So it is kind of intentional that I have been writing about diversity as of late, whether it be intercultural, workplace or literature diversity. As a web developer, I have to always be thinking about building websites that communicate to and are accessible to all people. I recently went to a talk by Rob Larsen, a front-end developer and author of The Uncertain Web. He made some really good points. Essentially he says that it is time to embrace web diversity.
By web diversity, he means identifying and embracing your online audience, no matter their technological know-how or access. To do this, Larsen suggests focusing on website solutions that are optimized, not absolute. With the rapid growth of mobile technology use, an optimized website should look good on a computer, mobile phone or tablet. More than half of the world’s Internet traffic today comes from mobile devices. Google just announced that its search engines will now give preference to mobile-friendly website.
Developers also have to create websites that look good on all browsers – Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and, yes, even Internet Explorer. While Windows’ problematic browser is reviled among design professionals, Internet Explorer is still the most widely used browser in the world.
Sometimes designers and developers have so many tech bias that we forget that most of the world doesn’t use or have access to the latest, cutting edge technology. MacBooks and iPhones are pretty awesome, but most people use PCs and Androids. I personally use a PC and a Mac simulator to build websites and my mobile is a BlackBerry. Yes, people still use BlackBerrys! I use it because I need a real QWERTY keyboard for typing the dozens of emails and texts daily. I am also a government contractor, and many of the agencies I do work for require that I use a BlackBerry for security purposes.
Most people are not that tech-savvy, so it is always better to design websites for functionality first, like the three-click rule, where users should be able to find anything on a website within three clicks.
Web diversity also means embracing all abilities and disabilities. There are approximately one billion people with disabilities worldwide and websites need to address their needs appropriately.
For example, try using your website without a mouse and a keyboard. If you are not able to use the site by only touching the screen, it is time to redesign the website to better accommodate those with motor disabilities. You also have to take into consideration visual blindness, poor eyesight and color blindness when you use certain colors, text and images.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a good place to learn more about accessibility issues. Embracing accessibility provides an added benefit for all users, regardless of ability. For example, closed captioning was originally designed for hearing impaired users, but it also benefits those watching online videos in a noisy environment and people learning the language being spoken in the video and need to follow the transcription.
The Web should be as diverse as the people using it.
Last Saturday, I was invited to be on a panel discussion about women in ICT careers for a group of teenaged girls aspiring for future STEM jobs, as part of an International Girls in ICT Day program. I was asked to discuss my work as a web developer and entrepreneur. Following the discussion, I spent a couple of hours showing the girls some tricks to designing a website.
I posed a question to the girls: “What is good design.” Most of them thought I was talking about the aesthetics of a website. I then told them that my definition of good design is a system that creates a solution to a problem efficiently and creatively. Yes, it is important to have a nice-looking website and that is what attracts most users initially, but website functionality is what makes users want to stay and come back to a website.
Here is what I think good website design should be:
Easy for the user to understand
Advocates for the user and commercially successfully
Needs to understand the business side and supports the brand
Knowing how to work in a collaborative manner and be able to communicate design concepts
Showing skills that help a designer stand out from the crowd
Showcasing cutting edge and futuristic design concepts
Good design concepts work in many different industries beyond web development. Creators of products and services are always thinking about what makes good design. Who better than Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive to explain how good design works in industrial production!
A couple of weeks ago I had a really interesting conversation with my friends Linda and Reginald about the need to have more books in K-12 schools representing diverse authors and perspectives. This talk was spurred on by a recent article by science fiction writer K. Tempest Bradford who challenged readers to stop reading books written by heterosexual, cisgendered white males for a year. (FYI – cisgendered means someone who psychologically matches the gender they were assigned to at birth, as opposed to transgendered. It’s a new term to me too!).
Bradford says she grew tired of reading other science fiction in mainstream magazines that were mostly written by straight, white guys. So she took on the challenge to only read works by women, people of color and LGBT writers for one year. After the year-long “sabbatical,” Bradford said that “cutting that one demographic out of [her] reading list greatly improved [her] enjoyment of reading short stories” and that she now has “a new understanding of what kind of fiction [she would] enjoy most, what kind of writers are likely to write it, and how different the speculative fiction landscape looks when you adjust the parallax.”
Bradford is not the only one who took on this radical way of reading books. Australian writer Sunili Govinnage also took the challenge herself to only read books by writers of color, and then realized “just how white [her] reading world was.”
Now back to my discussion, my friend Linda is a half-white, half-Puerto Rican high school English teacher and a mother of a nine-year-old daughter, and my other friend Reginald is a gay, black man from Trinidad who works in the adolescent book publishing industry. As you already know, I am a writer who runs a digital imprint, do advocacy for my local public library and has worked in a multicultural bookstore before. The three of us are in total agreement that schools should have reading lists that represent diverse writers. Linda likes the position Bradford and Govinnage take on multicultural school reading and would like to see more books by writers of many marginalized backgrounds in high schools. She says she also encourages her daughter to read diverse literature.
“I think my school district does an so-so job with multicultural writers, but their ideas of ‘multicultural’ is reading Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes during black history month,” Linda said. “I am tired of teaching mostly about white guy writers. Everyone knows who Mark Twain and Shakespeare are, but Esmeralda Santiago, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri and Octavia Butler are great writers too who need more attention and are more contemporary. I would like my school to have more required reading lists to include other people of color, even lesser known writers, and writers with disabilities.”
Based on his 12 years in the publishing industry, Reginald said that it is still hard to increase the number of diverse writers in schools and in bookstores in general. He said many schools have reading curricula that are decades old and don’t reflect the changing racial demographics in America today. This has mostly to do with the lack of people representing marginalized groups in positions of power in both school districts and publishing houses to make decisions about making more diverse literature available to students and readers of all ages for that matter. He also said that some school districts find it easier to stick to “tried and tested” known authors, which are usually dead white guys and occasionally diverse writers like Maya Angelou and Ralph Ellison, because it is easier to teach and cheaper to buy mass market copies of Huckleberry Finn or The Great Gatsby than a lesser known book, which is usually written by a marginalized writer.
However, Reginald had an even more radical take on diverse reading that even Linda and I were thinking: “Schools should put a moratorium on dead, straight, white guys, at least at the high school level. High school is great time to expose students to diverse ideas and views, since teenagers are beginning to develop their own identities and perspectives.”
As for his own reading habits: “I don’t read books by white guys anymore. Those books don’t reflect my life, my color, my culture, my masculinity or my sexuality.”
Reginald said he likes reading James Baldwin, Thomas Glave and E. Lynn Harris. Linda said she had similar reading habits. “I only seek out books by black, Asian and Latino writers. Their experiences reflect my own experiences as a person of color.”
I understood where they were both coming from, but I was actually kind of shocked by the fact that a school teacher and a book publishing executive would take such an extreme, and possibly narrow-minded view on literature.
So what do I think about this matter?
I like reading books by all kinds of authors – black, Asian, Latino, Middle-Eastern, LGBT, disabled, women, men, political, apolitical, religious, atheist, and, yeah, even some dead, straight, cisgendered white guys! While I enjoy reading books by people who I have a shared background with, reading to me for the most part is more about learning about other people’s experiences and perspectives. In order to be a well-rounded person in today’s society, you have to understand everyone’s perspective, even if it offends or scares you sometimes. That is how we evolve as a people.
If you have been following my writings for a while, you know that I like to read biographies and books about politics and history, and I write long, exhaustive essays about them. I like learning about how other people think and how their thinking shapes society. Two of my favorite writers are Upton Sinclair and Ernest Hemingway – two dead, straight, cisgendered, white guys. I am also a big fan of Richard Wright not just because he is black, but also because he is a great storyteller. Although he is best known for his racially-charged fiction work, I actually prefer his non-fiction travel writing like Pagan Spain, Black Power and The Color Curtain, which I wrote about last week.
Currently, I am rereading (yeah, because rereading is fundamental) The Politics of Change by Michael Manley, the charismatic former prime minister of Jamaica. Obama’s recent trip to the Caribbean to meet with CARICOM sparked my interest in reading Manley’s most influential work again. I didn’t read it just because he is black and Jamaican like me; I read it because he has interesting views on development economics and social policy.
As far as schools are concerned, yes, more diverse authors and perspectives need to be added to reading lists, but don’t cut out the white dudes. Everyone’s perspective should be welcomed at the table of ideas.
But maybe I’m wrong here.
If Linda and Reginald feel this way, there must be others. Please leave a comment below or email me about your reading habits. Does the author’s background influence if you will read their book? What are you reading now and why?
A couple of weeks ago, journalist Howard French brought attention to an ongoing problem in American journalism regarding coverage – or lack thereof – of Africa and indirectly about the developing world in general. In his open letter to the American TV news magazine 60 Minutes, which was co-signed by dozens of other journalists and academics, French states that voices from the African continent are muted and reduced to racial stereotypes. He pointed to recent segments from the program that only interviewed “white saviors” and featured jungle animals. He also took issue with the fact that no actual Africans were interviewed for a 60 Minutes piece on Ebola.
When I was in journalism school, this reporting phenomenon was called coup and earthquake syndrome. The developing world is only covered by the Western media when there is a war, natural disaster, or some other atrocity in a biased manner. International news coverage is already bad in America. Still, when you add in the constant negative news from the developing world, it does a disservice to both the people who are covered and Western newsreaders.
This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Bandung conference, an international meeting of 29 African and Asian countries in Indonesia. While this conference is today considered a minor bookmark in Cold War history, Bandung was significant in not only jump-starting the Non-Aligned Movement but also it was the first time the developing world had the opportunity to discuss a variety of social, economic, and political concerns in their own countries and have a voice on an international platform. While it might seem significant to see and hear from emerging African and Asian leaders, the Western media, for the most part, ignored the conference.
In 1955 most of the countries in attendance had recently become independent from their colonial rulers. They were starting to understand their role in a world divide by the capitalist United States and communist Russia.
Famed American writer Richard Wright was intrigued by this mass gathering representing over one billion people of color. As a black man who lived in the Jim Crow South and wrote about his experiences in Black Boy and Native Son, Wright believed that African Americans, Africans, and Asians shared the same common suffering of racism, colonialism, and mental slavery.
Wright once said in a 1947 interview that a Black person in America “is intrinsically a colonial subject, but one who lives not in China, India, or Africa, but next door to his conquerors, attending their schools, fighting their wars, and laboring in their factories. The American Negro problem, therefore, is but a facet of the global problem that splits the world into two: handicraft vs. mass production; family vs. the individual; tradition vs. progress; personality vs. collectivity; the East (the colonial people) vs. the West (exploiters of the world).”
With a growing interest in global affairs regarding race and identity politics, Wright decided to attend Bandung as a credentialed journalist representing the anti-communist Congress of Cultural Freedom. He wrote a series of essays about his trip, which were subsequently turned into his book The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference.
I recently reread this book and found Wright to be an amazing journalist and storyteller. The Color Curtain is possibly the most comprehensive media coverage about Bandung simply because Wright actually interviewed conference attendees and, thus, was able to capture the gathering’s true essence and nature. I highly recommend reading it!
Throughout his writings, Wright talks to Indonesians and other Asians from various life experiences about what the conference meant to them in the post-colonial context. He talked to them about their views on family, religion, education, and politics in Indonesia and their former colonial rulers in the Netherlands. What you learn from the interviews is that racial and class identity mean different things to different interviewees. The idea of a particular race and identity is not confined to specific countries or regions.
Wright also talked about other interesting people he met in Bandung. One story from his book that stood out to me was when he talked to a white American woman who was scared of her black American female roommate. The white woman thought the black woman got up in the middle of the night to practice voodoo using a “blue light” wand and spent an hour in the bathroom and came out lighter-skinned. When Wright probed the scared woman further, he realized that the black woman was most likely straightening her kinky hair with a hot comb and applying skin lightening cream, and didn’t want the white woman to see her real black self. Wright found it amazing that at a conference designed to address racism, the white woman reduced the black woman to a racial stereotype. The black woman felt she had to change her natural appearance to fit Western beauty standards because of her own mental colonialism.
In his interviews, Wright found that all the attendees had high hopes and dreams for their new future. Bandung had a full agenda, with discussions about racism in South Africa, colonial tensions between France and North Africa, the Palestine question, and if China, India, and Egypt were allying. However, if you only read the limited coverage from the Western media at the time about the conference, you would have had a different impression.
The United States refused to officially recognize the conference, citing that it was a gathering to recruit more countries into adopting communism. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said this in a radio interview in March 1955: “Three of the Asian parties to the Pacific Charter, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand, may shortly be meeting with other Asian countries at a so-called Afro-Asian conference.” The U.S. government then began a larger propaganda campaign in the media against the conference.
Much was said at the time about “Red” China’s presence at Bandung and it’s communist “intentions.” But if you read TheColor Curtain, you find out the intentions were far from the political Left. A couple of Wright’s interviewees said bluntly that a communism infusion in Indonesia would be somewhat impossible since 90 percent of the country is Muslim. Most of the other countries represented at the conference were also deeply religious – Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Shintoist, Christian – and their religions conflicted with atheist communism. Even China recognized that it had to address the conference differently, mainly because of the religious and cultural differences throughout Asia and Africa.
The Western media also focused on the “problem” of excluding white delegates at the conference, which is interesting since non-whites were always excluded from such discussions about their own countries during colonialism. Wright wrote about how the world’s media covered Bandung, including quoting British journalist and government propagandist Sefton Delmar who said that the conference was a “political jamboree” that was “very exclusive and colour conscious.”
From the Examiner of Tasmania (Australia), December 1954: “Their invitation to twenty-five nations, including Communist China, but excluding all Western countries, to a conference in April, could be the beginning of an upsurge of racial hatred against the West.” Newsweek compared Bandung to the impending “Yellow Peril,” as it foresaw a global African-Asian menace’s formation.
But not all the media coverage was bad. The Christian Science Monitor said this: “… The West is excluded. Emphasis is on the colored nations of the world. And for Asia, it means that at last, the destiny of Asia is being determined in Asia, and not in Geneva, or Paris, or London or Washington. Colonialism is out. Hands-off is the word. Asia is free. This is perhaps the great historic event of our century.”
At the end of the conference, a communique was created, with the attendees addressing their grievances to the Western world. While the communique had the best intentions and sounded great on paper, even Wright admits that some of the grievances would be harder to address because of their complexity. Wright interviewed an MIT social scientist who believed that tangibles like economic development and international trade would be easier to help build bridges between the Western world and the former colonial world. However, intangibles like attitudes and perceptions will be harder to break for both worlds. This is why there is still this awkwardness and bias about how the Western media covers the developing world today. Perceptions, stereotypes, and attitudes are hard to break.
Wright said this about the media in 1955, which is still relevant in 2015:
“It was strange, but, in this age of swift communication, one had to travel thousands of miles to get a set of straight, simple facts. One of the greatest ironies of the twentieth century is that when communication has reached its zenith, when the human voice can encircle the globe in a matter of seconds when a man can project the image of his face thousands of miles, it is almost impossible to know with any degree of accuracy the truth of a political situation only a hundred miles distant! Propaganda jams the media of communication.”
So it is kind of intentional that I have been writing about diversity as of late, whether it be intercultural, workplace or literature diversity. As a web developer, I have to always be thinking about building websites that communicate to and are accessible to all people. I recently went to a talk by Rob Larsen, a front-end developer and author of The Uncertain Web. He made some really good points. Essentially he says that it is time to embrace web diversity.
