Have you ever noticed that many "pointer" icons on computer programs, the ones you control when you move the mouse, are depicted as pointing hands, and that most often those hands are white?
Michele White is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University who is temporarily teaching at the University of California at Santa Cruz while her university recovers from Hurricane Katrina. She says that though it may seem like a small detail, such iconography presents a view of the Internet that assumes that users are white, and reinforces notions that white hands are the ones in control. Ms. White described her observations Thursday at the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, in Chicago, during a session about race and technology. She also showed several examples of advertisements for Internet services, such as one for Yahoo, in which users are consistently depicted as Caucasian and icons are always white.
She says she sees the white hand as an example of "racing the interface" and notes that such cues "really tell us who we are and tells us who’s invited." Could the white color have been chosen simply because it stands out better on the computer screen? No, she says, because other pointing icons are black.
