Online Discrimination, Black Students’ Academic Experiences, and the Role of White Bystanders

• In Event: 3-172 - Online Discrimination and Adolescent Development: Better Understanding Mechanisms of Influence and Opportunities for Intervention

Integrative Statement

A primary driver of the Black-White college-completion gap may be the discriminatory experiences Black students face at predominantly White institutions (McCabe, 2009). Relative to other racial/ethnic groups, Black students report the lowest satisfaction with campus racial climate; moreover, perceptions of negative racial climate indirectly influence students’ persistence in college and degree completion (Museus et al., 2008). Notably, limited research to date has examined the role of online discrimination in influencing students’ perceptions of campus racial climate even though online social spaces may be the most salient and damaging venues for acts of discrimination among late adolescents (Tynes et al., 2013). Moreover, the limited research that has been conducted largely has not explored White adolescents as actors and bystanders who are implicated in these online interactions. Thus, the current study was undertaken to 1) document the nature and frequency of racially-discriminatory comments posted on specific social media platforms, 2) better understand how racist posts affect Black students’ perceptions of institutional racial climate, sense of belonging at their institution, and academic performance, 3) better understand how White students experience racist posts, and 4) identify factors that may prompt White students to confront racist posts with the goal of developing a bystander intervention for White students to confront other White students who are engaging in anti-Black online discrimination. The current study included three components: surveillance and coding of social media data, focus groups with Black and White college students, and an experiment to assess whether a brief intervention could change the willingness of White students to confront online discrimination. Surveillance took place from September 1 through November 30, 2017 and included FaceBook and Twitter accounts specific to university members, as well as the comments section of the online student newspaper. Race-related posts occurred with non-trivial frequency across the platforms and were coded according to content that was explicitly anti-Black, anti-inclusive, politically charged, pro-inclusive, or challenges to anti-Black or anti-inclusive posts. Specific breakdowns of findings across platforms will be presented. Focus groups were conducted with 35 Black students and 33 White students ranging from their 2nd through 4th years. In total there were eight focus groups, four for Black students and four for White students. Patterns of findings will be discussed according to driving questions that pertained to the types of online discrimination students experienced, their reactions to racist posts, their reactions to public challenges of racist posts (and among White students whether they had ever challenged and what that experience was like), barriers as well as supports for challenging among White students, and what students perceived to be components of effective challenges of racist posts. Findings from the first two study components were used to create a brief script-based online intervention that was subsequently tested in an experiment with 180 White students. Results of the experiment indicated that students who received the intervention were significantly more like to write a challenge to a racist online post and agree to have their response posted in the comments section of the online student newspaper.

Authors

• Noelle M Hurd, University of Virginia
  Presenting Author

• Sophie Trawalter, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alex Jakubow, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Haley E Johnson, University of Virginia - Curry School of Education
  Non-Presenting Author

• Janelle Billingsley, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author