Defending race privilege on the Internet: how whiteness uses innocence discourse online

ABSTRACT

This article considers the comments sections of three controversial articles by commentators of colour in order to analyse the discursive strategies through which whiteness is defended and reproduced online. While the ‘racelessness’ of the Internet has, in some quarters, been upheld and celebrated, more recent Internet scholarship recognises the importance of the impact of race in delimiting and constituting online spaces. A discourse analysis, informed by Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, finds that, just as ‘offline,’ whiteness mobilises discursive strategies to protect its interests online. Specifically, discourses of vulnerability, simplicity, ‘colour-blindness’ and neutrality affirm whiteness in its central and privileged racial position. This article argues that these strategies are arranged around a central organising principle of white innocence.

KEYWORDS:

• Game of Thrones
• discourse analysis
• Internet
• innocence
• race
• whiteness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Anastasia Kanjere is a PhD candidate and recipient of the David Myers scholarship in the Gender, Sexuality and Diversity Studies Program at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her thesis analyses the interrelation between whiteness as an ideological sphere and discourses of innocence, and the implications of this link for anti-racist work and theory.

Notes

1 Mustafa was summoned to court to face two charges of malicious communications: she was accused of having caused fear and anxiety to an unidentified man with a tweet that includes the hashtag #killallwhitemen. Mustafa does not condemn the language but says she did not in fact write such a tweet.

2 This comment does not, in fact, appear to speak very directly to Rahman’s argument: the commenter in question (as were many others) appeared to be responding to a fairly generalised and vague understanding of criticism of racism in media rather than Rahman’s particular thesis.

3 Nakamura points out that this Utopian imagining of online space is also present amongst users (2002, p. 46).

4 Brock situates his analysis in the context of US-based web content, but the pattern is fairly consistent across all English-language content: in fact it seems that many users assume that all English content is from the US if not explicitly – and even then – marked as otherwise. One comment on Rahman’s article – published on a Canadian blog and clearly indicating him as an Australian comedian – referred confidently to race ‘in this country’ when the commenter obviously meant the US.

5 Theorist Marilyn Frye notices that it is not solely white people who are able to act in ways of accordance with white hegemonic values or in support of white domination (2000). It is usually not possible to identify the race of the commenters in online spaces: even when someone does identify her or himself it is impossible to determine the veracity of this self-identification, online spaces being notorious for their susceptibility to concealment and misrepresentation of characteristics such as age, race, gender as well as others (Walther, 2002). The particular race of each specific commenter is not, in any case, of particular relevance for this research. Rather I seek to analyse their discursive moves as within and constitutive of a certain discursive space: defined by the content and author of the article, the site on which the discussion is hosted, and the broader online space of engagement with similar issues which may direct Internet users to this particular space. This space is, I argue, ‘whitely,’ that is, the general online space which engages in discussions of issues of race and racism is a space which affirms the ascendant value of whiteness.