Flagging White Nationalism ‘After Cronulla’: From the Beach to the Net

ABSTRACT

In this article, I use a case study analysis of two white nationalist movements online, in the Australian context, to consider whether the prevalence and everyday uses of social media by white nationalist groups today has impacted on race relations and multiculturalism in Australia 12 years after the Cronulla riots. Social media affordances present a set of conditions that were absent during the 2005 riot, and yet, are today mobilising distinct variants of white nationalism online. Rather than these expressions being locally situated, social media allows these performances to be connected up virtually, extending the white nationalists’ capacity to occupy and terrorise a range of networked public and intimate spaces and influence mainstream political culture. Nonetheless social media affordances, which situate these movements in a virtual ‘ecology of subcultures’ also contributes to their instability and ambivalence, with the uncivil ‘trolling’ practices of online movements undermining broader social goals and contributing to even more extreme and unstable expressions online.

KEYWORDS:

• White nationalism
• youth
• whiteness
• racism
• race relations
• race riots
• multiculturalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Amelia Johns is a Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute. Her work spans the fields of digital media studies, cultural studies, and youth studies and examines issues of: whiteness and youth identity; Muslim, migrant, and diaspora youth negotiation of racism and citizenship in digitally networked publics. Her current research project examines Malaysian-Chinese youth digital practices, and the role ‘the digital’ plays in negotiations of political participation, citizenship and belonging. She is the author of Battle for the Flag (MUP 2015), an empirical investigation of youth performances of racism, nationalism and whiteness in the Cronulla riots of 2005. She is also a co-editor of recently published book Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest, Culture (with Anthony McCosker and Sonja Vivienne, Rowman & Littlefield 2016).

Notes

1. The notion of tolerance, a guiding principle of Australia’s multicultural policy and official discourses, has been powerfully critiqued by Hage (1998, 2003) as a demonstration of white governmental belonging. According to Hage, what is tolerable or intolerable is defined according to white norms of civility and respectability. The exception, or what is intolerable, becomes the point then at which the violence and incivility of the white nationalist manager becomes not only possible, but justified and even enfolded within notions of civic duty and ‘the good’.

2. A pejorative name applied to (often white) lower class Australians and lifestyles.

3. The data collected were scraped from the Twitter accounts of 25,406 followers of prominent white supremacists in the US. This was then compared with the findings of data scraped from US-based citizens following the Twitter accounts of ISIS figures/leaders.