Color Monitors

Martin Kevorkian’s Color Monitors was the reading material for my master’s class, Writing for Electronic Communities this past week. In class we discussed some of the major issues we had with the book, including what some students deemed to be overtly negative and racist in nature. I cannot speak for anyone else, but after our in class discussion, I started to think more in depth about the author’s intentions and my own reactions to the book. At first I was a little confused, especially being from an isolated area in England, I did not grow up in a society where racism against African Americans was an issue, therefore I did not have the contextual history to draw from, but once my teacher started to try and make a case for the author, that he was not trying to aggravate the reader, but instead was attempting to open up a discussion about contemporary racism. I believe now that perhaps Kevorkian was just trying to explain how technology could be a new medium to hide black men ‘behind’ – a remediation of servitude in the guise of something benign…what better way to hide stereotypes other than behind intellectual and technologized pursuit?

Color Monitors is a tough nut to crack – I think that to be able to access what Kevorkian was trying to discuss, the ‘reader’ needs to be able to put aside their own baggage, their instinctive reactions of defensiveness and its not an easy thing for some people to do…including myself.