New Media, Old Racisms: Twitter, Miss America, and Cultural Logics of Race

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of racist speech on social media, focusing on the controversy over racist tweets about the first Indian American Miss America, Nina Davuluri. The essay highlights tensions between “old” and “new” cultural logics about race. Specifically, it explores why such an “old” form of racist discourse, which explicitly imputes racial difference and exclusion, resurfaces on social media in the era of “new” or “color-blind” racism. Our study demonstrates the perseverance of racist discourse, its complementarity with ideologies of post-racialism, and the ways in which social networking technologies shape communication about race, culture, and identity.

Keywords:

• Racism
• Social Media
• Racial Discourse
• Twitter
• Post-Racial

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editors of the special issue, Dreama Moon and Michelle A. Holling, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their help strengthening the manuscript. We also thank Nate Stormer for hosting the writing retreat at Schoodic Point where much of this manuscript was written.

Notes

[1] Our use of this word reflects its prevalence in the literature on “new racisms” and is not meant to evoke any negativity toward visually impaired people.

[2] Our analysis is based on a sample of 100 tweets that were collected from a variety of web and news stories that covered the Twitter controversy, including Binder (2013a, 2013b), Broderick (2013), Hafiz (2013), and others (Greenhouse, 2013; “Miss America Faces Abuse,” 2013; “Miss America 2014 Win,” 2013; Zara, 2013). We have selected representative tweets for the analysis, a full list of which can be found in Appendix A. We have chosen not to include the screen names of the Twitter users so as to focus on the discourse itself, but we do quote some of the representative tweets because they are all publicly reproduced and archived, and this decision is consistent with recommended practice when conducting research involving Twitter (see Rivers & Lewis, 2014). Our study is not meant to provide a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of all the tweets about the pageant, or to make any claims that the objectionable tweets represent a broader consensus, attitude, or ideology.

[3] Although outside the purview of this essay, it is interesting to note the specific post-feminist subjectivity posited for Vail here, who purportedly both transgressed but also reasserted traditional gender roles (see Banet-Weiser & Portwood-Stacer, 2006).

[4] Based on a LexisNexis search of the terms “Miss America,” “Davuluri,” and “Twitter or tweet,” we found over 400 English-language news stories over a 2-month period of time, from September 15, 2013, the day of the Pageant final, to November, 30, 2013.