Meet Craig Sutton. Born in Meadow Lake, Canada and at the time of making his website living in Ontario. His first name is Anthony, but he prefers to go by Craig, or even Sutts. At first glance Craig is the quintessential no-nonsense guy who knows where he's from and where he wants to go in life. His profile page contains a number of quotes that give you a taste of what sort of person we're dealing with.
"The world don't move to the beat of just one drum, what might be right for you may not be right for some"
"Life is tough, put on a helmet and live it to the fullest."
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"
"Milk is for Baby Cows and Suckas"
Ambitious, independent, fearless and with an oddly specific disdain for milk. He plays American Football, goes to the gym and loves watching Hong Kong martial arts films. More suprisingly Craig has an interest in philosophy and taoism, which is not the first association I would make with a football player.
Craig's idols are also a colorful bunch. From Malcolm X to Obi-Wan Kenobi to Winnie the Pooh. A notable amount of Craig's idols are in the business of fighting sports. Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali and someone called Leroy Green. Green is a fictional character from the movie The Last Dragon who aspires to be a kung-fu master. Craig highly recommends visitors to watch this movie. His description of a cheesy motown/kung-fu hybrid with a deeper underlying message sounds right to me. I added it to my watchlist. Craig is a big fan of Taimak, the martial arts actor who portrayed the character of Leroy Green. Apparently Taimak dissappeared from the spotlights for a while after this movie, but through some internet sleuthing Craig was able to locate him.
Craig Sutton
Craig's ultimate goal in life is becoming the first biracial Kung-Fu movie star. Although he admits to having learned all his fighting skills from watching movies. Craig emphasizes his biracial identity here and this is a recurring theme on his website. On his about page Craig explains that his father is from Guyana and his mother from Saskatchewan. Growing up biracial has had a strong influence on how Craig regards the concept of race and he doesn't shy away from sharing his opinions about race.
"We use and misuse the concept of race to help us identify the various beautiful people in our world. We are all really part of the human race. There is nothing wrong with recognizing and/or celebrating the differences and/or commonalities within the human race to create seperate races but we must remember that this is what we have done. We have created the concept of race. It is not scientific. It is not cut and dry or in this case as easy as Black and White. We have to stop thinking that we are so different from each other just because we have different skin tones, different features or cultural practices. We are not all going to get along in this world but don't let skin tone draw the lines of seperation. It is our characters that make us different and don't allow us to get along. Look past what we think we know about someone from their apparent race and apperance and give them a chance to demonstrate their characters. If we must judge then use that, their character, to do so. Judge others by the quality of their character not by the lightness or darkness of their skin or by the straigthness or curlyness of their hair."
On yet another page Craig admits that growing up as a person of mixed race he has faced struggles and identity crises. What particularly bothers him is how other people tend to decide for him in which category he belongs. The following Boondocks comic excerpt found on his site really sums the issue up in 4 panels.
Craig also had a guestbook page with lots of friendly comments. It's clear he got a lot of female attention as well. One guest mentioned in a comment that they read a blog article Craig wrote on a website called mixedrace.com. It is clear that Craig Sutton belonged to some kind of online community of people who identified as biracial. I wanted to learn more about this community, so I dove right in.
If you toss the url "www.mixedrace.com" into the Wayback Machine and set it to 2004, you will find a login portal to a community of almost 300.000 people. Since the website itself is a walled garden, I had to look elsewhere to learn more about this community Craig Sutton belonged to. I found this article from april 2003. It mentions that mixedrace.com is a new 'online community' (this is what social networks were called before Facebook) "aimed at bringing together people from all races and ethnicities and helping shed 'old world' racial taboos". The site was created by a guy named Art Harrison. He was 24 years old at the time of the interview and believed to have found an overlooked niche market. Millions of people who do not see color with an unfulfilled desire to be connected online.
Art identifies as biracial as well. Born from a Scottish mother and an African-American father. Similar to Craig Sutton, Art was born and raised in Canada. Backed by statistics Art explained that in 2050 there will be 30 million people identifying as multiracial in America. The launch of mixedrace.com happened just a few years after U.S. citizens were given the possibility to check multiple races in the U.S. Sensus. Mixedrace.com would offer users a free e-mail adress, instant messaging, online dating tools and personal profile pages among other features yet to come.
For nearly 2 years you would see these coming soon signs when trying to visit mixedrace.com
Art's trajectory into creating an online community was a long and arduous one. He was interviewed by Annalee Newiz three years prior for Salon in an article about a new trend of online communities targeting specific demographic groups. Art had made a name for himself through a personal website titled Biracial World Domination. BWD was a satiric page with a serious undertone. On the site, Art claims that people of mixed race will inevitably take over the world as people from all races and colors fall in love and intermingle. Art criticizes single race oriented groups like the KKK and the Black Panthers for trying to preserve a pure white or black race. BWD was a fun page to spend half an hour and learn a little bit more about biracial culture. Art made a page featuring celebrities of mixed race like Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey and Tiger Woods. There was also a page for biracial foods, which naturally featured Oreos for dessert. Art was apparently selling Biracial merch on his page as well. The pictures were not archived, so we can only imagine what "Bi-Racial Militia Wear" looked like.
Art took the promotion of his website very serious and was nifty at getting his page into the spotlights. He mentioned that he was getting his site listed on several search engines, as well as applying it for different internet awards. He ended up winning a lot of awards which helped bring the site into the spotlights. Back to the Salon article, it was all the attention that Art had gotten from his Biracial World Domination page that inspired him create the first online community for mixed race people. If you try to visit the url www.mixedrace.com between the years 2000 and 2002, you will see a lot of 'coming soon' talk, but no real action. In january 2002 Art posted a long message, explaining why it had taken so long for mixedrace.com to be launched. Read it in his own words.
"In the beginning I attempted to gain financial support from various venture capital funds and private investors in order to speed up Mixedrace.com's launch date. Unfortunately, with the downturn of the stock market (especially technology) it became increasingly difficult to raise a significant amount of support. The offers that I did receive required me to give up too much control or to change the nature of the project. These were things I was simply not willing to do, as I believe too strongly in Mixedrace.com and what it will become.
As a result I made the decision to forgo that financing route and begin the development of a new communication suite by myself. Other companies working on similar project have teams of 10 or more developers working together to create communication tools such as web based instant messaging, content management, dating services, web logs, etc. I knew that attempting to do the work by myself was going to be extremely difficult, but I was optimistic about my skills and the time it would take to complete the work. I've now spent several months, first teaching myself the required languages, and then programming the software required to run a high-level community site. It's been very hard work, with very little rewards.
The good news is that almost all of the tools are completed and working properly, and Mixedrace.com is so close to completion that I can almost taste it. The bad news is that I am completely and totally drained. I've learned that passion is a very powerful tool when channeled correctly, but I've also learned that every idea needs more than raw passion in order to succeed. Not only am I emotionally and physically drained, but I've also used up basically all of my personally funds in order to keep working on Mixedrace.com. I refuse to give up. Mixedrace.com will be launched over the next few weeks. I may have to forget about some of the advanced components for the time being, but it will be worthwhile in the long run."
Art Harisson was unwilling to compromise on his vision and impressively taught himself all the necessary coding skills needed to build the mixedrace.com communication suite from the ground up. In late 2002 the long wait was over and mixedrace.com officially launched.
Once Mixedrace.com launched it quickly grew in popularity. In january 2003 there were just 2424 registered members, but by december that number had grown to over 120.000 members! Yet another year later in december 2004 Mixedrace.com counted about 300.000 members. Clearly there was an audience for what Art had built. I wanted to dive in to the community at its peak, perhaps try to look for Craig Sutton on the site, but as mentioned before, Mixedrace.com was a walled garden site. Thus it is pretty hard to find archived pages that give us a glimpse into what this community really looked like and how it functioned. I was able to find a few pages here and there that shed some light on the community.
Take a look at this sign-up page. Mixedrace.com made users fill in a crazy amount of personal details at sign-up. Information concerning religion, occupation, income level and sexual preferences. Now, some of these do make sense when I remind you that Mixedrace.com also to provide its users an online dating experience, but still it seems like a lot of questions. On the sidebar of the registration page there is a disclaimer mentioning the site being not suitable for people under the age of 13 and there was another mention of an adult content filter that could be turned on and off, but its unclear to me if and how this functioned in reality.
Mixedrace.com had an active message board and while most of it has not been archived. You can check out this page and find what the hot topics were in late 2004. If these posts are any indication things could get pretty wild here. From user Krayziebone wondering if he is still a virgin because he used protection during sex, to user Marcelle wondering why black men tend to choose lighter skinned over darker skinned women. I am really curious about how the online dating aspects of the site worked, pages called "hot or not" and "secret admirer" are inacessible for us using the Wayback Machine. There was a books page that you can visit which features an amazon ad to a book related to biracial topics. They were also trying to set up a book club and encouraging people to participate. Another page that we can visit is the events page, which is a mixed bag of an album launch party, a whorehouse in Texas (for real?) and some random user's birthday. This all causes me to suspect that whatever was happening in this community was not being moderated very much.
All in all I get the impression that there were plenty of things to do here on Mixedrace.com. Perhaps there were too many functionalities, causing the place to feel chaotic and making it time consuming to moderate. I also doubt whether users experienced it as a safe space. It sure was wild and exciting though and it is impressive that Art was able to build this community largely by himself!
After its first two years of rapid growth, things started slowing down for Mixedrace.com. A late 2005 archived version of the page shows 378k registered users, not even a 50% increase from a year before. It is unclear why the site's growth stagnated, but perhaps the simple explanation is that the demand for a biracial online community was not as big as Art had presumed back in 2000. Or perhaps the lack of venture capitalism and funds to properly market the site is ultimately what limited its growth potential. In 2007 Art decided to stir things up by changing the name of the site to "Mixyourworlds.com" and changing the look and feel of the page to something a bit more web 2.0 and a lot more like a dating site. Or maybe I should be blunt and call it for what it appears to be: a hook-up site. On the front page, Art asks users the question "Can racial profiling be fun?" Many of the pre-existing community functions, like profile pages (now called Worlds), a chat function and blogs still existed, but from the looks of it Art really tried to double down on the dating functionality. Mixyourworlds would remain online for another 6 years, seemingly without a lot of changes or new users flowing in.
Mixyourworlds.com landing page in 2007.
In late 2013 Art finally shut down the site and did an interesting and suprisingly honest reflection on the past decade of his online adventure. I highly recommend you to read the whole write-up here but there are a few take-away points from it. First of all, Art admits that the 35 fields of personal information users had to fill in upon signing up was excessive. However he also points out that gathering a lot of information upon pickup was considered normal in those days. Second, Art admits that he went into the creation of Mixedrace.com rather naively, underestimating how long it would take to build. Third, when Mixedrace.com took off in 2003, Art essentially became a moderator of his site instead of a developer. He did not spend enough time innovating and adding more user value. He also admits to not being very fond of social networks himself, so he had a hard time looking at Mixedrace.com from a user perspective. Fourth, the switch to Mixyourworlds.com was done rather impulsively and Art admits that the site never really took off. Art attributes the lack of excitement for Mixyourworlds to the rise of general interest social networks a.k.a. Facebook and Instagram. Finally, at some point Art started pursuing other projects, like Sellingly.com, and Random Acts of E-Mail, which he advertised here as well.
It is interesting to note that at the time of shutdown, Mixyourworlds.com was still generating ad revenue. Art explains that he felt a moral obligation to delete the hundreds of thousands of sometimes sexual images users had uploaded from the internet. It did not feel right to him to keep these images online and make money off of it. So kudos to Art for respecting his users privacy!
You would think that this is the end of the story, but there is one strange thing I found when I was about to wrap up my research into Mixedrace.com. Something that changed the way I look at Art's community sites.
If you visited the url mixedrace.com between 2008 and 2010 you would be redirected to the new page mixyourworlds.com. However, if you typed mixedrace.com in 2011, it would redirect to a wholly diferent page. The url was www.biracialworlddomination.com and it would lead you to a simple blog page. The blog had only 2 entries, both posted by Art in 2009 and 2010. Although one of the posts was tagged 'humor', the tone of this page to me feels a lot more serious than Art's personal page from 1998. The second post from 2010 is the most detailed. Art declares that his group is ready to fight single-race foes and start ruling the world. He mentions having spoken to Barack Obama, also a mixed race person, about the matter.
Now, you could just brush this off as satire or plain shitposting, but it doesn't make sense that Art Harisson, about 30 years old at that point, was still going on with this world domination stuff if it was merely a joke. The first post on the blog, from november 2009, even refers to an earlier website with an IP address as a URL, containing similar posts of biracial world domination. Unfortunately this site has not been archived very well and we can only view the front page. When you think about it, Art has devoted nearly 15 years of his life trying to give biracial people a voice and a community. He rejected venture capital because he did not want to compromise on his vision. His sites included online dating and after the switch to Mixyourworlds.com Art seems to have doubled down on this functionality. Using the power of this new technology called the internet he pursued his mission. For a one man operation, I'd say he came pretty far. I'm sure there are mixed race children in the world today who would not have been born if it wasn't for his websites. Perhaps having people from all races mix and procreate was the point of Mixedrace.com all along. For Art Harrison, Biracial World Domination was a serious matter and his community sites were the weapons by which he tried to accomplish it.