Teach42

I admit it. I’m slowly but surely getting hooked on Second Life. And the more I look into it, the more applications I see for education, and of course Discovery Education.

However, while looking for articles on building, skins and avatars, I came across an article entitled “The Skin You’re In“. It details a user who switched her skin from Caucasian to African-American for three months. It wasn’t meant to be done as a social experiment or anything, she was just doing a friend a favor who created skins for avatars. But she found that once she donned the new look, many people treated her drastically different.

Some of her friends shied away, she believes. Then there were the “guys that thought I was an easy lay, for lack of a better term. It scared me honestly, some of the assumptions made. Especially here where everything [in avatar appearance] is changeable with a click. I lost a couple of what I thought were good friends [who] stopped IMing and chatting. They were polite to a fault when I showed up, but [it] was weird. You know how you interact and something changes and no one tells you. Some were subtle, some weren’t.” She laughs without mirth, recalling how some friends would ask her questions such as, “‘[L]ike, when you going back to being you?’”

Second Life is a virtual world where you can change your appearance with a couple of mouse clicks. It’s as easy to look Asian, Aborigine or Eskimo as it is to appear to be a Stormtrooper or a squirrel. Even so, she obviously found that the color of her virtual skin dramatically changed people’s attitudes towards her.

Perhaps Second Life could be a powerful way to confront stereotypes, racism and cultural insensitivity, particularly in places where there may not be a lot of diversity. Or even in areas where there is.

Would you think that it should be easy in Second Life of all places for people to “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”?

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