“Payback for Pearl Harbor”

Abstract

Immediately following news coverage of the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, anti-Japanese users attributed the disasters to karmic “payback for Pearl Harbor.” As Klein notes, social media can legitimate White supremacist discourses, “laundering” them into popular discourse. Likewise, this article argues that Facebook and Twitter were spaces that allowed the movement of White supremacist discourses into everyday culture by coding overt racism. Twitter and Facebook, however, also acted as a space in which White supremacist ideologies were challenged, yet the challenge was limited as it reified postracism. Indeed, both the “payback” posts and “pushback” responses constructed their arguments within postracial logics in order to garner support.

Keywords

postracism White supremacist discourse Facebook Twitter Japanese tsunami

On March 11, 2011, an 8.9-magnitude earthquake, the most powerful in Japan’s recorded history (Soble, Dickle, & Whipp, 2011), shook violently off its northeastern coast, creating a giant tsunami that crashed into nearby cities (Fackler, 2011). The devastation caused by the giant tidal wave led to the loss of 19,300 lives (“Japan Tsunami Death Toll at 19,300,” 2012) and the collapse of the local infrastructure and economy (Fackler & McDonald, 2011). Further compounding the natural tragedy, the tsunami damaged a nuclear reactor in Fukushima. Radioactive contamination seeped into nearby areas (Alexander, 2013), creating an enduring crisis.

Shortly after news coverage broke, cyberspace reacted with shock and sympathy but also with morbid satisfaction. Alec Sulcin, a writer for Family Guy, tweeted “If you wanna feel better about this earthquake in Japan, google ‘Pearl Harbor death toll’” (Oldenburg, 2011). His indifference was not an isolated case. Dozens tweeted and posted Facebook updates that delighted in the natural disasters and subsequent radiation fears as “payback for Pearl Harbor.” Though these instances of hateful rhetoric are arguably marginalized discourses in the cyberarena, cyberspace is also the vehicle for racist discourses to become “laundered” into the broader cultural field (Klein, 2012).

The study adds to the paucity of critical research on race in cyberspace, addresses the scholarly gap concerning racist comments on social media (Cisneros & Nakayama, 2015), and contributes directly to Daniels’s (2013) call to develop further critical inquiry into Whiteness online, particularly the need to hold onto race while clinging to a “fantasy of a color-blind web” (p. 712). I argue that the payback posts adopted White supremacist discourses and moved it into the cultural mainstream through Facebook and Twitter but that a multinational and multiracial social media response challenged individual and U.S. American “ignorance,” thereby avoiding discussions of racism and, thus, reifying the dominant racial logic of postracism. As Cisneros and Nakayama (2015) point out, social media can be a space for old and new racisms to coexist simultaneously.

White Supremacy Online

One of the most troubling examples of the Internet’s reproduction of racist logics online is White nationalist websites. White supremacists have found voice, community, and legitimation online (Adams & Rosigno, 2005), using the Internet to espouse ideologies of White supremacy (Meddaugh, 2009). Based on pseudoscientific claims, White nationalist websites use “reasonable racism” to create community around anxieties that Whiteness is threatened by multiculturalism (Gerstenfeld, Grant, & Chiang, 2003; Meddaugh, 2009). The sites initiate new members into a broader network of hate groups and sites (Gerstenfeld et al., 2003), and they maintain routine interaction with committed members (Schafer, 2002) that maintain the culture of the White Power Movement (WPM) in everyday ways (Simi & Futrell, 2006). WPM argues for an essentialized view of race that links to racist eugenics (Bowman-Grieve, 2009) with these discourses helping to construct collective identity through a shared sense of superiority that adopts a conspiratorial worldview in which “White rights” have been stripped away through an illegitimate and oppressive government (Adams & Rosigno, 2005). Though these ideologies seem farfetched in dominant discourse, the ideologies White nationalist sites espouse are ones that have gained cultural traction (Duffy, 2003).

Traces of WPM are found in White backlash culture, too. White backlash culture is “legitimated” discourse that arose in the 1980s in response to White male frustrations at the dual threats of multiculturalism (Giroux, 1997) and feminism (Ferber, 2007). Like WPM, White backlash discourses mobilize solidarity by arguing that Whiteness and masculinity are threatened in dominant culture (Gabriel, 1998), but unlike WPM, its arguments are not situated in essentialized racial eugenics. Instead, it is situated in coded nostalgia, longing for a return to an idealized past, patriarchal and heteronormative family values (Gabriel, 1998; Giroux, 1997) and “traditional culture” free of the challenges of multiculturalism (Takaki, 1993). Though it is Whites who typically call for this nostalgic return, race has been discursively removed from White identities as advocates link traditional family values with patriotism and “freedom” (Crenshaw, 1997; Giroux, 1997; Lipsitz, 1998). By conflating White advantage with patriotism, its advocates’ manifest concerns are the protection of traditional America rather than the protection of White privilege (Crenshaw, 1997).

The explicit rationales of White backlash culture are, thus, expressed as “color-blind racism,” which advances racist purposes while denying that race or racism matters in shaping people’s life experiences or opportunities (Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Ono, 2010). Color blindness, in turn, connects with postracism, which argues that institutional racism is an anachronism, that racism only occurs as individual-level bigotry, and that everyone is equally capable of it (Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Temple, 2010; Thornton, 2011). It hides a more sinister purpose, however, as postracism is not only willfully blind to racial oppression and the need for community, but it works to provide cover that allows regressive attacks on antiracist gains (Ono, 2010). On social networking sites, the discourse of postracism is widespread (Grasmuck, Martin, & Zhao, 2009). Perhaps, because Whites have the least diverse social networks (Lewis, Kaufman, Gonzalez, Wimmer, & Christakis, 2008), there is little resistance from members of their social networks when White supremacist discourses disguised as postracial White backlash creep in from the overtly racist margins. One pathway through which this occurs on social media is through posts that articulate discourses of White victimization posted on social media—a discourse to which Whites generally respond favorably (Rauch & Schanz, 2013).

Social Media Deliberation on Race and Racism

Hopes of the Internet as a space for deliberative democracy have generally been overstated (see Downing, 2008). Though carefully cultivated conditions allow for online deliberation (Hartz-Karp, 2014) and though social media have been a resource for social protest (Tufekci & Wilson, 2012; Valenzuela, Arriagada, & Scherman, 2012), utopian hopes are technologically deterministic, ignoring the continued role of power and culture in media use (Freedman, 2006). It is not to say that cyberspaces cannot allow deliberation, but, rather, cyberspaces are continuous with users’ off-line social experiences, and, as such, online deliberation is not apart from but a part of the social and technological context in which dominant discourses are formed. For instance, Cleland (2014) found that English message boards became a space to conflate Englishness with Whiteness and to reject racially different Others. Especially when users’ identities are not known, online deliberation degenerates into arguments that rely on “putdowns” to silence opposing views (van Zoonen et al., 2007), and the accrual of social capital in the discussions maintains cultural hegemony (Goode, 2009). In online discussions of race and racism, there is little room to deliberate the merits of a viewpoint but rather to forcefully assert the legitimacy and power of one’s sociocultural privilege (Nakamura, 2009).

Facebook and Twitter operate as particular discursive spaces shaped by their technological platforms as well as the cultural discourses users bring into the technology’s use. Zhao, Grasmuck, and Martin (2008) note that because Facebook is a “nonymous” environment, identity play is constrained in favor of the self-presentation of carefully curated images. Users tend to not reveal their “hidden selves” nor take on wholly different identities but, rather, they emphasize their most desirable self. Because of the known networks on Facebook and anchored connections to off-line selves, discourse tends to be more egalitarian (Halpern, 2013), and because Facebook and Twitter rely on users for content, they allow for vernacular content from the cultural margins (Howard, 2008). Indeed, people of color frequently use Facebook as a way to articulate opposition to racist marginalization, resist racial silencing, and express markers of ethnic and cultural difference (Grasmuck et al., 2009). This is also true for so-called Black Twitter, a space that allows for signification with hashtags acting as a virtual “call and response” that allows African Americans to find community and to reject postracism (Brock, 2012; Florini, 2014).

Though technologies allows spaces for community and challenges to postracism, Facebook and Twitter users’ practices frequently reinforce dominant cultural logics, advancing White supremacy and racism (Gilroy, 2012). On social media, insults adhere to cultural logics that reify social domination rather than value difference (Rishel, 2011). Burke and Goodman (2012) found that in English discussions about asylum seekers, the structure of Facebook allowed deindividuation, allowing users to more easily slip into polarizing comments, yet opponents of asylum framed their critique as unrelated to race in order to seem more reasonable, conforming to the dominant cultural logic of postracism. As Grasmuck et al. (2009) found, White Facebook users tend to use few racial signifiers and seldom comment in ways that are racially specific, favoring a “color-blind” presentation of race (Grasmuck et al., 2009).

Unlike Facebook, Twitter comments are generally not limited to a user’s network; it is publicly visible. When Twitter users send tweets, multiple audiences become singular, leading to “context collapse,” meaning that the specific social contexts that guide different conversational norms are lost (Marwick & boyd, 2010). Because of the loss of context, users tend to err on the side of not revealing, not challenging social convention, and being careful in self-presentation (Marwick & boyd, 2010). As Cisneros and Nakayama (2015) point out in their analysis of Tweets about Nina Davuluri, the 2014 Miss America winner, Twitter was a space for old and new racism to exist simultaneously. Overtly racist tweets that disparaged her for being Middle Eastern, Arab, and Muslim were met with responses meant to shame the racist tweeters by drawing upon postracism as a dominant cultural logic. When studying race online, it is important to note that race and racism as powerful social constructs and identities do not dissolve but are enacted in ways that are shaped by the medium (Cammaerts, 2008). It is in this context that I examine how Facebook posts drew on White supremacist and White backlash ideologies in response to the multiple tragedies associated with the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in March 2011 and how Twitter challenged the racialized discourse in cyberspace while at the same time maintaining postracism as the lens through which old racism is fought and new racism is asserted.

Methodological Decisions

Drawing on Kellner’s (1995) description of ideological analysis, the article is situated in the larger sociopolitical context of challenges to U.S. exceptionalism marked by the political momentum of the Tea Party, a movement that in some ways resembles White backlash discourse with its calls to “tradition” and cartoonish displays of patriotism that thinly mask racism (Enck-Wanzer, 2011). Because of the discursive nature of the posts, I drew upon the tools of critical discourse analysis (CDA; Fairclough, 2010; van Dijk, 1993a) in combination with critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA; Brock, 2012). The goal of CDA is to pursue normative social justice goals by connecting microlevel discourse to understanding and ultimately correcting social structures (Fairclough, 2010; van Dijk, 1993a). CDA helps examine meanings beneath the surface of manifest discourse to reveal “deep structures” (van Dijk, 1993a). In this way, CDA complemented the use of ideological criticism through tools meant to uncover hidden meaning in language that reinforce racist systems. CTDA, likewise, provides a framework to understand the ways “… the Internet, as a social structure, represents and maintains Western culture through its content and often embodies Western ideology through its design and practices” (p. 53). Simply stated, CTDA is an adaptation of CDA for online environments. It differs primarily in the additional attention paid to the technological channels through which the discourse is structured. Thus, the analysis combines ideological criticism’s work in understanding the ways dominant ideology is articulated, CDA’s tools in uncovering deep structures that reify racist systems, and CTDA’s attentiveness to discourse that is shaped by the technological form through which it travels.

To examine Facebook posts, I used the now defunct site, openbook.org, which was created to demonstrate the information insecurity of Facebook through searchable terms. The search I conducted was completed on March 15, 2011, 4 days after the Japanese tsunami. Altogether, I gathered 79 posts from 48 Facebook users. I intended to research the Facebook page titled “Payback for Pearl Harbor,” but because Facebook users had flagged it, the page was deleted prior to the gathering of data. This was an unfortunate loss, but Facebook posts by users in their own networks are arguably more influential in everyday rituals of use and meaning making. To find Tweets, I used Twitter’s advanced search features to include “Payback for Pearl Harbor,” “Pearl Harbor,” or “Godzilla.” I completed the search on May 3, 2014, gathering roughly two hundred tweets, focusing the analysis on 60 tweets most germane to this project. After receiving the posts and tweets, I assigned pseudonyms to all quotes before including them in the analysis in order to maintain confidentiality and to protect users from potential harm. I have left the quotes exactly as they were written to maintain the integrity of the language used in social media spaces.

To make sense of race and racism in the posts, it was necessary to code the posters’ races whenever possible. For the Facebook and Twitter users, I made assumptions about the offline race of the user only when they used photographs that appeared to reference themselves, excluding images of identifiable celebrities, cartoons, or other nonhuman photographs. As Zhao et al. (2008) point out, on “nonymous” sites, individuals rarely engage in identity play that transgresses their own identities because they are anchored to people who know them off-line. Further, they point out that people of color use Facebook to resist overt racism and postracism; therefore, racial identities can be fairly safely assumed when taking account of users’ visible identities and their racial discourses (Grasmuck et al., 2009). Though this provided additional insight, ultimately, what matters is not the race of the user but the function of the discourse in the post or Tweet. It is certainly possible, though unlikely, that a person of color advanced White supremacist discourses under the guise of a White user, but, even if so, the functional work of the discourse would be the same. Because the project is concerned with competing discourses of overt racism and postracism, it is the racialized discourse rather than the race of the user that matters.

“Payback for Pearl Harbor”

Through CDA’s focus on understanding the ways discourse reinforces racist structures (van Dijk, 1993a), it was revealed that several Facebook users’ delight in Japan’s multiple tragedies replicated White backlash culture (Lipsitz, 1998) and the sense of victimization in WPM (Adams & Rosigno, 2005). They reveled in what they perceived as karmic “payback,” which was interpreted as God taking action on behalf of the formerly victimized and morally righteous. By claiming that the tragedies were payback for a past transgression, they marshaled patriotism to delight in Japanese suffering. Second, their belief that the Japanese tragedies were karmic or supernatural retribution evokes discourses of the U.S. as divinely exceptional and of the U.S. as continuing to bear an uncorrected historical wrong.

Patriotic Vengeance

By evoking Pearl Harbor, Facebook users argued that the patriotic response is to not sympathize with Japanese people. As William wrote, “Do I feel bad for japan? Two words … pearl harbor.” Brandon, too, posted, “Help Japan? Nah, Pearl Harbor.” Consistent with Lipsitz’s (1998) argument that White backlash is often cloaked in calls to hyper-patriotism, users mobilized patriotic virtue to call on their friends to not be sympathetic and mocked those who were. For instance, Fred wrote, “Why does everyone feel bad for japan? Doesn’t pearl harbor ring a bell?” Bob echoed these remarks, writing, “screw japan they got what they deserve. any remember pearl harbor I do. they killed thousands of americans and would do it again. Kill em all let god sort emm out.” These comments point to the racist margins from which delight in Japanese suffering is expressed as patriotic virtue.

Consistent with research that suggests postracism is the dominant way of understanding race (Prashad, 2001), racist animosities like those above were relatively rare and, instead, racist comments were implied through stereotyping. For example, Gabe wrote, “Did people forget when japan bombed us @ pearl harbor? Fuck them they can’t drive anyway!” At a casual glance, the latter sentence would not seem to make sense in his blame discourse. By understanding its “deep structures” through CDA (van Dijk, 1993a), it makes sense as a postracial logic that users deny race while reifying racist ideologies. In this context, the stereotype becomes necessary to signify Asian such that the sentence could read “Fuck them; they are Asian!” The use of stereotypes points to racist anxieties against the backdrop of the threat of multiculturalism, globalization, and Asia (see Ono & Jiao, 2008). Thus, given their racial + gender identities, it supports the link between White backlash culture and White masculinity, specifically.

Despite this link, it was not universally the case that racist comments came from White men. Occasionally, White women marshaled their networks to encourage friends to see the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster as long overdue vindication. Though the White men and women’s posts were largely similar in content, there is a notable difference in tone. White women’s comments tended to be less verbally aggressive. Janette, for example, wrote, “id like to say something to all u people talkin about japan and how u feel sorry for dem … pearl harbor.” Expressing disappointment with sympathetic U.S. Americans, Rachel wrote, “Man ppl once I heard America never forgets but I guess we forgot Japan caused Pearl Harbor.” Sandra, too, posted, “May be offensive but today I heard that this is what happens when you Bomb Pearl Harbor.” To demonstrate the difference in tone, Carter wrote, “Fuck you Japan I’m glad you got hit with an earthquake. That’s what you get for bombing pearl harbor.” His comment is directed aggressively at Japan, while the women’s comments are meant to build consensus among U.S. Americans. In both cases, though, White users’ animus is consistent with White backlash’s use of perceived victimization to mobilize racialized dissatisfaction (Adams & Rosigno, 2005).

Karma/Divine Intervention

The belief in supernatural or cosmic forces working on behalf of the U.S. not only links the divine with an instrumental deployment of patriotism, it also connects to White supremacist ideologies that the (White) U.S. is uniquely exceptional and favored by the divine and that it is being victimized by multiculturalism. The “deep structure” in the discourse about karma acting to right the moral wrongs of Japan is to argue that the cosmic scales were tipped against the U.S. until supernatural forces could mete out vengeance. James wrote, “Fuck japan!!!! … did everyone forget pearl harbor? … karma is a motherfucker isn’t it.” Less taunting in her response, Mary also supported the belief in karmic payback. She wrote, “really i feel so sorry for the loss of life in japan but i also believe in karma. the spirits of all our service men who lost their lives in pearl harbor may have risen. god bless us all for what is to come.” Although some women used aggressively hateful rhetoric, women like Mary moderated their posts by expressing relative sympathy. In contrast, no men, who claimed karmic redemption, qualified their responses.

While most referenced karma, several others explicitly pointed to a divine being. For instance, Roland wrote, “Japan bombed pearl harbor, and god gave them a tsunami lol.” For Jim, he mixed rationales, suggesting the reasons for the Japanese tragedies were because of God’s repayment for Pearl Harbor and God’s retribution against Japanese femininity/sexuality. He wrote, “If they didn’t bomb pearl harbor this wouldn’t have happened. Gods way of telling japanese people there gay.” Here, it is instructive to draw upon CDA’s connection of the micro discourse to macro cultural meanings (Fairclough, 2010). The mixing of explanations might seem to be irrational on a manifest level, but the coupling makes ideological sense when considering Asian men have been feminized and represented as asexual in U.S. popular culture (Espiritu, 2004) and when considering that White backlash culture is not only a response to the perceived threat of multiculturalism but also to the perceived threat of feminism (Oh & Kutufam, 2014). One manifestation of that perceived threat is to reassert heteronormative masculinity (Kimmel, 2006). Against this backdrop, the linking of explanations connects cohesively to White backlash culture.

For other Facebook users, who cited God’s favor, they combined their religious beliefs with racist fervor. Here, the posts reference White superiority more directly. For example, in response to a post by Derek, who wrote, “Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan = Payback for Pearl Harbor? lol,” Amelia replied, “its god way of saying theres to many chinese here imam take u out lol.” The conflation of Chinese with Japanese reflects a racial essentialism, which transforms all East Asian bodies into a racialized Oriental Other. Her comment about widespread human tragedy also suggests that she views Asian lives as disposable, a common trope in racist representations of Asians as a “yellow peril” threat (Hamamoto, 1994). More overtly racist was Megan’s use of a racist slur, writing, “Maybe its payback for the japs and Pearl Harbor?? Who knows what he has instore for Others??” Through her question and use of a racist slur, she connected racism, patriotism, and divine intervention. Although she does not name God directly, the use of the male pronoun “he” and the context of natural disasters would suggest she is referring to a divine power, whom she arguably hopes will act in ways that her government is unable or unwilling in the killing of (racial) “Others.”

The purpose of understanding the Facebook posts has been to examine them as sites in which racist discourses in the White supremacist margins of cyberspace creep into the cultural mainstream, tying racism, patriotism, and religion together. The strategic use of patriotic discourse allows “reasonable racism” to persist (Klein, 2012; Meddaugh, 2009) but that same coded patriotic discourse occasionally finds hateful expression in hopes for continued death as well as the use of racist slurs and stereotyping. By claiming “payback for Pearl Harbor,” Facebook users provided a “legitimate” reason for delighting in Japanese deaths and for claiming the racist belief in divine favor. Though these discourses resonate in White supremacist discourses, the expression found on Facebook more closely reflect the gentrified form of White backlash culture. That is to say, though White supremacist discourses have animated White backlash culture, it has not done so entirely.

White backlash culture borrows White supremacist fears of a threat to White masculinity, a desire for a return to “traditional” social structures prior to the threats of multiculturalism and feminism, the belief in divine selection, and an argument about patriotic duty, but it does not replicate White supremacist discourses’ explicit references to White superiority. White backlash culture has adopted a postracial frame that advances racist agendas without naming race specifically (Gabriel, 1998; Ono, 2010). For Facebook users, ideologies of White as superior are not directly expressed, although the Asian Other as inferior do find expression through putdowns, racial slurs, and racist stereotyping. It appears that WPM discourses have shifted out of the periphery but not entirely. It has, thus far, not dislodged postracism as the dominant way of understanding racial relations.

“Ignorant and Insensitive”

Through CDA’s focus on tying specific discourse to larger social meanings (van Dijk, 1993a), it became apparent that users problematically resisted White backlash discourse by marshaling postracism. Whether commenters angrily denounced the payback comments, expressed disgust for the comments, or mocked the commenters, there was only a single tweet that referenced racism explicitly. Allison tweeted, “Nicely put!! RT“@BenXFD: Godzilla & Pearl Harbor trending?. Nothing like a bit casual racism is there …” Notably, her comment was not retweeted. Instead, the criticisms either were directed at individual “idiots” or the U.S./Americans while only obliquely conjuring race and racism. In critiques of postracism, the central argument is that racism as systemic discrimination is imagined to be a relic of the past and that race is considered unimportant in shaping people’s lives (Ono, 2010). Criticism of the U.S. and individual actors deflect antiracist readings that can connect connotative meanings of the payback posts on Facebook with systemic racism. Further, the argument that individual bad actors were acting like “idiots” shields White privilege from criticism (Foster, 2009). In the multiracial and multinational push back against payback discourses, Twitter users and Facebook commenters avoided referencing race, perhaps as a way to avoid offending or distancing themselves from potential allies, or it could simply be that postracism has become such a dominant framework in social media that it has been fully naturalized (Grasmuck et al., 2009). Regardless, the posts ultimately reified the racial status quo by advancing postracism as the lens through which resistance was mobilized even while repelling more virulent forms of racism on the cybermargins (Cisneros & Nakayama, 2015).

Postracial Counterattack

Tweets that advocated “payback for Pearl Harbor” had all been removed by the time data were collected. Attempts to publicly shame payback Twitter users were apparently successful. However, the remaining Tweets were not antiracist, either. Instead, they reinforced postracism as the dominant cultural logic. This was reinforced further as people of color were prominent in humorously arguing for their generalized disappointment in humanity. Asad, a self-identified Canadian, wrote jokingly, “Seeing all these people saying the earthquake was payback for pearl harbor makes me not want to live on this planet. Next rocket to mars plz.” Cody, an African American man, similarly tweeted, “Let’s see, Godzilla, Katrina, Pearl Harbor are trending. Stay classy, Twitter. #Dumbasses.” A premise of CTDA is that discourse is shaped by the technological structures through which it is articulated (Brock, 2012). The use of the hashtag, in this case, allowed Cody to call others into postracial community, suggesting that Twitter’s ability to create antiracist community that resists postracism is more ambivalent than the existing literature suggests.

For most others, they did not respond with humor but with frustration and mounting anger. Adrian, an Englishman, wrote, “Starting to dislike Twitter. Godzilla trending yesterday and Pearl Harbor today. Pathetic ignorant cunts.” It is notable that men’s criticism of the payback users was expressed in masculinist terms. Masculinist discourses are those that advance men’s interests in a patriarchal social order (Miriam, 2007), and they include values such as competition, control, and conquest (Butterworth, 2012). Perhaps because understanding and empathy are gendered feminine in the West, users felt it necessary to use aggressive masculine language to express their frustration at the “ignorance” of users, particularly as virtual public spaces are often dominated by “putdowns” (van Zoonen et al., 2007). Vice, a blog based in Brooklyn, was retweeted 124 times after posting, HEY IDIOTS: THE TSUNAMI IS NOT PAYBACK FOR PEARL HARBOR http://bit.ly/g7A3ju.” Likewise, Alan, a White man, tweeted, “OMG Fail. You dumbfucks a huge earthquake is_not_payback for Pearl Harbor! http://i.imgur.com/Pp4oA.jpg.” Others insinuated that making the link between the Japanese tragedies and Pearl Harbor revealed the payback posters’ ignorance and gendered oversensitivity to perceived historical wrongs. Bill, an African American man, posted on Facebook, “some ignorant motha fucka gone say japan deserved what they got for pearl harbor. That’s fucked up, it’s been 60 years get over it.”

Women like Audrey, a White Tokyo resident, also used masculinist language by exerting violent control and domination. She said, “I want to strangle any and all people making Godzilla or Pearl Harbor ‘karma’ references.” I want to see the life leave them.” Her comment was atypical, however, and perhaps informed by her lived investments in Japan. More commonly, women tweeted shaming discourses. Kristen, a White U.S. American, wrote, “1st Godzilla jokes, then comparing to Katrina, now Pearl Harbor. Some people disgust me! heartless bastards #endit.” Likewise, Ashley tweeted, “Death toll in Japan is up to 10 k and people are still making ‘That’s payback for Pearl Harbor’ jokes. Attempt @ humor FAIL. Shame on you.”

Tweets that attempted to dominate and tweets that attempted to shame both exerted power but were gendered articulations by users. In either case, however, Twitter users avoided naming racism as an animating force in their arguments against payback messages. Instead, their criticisms were rooted in a postracial logic. Instead of arguing explicitly against White racism, they argued that the posters were ignorant or insensitive. The racial status quo of postracism was then leveraged to demonstrate superiority. In other words, they claimed superiority by putting down White supremacy. As payback Twitter users constructed the Japanese Other as inferior, postracial Twitter users constructed the payback Twitter users as an inferior White Other. This fits a common construction of working-class Whites in popular culture as “White trash”—ignorant, racist, macho, patriotic, and God fearing (Price, 2012). The portrayals scapegoat “other” Whites in order to relieve middle-class White guilt from their complicity in sustaining racism (Price, 2012).

Payback Against the United States?

One of the most common responses was to directly challenge the posters’ historical amnesia, regarding the U.S. military’s response to Pearl Harbor. Gabe, a Black man, who identified as explicitly not U.S. American, posted on Facebook:

I don’t doubt there are some educated Americans around. However judging by some of the comments on facebook, they’re in the minority … You know how Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and killed 2,400 people? And how the US got no revenge in any way and totally didn’t kill 200,000 Japanese civilians?”

Derek provided counterideological discourses that challenged U.S. hegemony but that did not explicitly take an antiracist position. Thus, again, postracism was advanced as racism was ignored in favor of criticisms of the U.S.’s willful forgetting.

Perhaps because discourses of patriotism have become entangled with White backlash, Bill, a Black man, saw expressions of (White) U.S. American victimization as troubling. He wrote:

Something that really has pissed me off …. I read a few post of some folks (no names … we don’t need a FB war to break out) and they are saying Japan is getting payback for Pearl Harbor! How insensitive, ignorant, and just plain stupid can one be! I mean they did get A-bombs dropped on them, for one, and now they (innocent men, women, and children) are in a living nightmare …. SMGDH [Shaking my God Damn Head]!!!!!

However, his critique was, at most, a coded challenge to White racism with words like “ignorant” arguably indexing racism. His manifest language, too, fits with postracial logics, which require individuals to avoid discussions of racism lest they be accused of “playing the race card” (Lipsitz, 1998).

U.S. American Twitter users also shared similar sentiments. Shelton, a White man, tweeted, “Payback for Pearl Harbor? you mean the bombings of #Hiroshima and #Nagasaki weren’t enough?” Bryan, a White man, wrote, “Here’s why we have a hard time around the world. here are some of fools saying EQ was payback for Pearl Harbor http://bit.ly/fBfTIh.” Like other Twitter users, he linked payback comments with ignorance and shame by association. Notably, his shame was directed at U.S. American ignorance, rather than White racial ignorance. Emma, a White woman, tweeted, “Payback for Pearl Harbor? Are people that idiotic? I guess they didn’t hear about the A-bombs we drop over there. Pretty sure we’re even.” Sophia, a White woman, on the other hand, aggressively used a gendered insult to mock as she used the hashtag #douche, tweeting, “All you asswipes talking about the Japanese earthquake being payback for Pearl Harbor … Did you conveniently forget about Hiroshima? #douche.”

For some users, their critique was not leveled against specific Facebook and Twitter users, who made payback comments. Rather, they directed their criticism against the U.S. and its military intervention and foreign policy. Lydia, a self-described Lebanese woman, tweeted, “Are ppl actually saying that #Japan earthquake is payback for Pearl Harbor? Wonder what payback #US will get in the future then.” Her comment was retweeted eight times, resonating with at least some of her followers, who believe current U.S. action deserves future karmic retribution. Similarly, Floyd, a White American man, wrote, “If the Japan earthquake is karmic payback for Pearl Harbor, what sort of karmic hell is the US due to suffer?” Gordon, a White man, took a similar tact but used the logic of the payback posters to sarcastically suggest that the U.S. has also received payback. Gordon tweeted, “Since ppl are saying that this earthquake is god’s payback for Pearl Harbor, I guess Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 were payback for Hiroshima.” In this way, these posters worked to deconstruct the coding of patriotism and divine favor found in the White backlash discourses.

Criticisms made by members of Asian diasporas crystallized around a similar refrain, namely, that the U.S. has already exacted military revenge. Heather, for example, posted on Facebook:

To thoughs people who keep saying Japan got what it deserved cause they are atheists i hope “god” smit[e]s them with the rath of “your stupid go die in a hole” -_-. Also the fact that its ‘karma’ for pearl harbor. Well then we are all going to die for our ‘karma’ from the atomic bombs we threw.

From her use of the pronoun “we,” it can be assumed that she identifies as U.S. American while engaged with racial difference. Her construction of a serious, displeased face “-_-” represents familiarity with East Asian uses of emoticons. This suggests that her identity is drawn from multiple sites, domestically in the U.S. and transnationally in Asia. Like Heather, Bart, whose race is unknown, used the same emoticon. He pointed out that not only did the U.S. pay back the attack on Pearl Harbor but that it has committed other moral atrocities. Bart asked rhetorically, “Why is this Pearl Harbor is related to the tsunami crap still going around …? Guess people don’t know about the Iraq, Trail of Tears, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and that whole slavery shit that happened a while back. Forget about that fuckers … tsunami =pearl harbor? really? -_-” What emerges, though, is opposition that only implies racism as a cause for the payback discourses. This suggests that opposition to the payback discourses operate within the confines of postracial cultural logics, at least in its manifest expression.

These posts, while fending off the challenges of the White supremacist margins do not provide space for critical antiracist views, thereby reifying postracism. In the multiracial and multinational coalition that coalesced, nearly all responses slipped into personal criticisms that ignored global power and dynamics of racist hierarchy and that engaged in “color-blind” discourse that inadvertently advances a racist status quo (Ono, 2010). Though the comments represent a more sympathetic and humane point of view, the responses point to the limits of deliberative democracy in Web 2.0 and the inability to move beyond dominant racial and cultural logics.

Conclusion

It is nearly trite to talk about racism on Facebook and Twitter. Its pervasiveness has become something of an Internet truism. Though it might be argued that there is nothing particularly novel about the ways Internet discourse emerged following the Japanese tragedies, it is the very ubiquity of online racism that makes it worthy of analysis. What is important to understand and what gives these posts and tweets greater social significance is the location from which these discourses are coming and the platforms through which they were articulated.

Extending Cisneros and Nakayama’s (2015) conclusion that overt racism based on explicit difference and postracism based on color blindness coexist in social media spaces, this project elaborates the circuits by which these discourses travel (see Figure 1). White supremacist discourses, in this case, first initiated as a response to elite discourse in news (van Dijk, 1993b). It provides the symbolic material to articulate racial meanings into the cultural terrain. White supremacist discourses that lie in the cultural margins are activated and laundered through social networking sites (see Klein, 2012). The laundering results in the coded language of White backlash discourse that advances while somewhat disguising its White supremacist functions. Though it is unclear whether users are aware of the racist location of the discourses, it resonates with the racial logic of some users and circulates through their social networks as vernacular discourse. Unlike van Dijk’s (1993b) model of elite racist discourse in the news, however, racism originates primarily at the site of the vernacular to advance marginalized racial logics. Connections between White supremacist discourse, White backlash discourse, information laundering, and social networking sites has, heretofore, not been made, so this project contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the interconnectedness of these discourses and communication vehicles in sustaining overt racism.

Figure 1.

Sustaining White supremacy.

In addition, like the work of Cisneros and Nakayama (2015), this project examines the interaction of postracism. Furthering their work, I examined tweets that have remained a few years after the initial tragedy, thus I am able to uncover the remaining traces and the discourses that ultimately prevailed. What remains were legitimated tweets that articulate postracism, the prevailing racial logic, especially on social networking sites (Grasmuck et al., 2009). The championing and winning out of postracism demonstrates that discourses that support it were successful in shaming or creating enough flak for the users of White backlash discourse to largely result in their removal. Users marshaled the dominant cultural logic of postracism in order to shut down the marginal cultural logic of White backlash. In so doing, they claimed their moral authority as color-blind nonracists and reinforced the hegemony of postracism. So, it is not quite precise to state that overt and postracial discourse coexist in social networking sites, but, rather, postracial discourses enter as a challenge to White backlash discourse, disciplining it back into the cultural margins. Lest this be interpreted as solely beneficial, it should also be noted that antiracist discourses that challenged White backlash discourse were also removed and remained unseen, pushing counterhegemonic, antiracist discourse to the cultural margins, too. While Facebook and Twitter allow for marginalized vernacular discourse to move into the cultural center, these discourses are disciplined back to the margins (1) when users have publicly visible profiles and (2) when their messages reach a broad audience who popularly select dominant postracial logics.

Further work should be conducted to advance this understanding of social media as a site for the interaction of overt racism and postracism. Additional research should also further complicate the conclusions of this article by analyzing other important axes of difference. For example, what happens when overt sexism and racism interact simultaneously with postfeminism and postracism as dominant responses? With the growing use and reliance on social media, it is more necessary than ever to address questions such as this in order to create opportunities for an intersectional antiracist multiculturalism to find a foothold.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their incisive and substantive feedback. It greatly improved the quality of the essay.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

David C. Oh (PhD, Syracuse University) is an assistant professor of Communication Arts at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He is the author of Second-Generation Korean Americans and Transnational Media: Diasporic Identifications and more than a dozen journal articles and book chapters on race, identity, and media.

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