Hello everyone, thank you for being interested in this talk.
This is Qunfang Wu from Syracuse University.
I am presenting this work on behalf of my collaborators.
As a content warning, this work contains racist quotes, which may be upsetting or harmful
to some audience . This is the agenda of this talk.
To provide some context, I would like to start with an example of a conversation about crime.
This is a post from subreddit Baltimore.
The background is a Black teenager Dawnta Harris was charged
with felony murder, burglary, and auto theft for killing a White police officer when conducting
burglary.
Harris was waiting outside a home where the other three Black teenagers were conducing
burglary.
According to evidence caught on camera, the police officer asked Harris to get out of
a stolen jeep.
Harris opened the door, hesitated, and then closed the door and drove over the police
officer.
When discussing this crime incident, one user kept using language “animals” to describe
Harris and the other three teenagers.
While Harris’ race was not explicitly mentioned, the racialized language continue to link the
teenagers and Black people with crime.
Digital platforms such as Reddit afford users to be exposed or actively engage in conversations
about crime, which contributes an increased awareness of crime.
However, conversations about crime occurring on online spaces can be problematic.
These conversations reinforce racialized narratives that marginalize People of Color,
and induce fear and further impact people’s ability to engage in everyday routines.
This signals a critical need to better understand how people frame their conversations about
crime online.
Our work drew on racial framing and collective narratives.
Old racism refers to the racial oppression devised by White people to subordinate People
of Color since the colonial era.
However, in contemporary America, Jim Crow racism is no longer the primary racism.
Bonilla-Silva defined new racism as “the post-civil rights era set of arrangements,
mechanisms, and practices responsible for the reproduction of White privilege at all
levels.”
Bonilla-Silva also articulated four central frames of new racism to illustrate how White
people’s narratives framed around color-blindness.
Online community can support the construction of racist spaces.
This is best illustrated by “platformed racism,” “the mechanisms how sociotechnical
systems like Reddit enable the construction and propagation of racist ideologies.”
Online spaces can also support collective actions that pushes back against platformed
racism.
We focus on how collectives develop counter narratives to combat the dominant racist ideologies.
We ask the research question: How are people engaged in framing and combatting racist ideologies
in conversations about crime?
We chose Reddit as the research site.
Reddit allows users, we call redditors, to create sub-communities on various topics,
among which crime is a popular topic.
Moreover, Reddit is a unique platform to explore racial discourses, as it has a unique set
of features that both shape and are shaped by user interactions, such as pseudonymity,
the voting system, moderation, and more.
We chose r/baltimore because the dominant narratives around Baltimore are unsafe and
indeed synonymous with crime.
We referred to FBI’s definitions of violent and property crime and generated a list of
keywords to collect data about crime.
We conducted both inductive analysis and deductive analysis on the collected conversations about
crime.
This is the summary of the findings.
By engaging in these practices, redditors on r/baltimore were collectively mitigating
people’s fear of crime and destigmatizing Baltimore’s image.
However, on a deeper level, we found that many of these conversations were not actually
related to developing an awareness of crime in a traditional sense.
People were using old racial frames to perpetuate racially coded language rife with anti-Black stereotypes;
they were also applied more covert, new racial frames to cover their racism and discrimination against Black people.
Other redditors fought against platformed racism by rehumanizing, drawing attention
to systemic racism, and situating crime in root, societal causes.
While we see these various color-blind racial frames being perpetuated on Reddit, in the
interest of time, I will explain minimization of racism as an example.
Minimization of racism rationalizes how discrimination is no longer a central factor impacting the
life conditions of minorities.
Through this argument, discussion of race in relation to crime could be considered in
“playing the race card.”
Redditors used “reverse racism” to defend for themselves.
Reverse racism or reverse discrimination is the inherently racist concept against affirmative
action, which provides social and economic advantages to Black people.
For example, in a post that the original poster recalled a mugging experience, the comment
used reverse racism: “Why is it that Black people claim racism where there is none?
It’s so common, victim complexes are so unattractive.
I believe you are the snowflake, crying racism where there clearly is none.
I think you need a reboot.
It is called reverse racism or discrimination.”
Another instance is that some redditors denied the minority status of Black people.
As this quote said: Black or African American people are the majority racial group, 62.8%
of the population of Baltimore.
To challenge the dominant ideology of the subreddit, one redditor reminded people that
racism is not directly associated with racial composition.
This particular individual drew upon the concept of “institutional racism” as defined on
Wikipedia to describe how people’s attitudes and beliefs were being shaped.
In this work, we see people in digital spaces are weaponizing identity and engaging in a
kind of digital gentrification.
We developed the two terms to explain ways where people continue to perpetuate White
hegemonic power structures in society through online interactions.
This work also discusses articulating rules and algorithmic detection to dismantle
platformed racism, especially color-blind racism.
This work is a collaboration by Louisa Williams, Ellen Simpson, Bryan Semaan and me.
It was supported by National Science Foundation and the Graduate School Fellowship at Syracuse
University.
Please contact me if you are interested in this work or have any questions.
Thank you for listening.