"The Web is not a post-racial utopia"

"When the game was first opened up, all players were given the same default avatar: a bald white man. With the most recent update, Rust’s lead developer, Garry Newman, introduced different avatars of different racial origins into the mix.  However, they did so with a twist — unlike typical massively multiplayer online role-playing games, Rust does not allow players to choose the race of their avatar. Instead, they are assigned one at random. Newman explained the change in a blog post:

Everyone now has a pseudo-unique skin tone and face. Just like in real life, you are who you are — you can’t change your skin color or your face...

The reactions reflect a failure on the part of some gamers to recognize that whiteness is a race at all. These players appear to think of whiteness as a neutral type of embodiment, the universal category of humanity against which all those who do “have” a race (anyone who is not white) are compared...

Of course, in trying to prove just how “colorblind” they are by making reference to these fantasy skin colors, these gamers conveniently opt out of real-world discussions of race and racism. They imply that the way to end discrimination is simply to ignore it, that the best way to pursue a post-racial virtual utopia is to erase the existence of people of color all together and to replace actual racial diversity with a rainbow of fantasy races, all of which are treated equally and none of which faced a long — and, to white gamers, potentially discomforting — history of institutional oppression."
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/5/the-online-game-that-proves-the-web-is-not-a-post-racial-utopia.html?fb_action_ids=10204713410055859&fb_action_types=og.shares

I love this, lovveeee that these white gamers had to experience that moment of discomfort at being assigned the wrong race. Looking in a mirror and seeing someone else and being told to accept it or abandon that experience entirely.

People who are not white have had to develop the ability to see themselves in other people, in order to feel at all a part of popular media, and there is this incredibly bittersweet thing for me when I do have moments of representation and I have this bigger and more enjoyable experience than I normally do and I also want to cry because I realize that that's what it's supposed to feel like all of the time.
(Credit to JD)