This past weekend, I had the chance to see the box-office hit 21. The film is the story of a group of college students from MIT whose professor recruits them for an elaborate card counting operation. The group frequents Las Vegas on weekends and racks up big winnings. All is well until their goings-on arouse the suspicion of the security expert viewing them from behind a bank of computer monitors. If one accepts the ideas of Martin Kevorkian, author of Color Monitors: the Black Face of Technology in America, it is no acident that this character is portrayed by an African American.
According to Kevorkian, it seems the new stereotype for African Americans is the helpful technology expert. Kevorkian provides countless examples of films where the black man is cast as the person behind the computer monitor who saves the day by cracking the code, manipulating the data, solving the puzzle through his technical know-how. While some may see this as evidence of the great strides in the country’s racial relations since the days when the roles for African Americans were limited to minstrels, Kevorkian makes the case that today’s technological stereotypes serve as a new kind of racial injustice. By placing the black character safely behind the computer terminal, he is portrayed as the person doing the distastetful work of society.
It’s not just the drugery of much computer work that makes it so unattractive. It’s the notion of technology as a dehumanizing force, something to fear. By reinforcing the image of the African American behind the monitor, is white society reflecting its fear? Such a notion should not be dismissed. As Kevorkian writes, “Efforts to move beyond old stereotypes should be applauded, but such efforts do not preclude the mergence of new stereotypes, curiously comfortable and highly specific defaults for ‘positive representations’ of blacks” (17).
