Is This a Race Book?

From the author of Hugo and NAACP Image Award finalist Riot Baby, an original memoir in essays that interrogates how identities are shaped and informed in online spaces and how the relationship between race and the Internet has changed in his three decades online

When Tochi Onyebuchi realized that his acclaimed science fiction and fantasy storytelling career had been centrally preoccupied with race, it prompted him to consider his sense of duty as a Black writer in the Internet age. Is This a Race Book? seeks to explode identity-based presumptions, exploring the early Internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s and recalling in parallel the origins of Onyebuchi as a writer, how his racial presence was defined online then, and how it shifted.

With an incisive eye, Is This a Race Book? illustrates Onyebuchi’s personal relationship to the Internet, proceeding from the current moment when everything, including personal identity, is for sale, and tracing his online self in reverse chronological order to reevaluate Web 1.0’s promises of greater equality. Deftly examining the evolution of Web 1.0 to Web 3.0—from the digital-cultural limitations on social justice then and now, to the ever-changing face of blogging and the inception of Virtual Reality and its failed experiments—Onyebuchi mediates on the roles and restrictions Black writers and characters are subject to, the purpose of virtual worlds, and how the Internet amplifies our failures of imagination.

A new, compelling investigation of race through the lens of the modern Internet age, and a profoundly intellectual journey in pursuit of community online, Onyebuchi argues for a recognition of the individual behind the data, ultimately asking “Is this a race book or is it not? Is it either-or? Can it be both-and? Can I?”