Gentle Reader, as I read through Senft and Noble’s essay “Race and Social Media,” I could not help but think of what W. E. B. DuBois brings up in his book The Souls of Black Folk. This resemblance was especially strong at the final section of the essay titled “Addressing the Problem” where it talks about, like in DuBois work, the problem of racial tension being placed on a group of people. Although in The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois addresses the issue of black people being blamed as the problem, and in this section of “Race and Social Media,” the finger is pointed at white people, there is still correspondence with the overall concerns of the color-line. Mixed-raced author Charles Chesnutt, who despite appearing white (much like Homer Plessy) identified himself as black,  describes his writing as “not so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of whites.”

The problem is neither black or white, although I would argue it unfixable. I do not see how there can ever be an answer to the problem of racial tension because even the generally accepted neoliberal, color-blind view of race still holds a “cemented” and often over-emphasized view, which Galloway brings up in “Does the Whatever Speak?”  I find myself somewhat unqualified arguing over topics like this though, probably due to being white myself. I can identify with the idea of whites actually being the problem, which can be highlighted in a (for some reason) uncanny way with this quote from “Race and Social Media”:

As we noted earlier, people of color have long used the Internet to gather together. Whites, too, have created spaces devoted to racial identity although as Jesse Daniels notes, at these sites tend to come with overtly racist political agendas.

I can never imagine a website created and monitored by whites for the promotion of “white” culture without it being dubbed as racist, supremacist, or at least exceptionalist. I am in no way arguing that there should be websites like this, although I am just interested in what the fuel is behind this. I understand the argument of the history of white supremacy, but will this ever go away? Is this all that is behind it? Of course, groups of white people have brought along some large problems within society, but will the times ever change that there is no line between race, or even boundaries that races have to follow? Will this only come when all people are mixed-race? I see it as a problem of coming to terms; but when the original problem that needs to find closure is simply too large, there seems to be no real answer. Or at least for now.