Cyber Racism: When Online Play Is Not All Fun and Games

President Trump has never been in short supply of offensive comments against the world at large. Leening on the racist side, he launched hate-fueled speeches and displayed ridiculously intolerant attitudes against women, Muslims, Mexicans, journalists, the disabled, black, and Native Americans. The latter group embodied, in his view, a state sanctioned monopoly over US land-based casinos and unwelcome competition to his own gambling strip on the East Coast.

Now, as a side effect of Trump ascending to office and in his name, the disruptive presence of white-male dominated supremacist groups in Charlottesville adds injury to past insult.

In light of recent events, bigotry has received a well-deserved backlash (although not unilateral, the Oval Office taking leave of absence on this one) from both top CEOs who quit the Presidential business council and the big tech that finally decided to spruce up their social sites and payment platforms of all the hate players out there.

But if GoDaddy, Facebook, Google, Apple, Paypal, and the rest of the digital A-team can squeeze out abuse and hate crimes from the online equation, the gambling and gaming chat rooms still provide fertile ground for discriminatory slurs and offensive language.

Granted, there are corners in the gambling world- like Takebonus ,where the design, the scope of the games, and the code of conducts do not leave room for much Heil waving and torch-lighting.

The law is clear when it comes to dealing in illegal products online. Drugs, unregulated gambling, and weapons are banned.

However, damaging as these tools can be, the Web regulators have to first admit and then take stand against the a more elusive enemy: online racism.

Don’t hate the medium, hate the player

In 2011, a study called “Deviant bodies, stigmatized identities, and racist acts: examining the experiences of African-American gamers in Xbox Live” tracking the experience of a group of black Xbox gamers in Microsoft’s cyberspace showed how the participants were subjected to daily racist and abbusive comments on the online platform.

The white, male-dominated hegemony in online gambling and digital sports betting has produced many other victims, from players who are self-declared homosexuals to girls or older gamers.

Using their cloaks of anonymity and online aliases, gamers have come to think that delivering racial slurs on and on again will bring no real consequences.

But the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales comes to disagree. In the span of one year from 2015 to 2016, the prosecutors have brought to trial more than 15,000 hate crime offenders who have targeted people based on religious, racial, sexual, and gender differences.

Indian Blood will pay for a casino. Or, the tricks of reverse racism

In the 1980s, the US has decided to pay its dues for all the harm inflicted on the Native American communities. Acting on the country’s top capitalist impulses, the government thought to make amends by enabling the tribes to earn revenue by building money-making establishments (aka casinos, or the Native American Wall Street) free of tax.

The concept came to be known under the name of “Indian Blood” since any Native American entrepreneurs wishing to benefit from this federal largesse had to obtain a Certificate of Degree of Indian or Alaska Native Blood from the Interior Department.

Needless to say, the strategy of claiming Indian blood became popular overnight as many, including Donald Trump in his past rage about his businesses being under pressure from the emergent Native American casinos, vied for membership within an Indian tribe.

Is affirmative action towards a previously discriminated group not a form of officially-sanctioned reverse racism?

Vitriolic and hateful language in the gaming chat rooms needs to be addressed on a wider platform. Recent censorship by the social media platforms should only be considered a temporary solution.

Otherwise, the bigotry will just move underground and raise in numbers there only to spill on the surface in gushes of crime later on, like we’ve seen in Charlottesville.

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