Colonizers in the neighborhood: a critical discourse analysis of Nextdoor users’ postracial strategies

ABSTRACT

Colonizing the neighborhood is more accessible than ever before with digital platforms like Nextdoor. Through a critical discourse analysis of users’ content in West Philadelphia between May 2019 and April 2021, we found that users rarely utilized explicitly racist language or topics. Rather than interpret this as an indication that users do not engage with racializing or colonizing discourses, however, we argue that users relied on three postracial practices [Mukherjee, R., Banet-Weiser, S., & Gray, H. (2019). Racism postrace. Duke University Press] to normalize and obscure their anti-Blackness and settler ideologies in the context of broader sociocultural and political events of racial profiling and crises of care. First, users moved away from ‘objective’ racial categories to nostalgic narratives that shaped ideals of safety and community in exclusive futures. Second, they shied away from problematic but coded language to embed their racializing practices in policy and partisan discussions. Third, despite the changes users made to other discursive strategies, they remained steadfast in their preservation of surveillance and policing discourses. These themes reveal how postracial discourses reflect and produce their larger social world, obfuscating settler logics through slippery and sticky strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Nextdoor
• postrace
• surveillance
• settler colonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenny Lee

Jenny Lee is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Chloe Ahn

Chloe Ahn is a joint PhD student in Political Science and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.