*Note: This will be a short post because I am currently working on my final project using Voyant, which I am very excited about!! But I felt compelled to make a post about the current debate surrounding Tara McPherson’s article.*

According to Tara McPherson’s article titled “Why are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation,” the answer to the question in my post title is “yes.” There has already been much debate on this article not only from critics in the field, but also in our Digital Pedagogy classroom. From the question of “is there anything real thing as an ideology?” to “What is she even talking about? Technology can’t be racist.” Some of the major points she brings up are the people that write about the computer industry and the fact many of them are white man, and the fact that, overall, the Digital Humanities doesn’t talk about race too much. The question of gender has been raised every so often, but not race.

I’m not sure that I am in as much disagreement with McPherson’s points as my classmate, Mark, but I do think the problem may be that McPherson’s argument is clear enough. I found myself thinking while reading the article: who is at fault here? Is it the people that create the machines? Or is the people that consume technology? McPherson cannot blame computer/IT workers who create technology for being white if they are white or for being black if they are black- they just are, they just exist. This may sound like I am making a “color-blind” statement, but that is not what I am trying to imply. Rather, I am trying to state that the market tends to embrace whiteness- white people are educated in these fields, white people are hired, white people develop the technology. So, what can we do about this? I don’t think we can blame the people who have already paved the way for the development of technology. However, we can start bringing technology and opportunities to study and develop new technologies to inner-city students and colleges, where much of the black population tend to reside. This may finally bring race to the conversation in a way it hasn’t existed before.

An interesting question, though, is is it too late? Is the DH community permanently color blind? If this is a problem, can we reverse it?

I think that our future discussion on this article, and watching the development of race in the field, will be quite interesting.