Reading Race on the Internet: Examining White Teens’ Interactions With Race-Related Content on Social Media

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Youths' Critical Literacies in and Beyond Classrooms: Exploring Race, Censorship, and Transgressive Humor (Table 20)

Abstract

Teens are on social media more than ever before, yet we know little about how these platforms teach adolescents about race (Frey et al., 2022). This study uses think alouds to examine how white adolescents (n=8) interact with race-related content on social media. Given that identities are formed through interaction (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005), I ask: How do readers’ interactions vary depending on the audience given multimodal text speaks to? Preliminary findings suggest that white adolescents responded with guilt and detachment when they read posts that addressed white people, while they took stances of curiosity and solidarity when reading posts that spoke to other identities. Implications for using texts to support racial literacy development (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021) are considered.

Author

• Emma Bene, Stanford University