I Can Make You Asian

Recently, a few people have asked me to help them make their avatars Asian. In Second Life, everyone is born white. Changing race is not a trivial matter. Of course, there are color sliders that enable you to change the skin tone of your avatar. But most people use "skins" anyway--they look so much better than the default skin that you get when you join Second Life--and the overwhelming majority of skins are also white.

I assume the reason I am getting this request is that my avatar is Asian. In two cases, I have spent considerable time helping people create avatars, which is a difficult mix of reworking one's "shape" (the 3D model of your body), which again is by default set to a Caucasian physiognomy (thin pointy nose, etc.), and finding a skin that would look right on an Asian body. My own avatar took me many, many hours of tweaking before I got her right.

So I helped two of these avatars "become Asian." I'm not sure either was entirely successful, because I can only help out with the shape. They will have to find appropriate skins, which could take some traveling around. But both of them seemed happy enough.

The next day, I read an article about race in virtual worlds. Exploring the realities of race online, the author observes that even in the supposedly race-free utopia that is the Internet, racial stereotypes are pervasive. One form of this is when white people play (stereotypes of ) Asian people online. This practice, unfortunately, does not contribute to more dignified conceptualizations of race. Rather, racial stereotypes--such as the geisha or the samurai warrior--are commodified, sold, exchanged, and worn for a time.

In light of the race-change operations I had just facilitated, these words troubled me. As an American-born woman of Chinese descent, had I just sold out my own ethnicity (metaphorically speaking, that is; I did not accept any money for my help), commodified my own skin as a toy for the virtual marketplace? Neither of the women (by which I mean female avatars; I have no idea of their real life genders or races) I helped said anything that made me feel uncomfortable. Sometimes online people make jokes about Chinese restaurant menus around me. But these women didn't speak of becoming geisha or any such. And presumably if I didn't help them, they would have found a way to make themselves Asian.

I don't really have an answer.