Exploring discourses of whiteness in the Mary Beard Oxfam-Haiti Twitterstorm

ABSTRACT

Social media may have amplified the Black Lives Matter movement, but companies like Facebook are often accused of not doing enough to address online hate speech. These platforms nevertheless have the potential to facilitate informal learning about the color blind racism through which whites rationalize the inequalities and injustices experienced by People of Color (PoC). This paper adds to the emergent literature in this area by exploring a high-profile Twitterstorm in February 2018 following a tweet from Cambridge University Professor Mary Beard about the sexual misconduct of Oxfam aid workers in Haiti. Academics like Dr Priya Gopal faced much criticism for suggesting the tweet was evidence of the white fragility and privilege to which they were frequently subjected. A qualitative content analysis of 1718 unique tweets containing ‘Mary Beard’, posted between 16 and 20 February 2018, was conducted to assess whether there was much evidence of agonistic debate between critics and supporters of Beard about whiteness. Results indicate that there were twice as many tweets criticizing Beard for her performative white privilege and frailty than those defending her. While the framing of the Twitterstorm was generally agonistic, there was little evidence of informal learning, with PoC conspicuously under-represented. Indeed, the burden of talking about racism and whiteness fell on the few PoC in the corpus, in much the same way as the ‘pre-social media’ era.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• whiteness
• computer-mediated-communication
• qualitative content analysis

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For more on this, see: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52861726 (accessed 27 July 2020).

2 This research was conducted prior to changes in Twitter’s API restricting academic access to historic tweets. Sifter was decommissioned on 30 September 2018. For more on this, see: https://texifter.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/200581030-Sifter-FAQ (accessed 16 October 2019).

3 There was a small amount of data loss from tweets scraped and those analysed. 2320 tweets were scraped, and 2313 analysed.

4 The milk shake duck meme describes a person who “becomes extremely popular on the internet for some positive reason, but as their popularity takes off and people dig into their past, they quickly become an object of outrage and hatred.” See: https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/milkshake-duck/ (accessed 26 July 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Sheffield.

Notes on contributors

Ceri Ashwell

Ceri Ashwell is an independent researcher who studies how social media are used to highlight white privilege and racism. She achieved a Distinction in Social Research at the University of Sheffield.

Paul Reilly

Dr. Paul Reilly is Senior Lecturer in Communications, Media and Democracy at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on digital activism, social media sousveillance, and crisis communication. His work has been published in a number of journals, including First Monday, Information, Communication & Society, Journalism, and New Media & Society.