world white web campaigns for diversity on the internet

a swedish design student’s fight against white privilege

If you’ve ever searched on Google Images for a general term like “hand,” “ear,” or “baby,” there’s a pretty slim chance that the results featured a person of color (with one exception being “face,” which returns photos of Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé because, of course). Swedish design student Johanna Burai recognized this as a normalization of whiteness, given that one has to specifically search for non-white images. She channeled her frustration into World White Web, a digital project that raises awareness of and campaigns against the "whiteness of the Internet." The site displays six images of hands with different shades of skin, encouraging viewers to share the photos in order to boost their rankings on Google Images. It also has links to informative articles on structural and institutional racism, and white privilege.

“The purpose is to create change,” says Burai. “A lot of people choose to turn a blind eye to the privilege of simply being born white, as well as to the systematic racism experienced by people of color in their everyday lives.”