Cyberracism 2.0: #itsokaytobewhite and Other User-produced Tweets Circulating on Social Media in the Post-racial Era

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  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 15. Racial Identity and Individualism Among Working Class Whites in the Trump Era

Abstract

This article investigates how social media users continue to spread both overtly and covertly racist content via Twitter and other popular social media platforms in the post-racial era. This article uses content analysis to interpret the transmission of online racist material and the continued use of “white racial frames” (Feagin 2009) in tweets and memes on social media. Building on previous white supremacy online research (Berbrier 2000;Daniels 2009), this article will show how cyberracism 2.0 functions. This includes the critical interpretation of such cyberracism- including hashtags and user-generated memes that continue to circulate on social media like twitter and instagram. Although greater criticism was made by me personally to the hashtag # itsokaytobewhite, still other related hashtags such as #whitelivesmatter, #alllivesmatter, #whitegenocide, #teamwhite,#maga,#waronwhites, #whiteprivilige, #antiwhite, #afd etc. were also analyzed after they appeared during the initial process of preliminary data-mining. The final results of the content analysis revealed patterns of overt cultural sexism, white victim racism, white heterosexist racism, and cloaked/covert symbolic white racism.

Author

• Michael Buhl, Texas Woman's University