GroupMe

  Late Night Show with Larry Wilmore - GroupMe App Segment   

   Racism runs rampant even in today's day and age. Years of reformation and institutional changes have brought people closer, but there is still institutionalized racism in society. Whether it is common lingo, movies, tv shows, websites - racism appears everywhere. We discussed this week in class the new forms of racial stereotyping and racial fueled stigma through phone applications. One application we discussed was "SketchFactor" which allows for individuals in public to openly post about "sketchy" citizens in public. While there were no racial implications behind the application, the application fueled a racial frenzy. Over 3/4ths of the accused in the application were black, showing that racism is still alive and well. This isn't the only application which has triggered the same reaction. 

   In perfect correlation with our class discussion on Monday, On the Late Night Show with Larry Wilmore (from this week), his panel discussed the phone application "GroupMe" which allows for shop keepers to post about sketchy people shopping in their store. It is an alert system which can be looked at by the general public, and again the majority of those accused were black. Many people strive for the feeling of security, but these anonymous applications wont secure zones, but merely enforce violence and hatred of people based off of stereotypes. The reason why racial violence declined was not only because of the civil rights movement, but also because as a nation we were globalizing. Globalizing meant migrations of people from North to South, East to West. People of color were living amongst whites, and where whites had been able to support racial fueled violence they now had to face those who they "hated." That doesn't mean racism was removed, it just meant there was more consequence for racial fueled actions.  Anonymity was removed, thus reducing violence because of face to face situations. Anonymity is a terrible concept and allows people to openly hate without consequence. Accountability is everything. 

   While many of these applications did not foresee racial profiling, it is something we cannot stop. In order to contain that though, we need to remove the anonymity of these applications so people can be held accountable for their profiling. It will be very interesting to see the progression of these apps and see if they catch on across the nation since most of them are only in localized areas.