What Your Web Branding Suggests About Your Politics

Here are four political websites I came across many times before I realized that they weren’t what I initially thought they were. I usually surf the web quickly looking for specific information, and I am not actively trying to find websites to add to my feed reader. However, after third or fourth chance encounters, I ended up delving deeper and finding out that I was wrong about Feministing, Feministe, Asian-Nation, and ModelMinority.com. These websites weren’t actually exclusionary; they just looked that way.

Feministing.com (logo)

Feministing’s logo is a reappropriation of the mudflap girl icon but which is “flipping the bird” or giving the finger. While the mudflap girl is only in silhouette, the silhouette looks like that of a Caucasian woman. If the woman is black, she is a black woman with a wig, relaxed hair, or Caucasian hair genes. If she is an East Asian, she is an exceptionally buxom East Asian woman. In any case, the mudflap girl image that was designed for male truckers in the 70s was probably not of a woman of colour.

First impression: White feminism
Perceived audience: White women
People who may be turned off: Women of colour who don’t want to deal with white feminists who cry “fuck the patriarchy” without acknowledging the white supremacy in society.
Reality: Surprisingly, feminists of colour are well-represented in the comments, and at least one of the staff is a feminist of colour.

Feministe.us (logo)

Feministe’s logo appears to be a reappropriation of a retro image of a little, blonde, white girl, except she’s holding some kind of long gun.

First impression: White feminism
Perceived audience: White women
People who may be turned off: Women of colour who are tired of a white female representing the face of feminism; people who are at risk of being shot; people who are wary of gun-toting white people from the 50s wearing overalls.
Reality: Although this logo is blatantly whiter than Feministing’s logo, Feministe has great posts analyzing racism and had blogged about the disappearance of brownfemipower from the web and its related issues four days before Feministing. (Fortunately, brownfemipower is back online.)

Asian-Nation.org (domain name)

Asian-Nation.org’s domain name was chosen by the owner at the spur of the moment and “generally represents the contributions that Asians have made to the history and culture of American society.” However, the name “Asian Nation” is too visually similar to “Asian Nationalism” and the idea of an Asian nation suggests an “Asian invasion”.

First Impression: Asian Nationalism
Perceived audience: Asian nationalists or Asian supremacists
People who may be turned off: Asians who don’t want to be perceived as taking over the nation and being an invasion.
Reality: Asian-Nation is actually authored by a sociology professor that likes to study demographic data related to Asian Americans and hates stereotypes about Asian Americans. I like this informational site enough to link to it on my side bar, but it’s linked as “Asian Americans 101″ because I cannot bring myself to put a link called “Asian-Nation” on my blogroll.

ModelMinority.com (domain name)

Ironically, one of the recurring themes at ModelMinority.com is dispelling the model minority myth. It’s as if the site’s author registered the domain name, started reading up on the concept of the “model minority” because of it, and then suddenly found out that it was a dangerous myth created by Republicans to silence People of Colour, but by then it was already too late.

First Impression: Asian Supremacism
Perceived audience: Asian supremacists who believe that they are intellectually superior and that blacks and Latinos are intellectually inferior
People who may be turned off: Asians who hate the model minority stereotype; Asians who are not Asian supremacists; antiracist Asians; Asians who self-identify as People of Colour.
Reality: ModelMinority.com is an informative site that includes academic research news about Asian Americans, but the majority of the readership seems to fit the profile of the “Perceived audience” described above. Adding yet another layer of irony is the fact that many of the commenters appear to lack the intelligence to read and comprehend the article they are commenting on, and continue to maintain the belief that they are of superior intelligence. I cannot add this link to my side bar because of these problems. Notamodelminority.com, on the other hand, would be a great domain name.