Racial Manipulation/Technologic Manipulation

I remember on the first day of class when Professor Chun gave the example of the commercial for the Internet where in order to address a world where race and gender are unimportant, you must first address this world where race and gender are, in some places, still extremely important. In Heidegger states in “The Question Concerning Technology” that technology in the modern day is just “a means to an end” (pp. 288-289) and that “everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means” (p. 289) which immediately brought me back to that commercial along with our discussions of passing. Branching off of these ideas, along with our discussion from last week, I was posed with many questions such as, what does it mean to manipulate something like race and/or technology as a means to an end? What does it mean to use race like a manipulated technology, as in the case of passing, to use race as a tactic to end racism?

Also, on the opposite side of the spectrum, how does technology enforce the solidification of races to stop racial manipulation and passing as Nobles explores in her “‘The Tables present plain matters of fact’”? As illustrated in the title for this course, race and technology can have a very intertwined relationship and I am left wondering what sort of relationship is this in the context of the readings for today.