strengthens her
point that social media for the most part will do more bad for divisions in
society than good.
In this
article, you see many indications that there is a lot of fieldwork included
that supports what she has heard about for many years. She asks students at
other “diverse” schools why they are separated by race. These students answer
that it is because what class they take or what sports they play, not realizing
that they have been already be segregated by society like they were sixty years
before. She also notes that social media can be an indication of how bad racism
and segregation has gotten on this country, based on online friend groups and
comments on topics. If Boyd did not include this fieldwork in this essay, the
article would be in a way one sided, with no opinion or personal experience.
Because she puts this in there, the article is much more “easy to swallow” and relatable
to the reader
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