“Payback for Pearl Harbor”

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.

“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).

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. OPEN IN VIEWER

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.