| Sumario: | The article deliberates on African American women, technology, and identity. Race and gender take on a number of different forms when they intersect with technology, although most of those permutations resemble their real time counterparts, where atavistic attitudes and practices exist alongside progressive views and activities. As author Lisa Nakamura argues in Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, the myth of cyberspace as a raceless, genderless, and sexuality-free space is one that thrives in a variety of chat room and other on-line forums. Nakamura argues that race is constructed as a matter of aesthetics, or finding the color that one likes, rather than as a matter of ethnic identity or shared cultural referents. The fantasy of skin color divorced from politics, oppression or racism seems to also celebrate it as infinitely changeable, customizable; as entirely elective as well as political. One point on which all of these studies agree is that the number of African American Internet and computer users has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few years, and most studies note that this jump coincides with the rapid decrease in hardware prices.
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