Abstract
Twitter campaigns attacking those who make racist or xenophobic statements are valuable, raising the public profile of opinions that will not tolerate racism in any form. They also indicate how our major institutions are failing to address important matters of social justice. But there is concern that social media, such as Twitter, tends to extremes, moral outrages, lack of nuance and incivility, which shape how issues become represented. In this paper, using Critical Discourse Analysis, we look at three Twitter hashtags calling-out racist behaviour. We ask how racism and anti-racism is represented on these hashtags? We show how these misrepresent fundamental aspects of racism in society, distracting from, what race theorists would argue, is the most important thing these incidents tell us about racism at this present time. The findings have consequences for all such Twitter social justice campaigns.
Keywords
Introduction
In mainstream and social media there has been much public debate about the nature of cancel culture, driven chiefly by Twitter. Some show concern that the brutality of the campaign may not be in proportion to the original transgression (Kirk, 2018). Others note that they seem to be driven in large part by the pleasure brought to those tweeting as they have a sense of working together, fighting for justice, and helping the vulnerable to deal with a perpetrator (Bérubé, 2018), all at little personal cost or time (Henderson, 2019). As much as dealing with injustice here, it is way for those in the cancel campaign to show they are morally good (Ditum, 2014). Many critics of cancel culture sit to the political right, describing it as a kind of political correctness, or identity politics gone mad, carrying undertones of what they see as a dangerous ‘Cultural Marxism’ intent on bringing down Western civilisation (Furedi, 2020). It is not considered that, while these call outs may have their problematic features, their existence points to the fact that existing institutions are simply failing to address very real and pressing issues of social injustice (Semíramis, 2019).
There is also academic literature on the nature of debate on social media, especially Twitter, which points to the moralising quality and mob mentality of cancel campaigns. Social media does not lend to a more nuanced and complex discussion of issues, but rather to simplifications, extreme points of view and moral rages (Ott, 2017). Discussions of social and political issues tend towards simple narratives, involving binary polarities of good and evil (Bouvier, 2019; Papacharissi, 2015) based largely on symbolism and buzzwords, rather than careful consideration and deliberation of issues (Bouvier and Cheng, 2019). Those posting may be little engaged with the precise details of what others are posting, but rather the overall affect (Papacharissi, 2015; Sampson et al., 2018). This means that different users can throw a range of more or less related, or even tangential, issues to the affective flow (Bouvier, 2019). Some authors argue that nevertheless Twitter feeds can still serve to raise issues of social justice into the public domain and force them onto political agendas (Papacharissi, 2015).
However, much less research has been done focusing on the exact nature of these Twitter cancel campaigns. If such hashtags risk simplification, ideological extremes, moral posturing and incivility, what are the risks in cases where campaigns seek to cancel individuals in relation to perceived transgressions against specific issues of social justice? In this paper we ask this question using the case of three campaigns against persons who have made racist and xenophobic statements. In our corpus of data, film clips of racist outbursts are shared on Twitter, dedicated hashtags are created and the perpetrator then becomes subject to, what at the time of writing, was being called ‘cancelling’.
We do not want to fall into a trend of what Bucher (2019: 1) calls choosing only ‘straw men’ to either celebrate or criticise social media, but rather simply to ask what happens when, what may well be good sentiments relating to social justice, are communicated on Twitter as a perpetrator is dealt with. Drawing on the work of scholars working in the area of racism theory and race history we show that these campaigns, due to how they represent racism and racists, run the risk of concealing the nature of the very things that they seek to challenge and certainly miss some of their most pressing features in our societies at this present time. This has significance, more broadly for thinking about what such social justice campaigns, however valuable, tend to set aside as their ideas are shaped through the affordances of social media.
In this paper, using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Machin and Mayr, 2012; Van Dijk, 1998) we look at three examples of hashtags taken from a larger corpus. Before looking at the data we present two bodies of literature, both of which help us to throw light on our data. First, we consider some of the literature that makes observations on the nature of discussion on social media. Second, we look briefly at literature on contemporary representations and understandings of racism.
Twitter, social justice and civic debate
There has been much scholarship that has celebrated the potential of Twitter, as well as other social media, in democratisation and social justice. Individuals and groups, formerly lacking a platform to speak, are now able to be heard, share their ideas and mobilise themselves and others (Castells, 2015). Hashtags such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter are some of the high-profile cases bringing formerly more concealed social injustices into open view. In particular, if we think about mainstream news media as communicating elite ideologies top-down into society (Van Dijk, 1998), social media allows voices from below to speak back. And there is huge potential here challenging racist and xenophobic ideologies carried in the mainstream news media (KhosraviNik, 2017).
There are many studies documenting the way that social media can provide such voices from below playing a role in democratising and social justice movements and negotiating elite control over mainstream media (Florini, 2014; Jackson et al., 2020; Penney and Dadas, 2013; Poell and van Dijck, 2015) showing the huge impact this has made internationally (Bruns et al., 2013; Tufekci, 2017; Yang, 2018).
Then there are those scholars who have pointed to the limitations of Twitter, as well as other social media platforms, to allow more nuanced and complex discussion of issues, rather than simplifications, extreme points of view and moral rages. We look at some of the key points in this literature, which provides insights we take forward to look at what happens to the anti-racist sentiment of those tweeting in our data.
First, Twitter feeds tend not to carry coherent rational discussion, floods of emotion and affect, and are usually based around a highly simple narrative where there are clear opposite forces of good and evil (Papacharissi, 2015; Sampson et al., 2018). Purposes, aims and causalities will be less than clear and certainly not coherent, but this will be backgrounded by the sense of shared outrage and mobilisation (Bouvier, 2019). And members of an affective community can create a shared mental idea of the evil other that they are addressing, in part defined through the needs of the affective outrage (Suler, 2004). The fast-moving nature of tweeting and the limited space can also simply counter the possibilities of a more considered response (Ott, 2017).
Second, Twitter hashtags can take a highly insular and nodal form (KhosraviNik, 2017). Here users will tend to be attracted to, or on the bases of previous activity, channeled towards, hashtags that carry similar outlooks and ideas (Matamoros-Fernández, 2017). Here they will come across familiar narratives, ideas, symbolism, buzzwords and patterns of mutual confirming, even though overall there may be the lack of clearly formed ideas. Combined with the challenges to making more nuanced and considered response this means that social media platforms like Twitter can yield ideological inflexibility (Ng, 2020).
Third, hashtags can be driven by high levels of emotion and effect, which creates engagement and the moral intensity that can bind and affective community (Papacharissi, 2015; Sampson et al., 2018). Some have argued that this is one reason that hashtags can be rich with personal attacks, aggression, and other incivility (Ott, 2017; Shepherd et al., 2015). The desire for those tweeting to post likable and sharable tweets can also drive the tendency to more extreme and provocative comments (Rambukkana, 2015).
Hashtag incivility can involve the use of sarcasm and cruel humor, along with memes and parody (Henefeld, 2016). Humor in itself can drive engagement, likes and sharing and, as well as incivility, can work as a form of self-promotion and attention grabbing (Udupa and Pohjonen, 2019). The use of humor in the debate of civic and political issues can also act to soften the style of discourse, signaling accessibility for those normally feeling excluded (Davis et al., 2018). But, specifically in relation to morally infused affective communities in the case of racism, authors have also shown how humor, sarcasm and irony can also be one way that an affective community can signal its smartness and knowingness through its mastery over discourse, signaling their superior position (Breazu and Machin, 2019). This merging of civic commentary, moral campaigning, incivility, shaming and humor on social media, has been observed to be one of its key communicative characteristics (Udupa, 2017), which we must bear in mind as we look at these campaigns against racist behaviour.
Fourth, the way that hashtags tend not to carry coherent rational discussion, but rather moral outrage, narratives and polarities which lack nuance and complexity along with incivility, is also explained by Ott (2017) as due to the ‘ephemeral’ nature of how people tweet. The idea here is simply that, when we decide to tweet, we are unlikely to read carefully what has already been said on a hashtag. We do not carefully consider what has been said other tweets and what kinds of exact priorities or arguments they carry. Our own tweets may not be the result of long reflection nor planning. And it takes little time or effort, whether tweeting about our daughter’s football match, a product review, or about a racist act. It can be done as we queue to pick up our coffee and when we are tweeting about a number of unrelated things in rapid sequence (Bratslavsky et al., 2019). In such cases we may not necessarily have a deeper level of commitment to what we tweet (Foxman and Wolf, 2013). Such ephemeral engagement can also help create distance from those to whom incivility and sarcasm is aimed at and, bolstered by the affective community, there is little fear of consequences (Groshek and Cutino, 2016). We may also attend less carefully to the details of a new hashtag as it may feel familiar to us. This will likely be presented to us on the basis of our prior user patterns and preferences and in this sense appear as immediately familiar not in need of closer inspection (Bouvier and Cheng, 2019).
Anti-racism and the individualisation of racism
In critical race theory it has been argued that public and official handling of racism can tend to represent it, not as something related to deeper issues in society, but as something that is an exception, a public outburst, something abnormal that is either left over from a less-civilised period or evidence of extremism (Goldberg, 2009). Here, racism is usually seen as something committed by an individual or group of individuals (Lentin, 2016). In this context our understanding of racism and anti-racism, Lentin (2016) argues, becomes decontextualised, seen as a personal disposition, behaviour or attitude that is isolated rather than being an expression of the underlying ideology or system (p. 36). Racism represented in this way is removed from its ‘historical basis, severity and power’ (Song, 2014: 107). This individualisation of racism cuts it off from the ways that the state, institutions and organisations can embody and enact racism (Lentin, 2016: 37). As Alexander (2016) points out, this structural racism is well documented in terms of salary levels, poverty levels, proportions of Black people in prisons, police harassment, lower quality accommodation, success in job applications, levels of poor physical and mental health. And as race historians argue, these socio-economic positions of Black and Latino people in the US must also be understood in the context of wider neoliberal created forms of social inequalities (Johnson, 2007; Johnson et al., 2011; Reed, 2001). In this sense the individualisation of racism, one might argue is a simple ‘bulwark to the neoliberal project’ which has ‘adversely affected black workers and communities’ (Johnson, 2020).
Other scholars argue that there is a sense that this individualised racism takes place in societies that are otherwise not racist (Seikkula, 2017). Such racism is seen rather as something belonging to the past or as something characteristic of specific regimes such as Nazi Germany and South Africa under Apartheid (Lentin, 2014). Kushner (1994) argues that it was largely the iconography, and therefore extreme distinctiveness and otherness of these regimes, including organisations such as the Klu Klux Klan, which make them compelling and also create a sense that they are distinctive from regular society. Such representations undermine our ability to understand the nature of racism as it takes place in specific places, in specific social formations. This racism, carried out by different people in different context, becomes dealt with in the same way – with reverse racism in one such case (Song, 2014: 109) – and becomes relativised (Goldberg, 2009; Lentin, 2011, 2016; Pitcher, 2009).
Gilroy (2012) argues that racist outbursts must not be individualised. It is more productive to ask why a person uses this way of speaking at this particular time. Even if they are otherwise irritated, frustrated, under the effects of alcohol or medication, why do they express racist or anti migrant sentiments in a particular moment of rage? The point is that such people will likely be speaking through words they hear all around them. This includes the history of racism in that society, but also the present socio-economic position of the person producing this outburst (Gilroy, 2012), for example, in the case of working-class people, also experiencing the harsh effects of neoliberalism: growing poverty, job insecurity, pension cuts, etc. For Gilroy, this scapegoating of ethnic minorities and migrants, he points out, is something heard routinely in political talk and in mainstream news media. The news media may well themselves denounce individual racist outbursts but in other ways contribute to growing intolerance (Richardson, 2017). And as Dummett (1973: 244) observed many years ago, there is a tendency within the educated liberal population to deflect the blame for racism onto the less educated masses, hence ‘brushing it under the carpet’. Micheals (2018) puts that it’s almost always been true that the struggle against inequality has been championed by some of its beneficiaries as well as its victims’. At the same time politicians have long used and fostered racism and xenophobia as political leverage (Richardson, 2017).
At the time of writing, many scholars were concerned about rising racism and xenophobia across Europe as emerging right-wing populism was leaning heavily on these to leverage power and seduce disenfranchised populations (Wodak, 2015). As Virdee and McGeever (2018) suggest ‘From Sweden to Switzerland, from Belgium to Bulgaria, a tide of reactionary populism is sweeping across the European mainland which demands nothing less than a restoration of a mythical golden age of sovereign nation-states defined by cultural and racial homogeneity’ (pp. 1802,1803). Simply, racism and xenophobia become one way that disenfranchised populations are encouraged to place the blame for huge changes taking place in society, where there are increasing social inequalities, a break down in former employment patterns, weakening of former institutions through neoliberal policies, economic instabilities and a sense that the political elite no longer represents ordinary people (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018; Inglehart and Norris, 2019).
The danger therefore in individualising racism and xenophobia is that we miss these wider patterns of which it is a part. It becomes ‘a disjointed series of public events’ (Lentin, 2015: 33) and ‘reduced to a question of individual morality’ (Lentin, 2018: 402). And when we collapse all instances of localised racism together using iconographical cases such as Fascism or the KKK we create a dangerous view where ‘racism is rendered universal, ahistorical’ (Lentin, 2018: 402).
Such observations are important as we come to think about how racism, racists and being anti-racist are represented on the Twitter hashtags in our data are expressed though the affordances of social media.
Theory and methods
The analysis that follows uses data from three Twitter hashtags focussed around short video clips of racist outbursts by three different people. All went viral and were taken up by mainstream media. The three cases involve: Aaron Schlossberg, who was seen in a New York restaurant telling workers to refrain from speaking Spanish and threatening them with deportation; Kelly Pocha, who was filmed drunk in a restaurant telling Syrian migrants they had no place in Canada, after she said they had been offensive to her; and Rhonda Polon, in Los Angeles, who was seen throwing a in the face of a Latin American worker she said she presumed to be a burglar. These all took place in 2018. We gathered a corpus of 3000 tweets. Not all tweets were gathered from these hashtags, nor those of all closely related or parallel hashtags. In the case of social media, data can rapidly expand and become unwieldy. Following Pink et al. (2015), the priority is to maintain a practical sense of what data is required to allow the research question to be operationalised. Therefore analysis draws on tweets over the period of 22/5/18 – 14/8/18 for Aaron Schlossberg; 9/5/18 – 22/6/18 for Kelly Pocha; and 12/8/18 – 19/8/18 for Rhonda Polon, using the following search terms: #AaronMSchlossberg, #AaronSchlossberg, Aaron Schlossberg, #KellyPocha, #RhondaPolon, and #CoffeeCathy.
The analysis involved two stages. The first was a thematic analysis. Tweets we scraped and imported into NVivo. This first stage used Van Dijk’s (2009) semantic macro-analysis to look for the main themes in the data. This includes open coding and axial coding where major categories are broken down into subcategories (Charmaz, 2006). In this paper we present the data using six of the most salient themes which allow us to both show how racism is represented on these hashtags and reveal how this can be understood as in part being due to the affordances of Twitter.
The second stage of analysis close attention to the language using CDA (Fairclough, 1992; Van Dijk, 1998) and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) (Machin and Mayr, 2012). Here the interest lies in the role of language, and other semiotic modes, in the functioning of politics and society. In particular, this interest relates to the dissemination, legitimisation and naturalisation of ideologies that support and maintain social inequalities, which serve the interests of the powerful in society. These ideologies are identified in instances of communication through close, critical attention to the choices made in language, images or other modes of communication.
One core concept in CDA is that of ‘discourse’ (Foucault, 1972). It used to account for the kind of knowledge, or models of the world, disseminated by different groups to support their own interest. Such discourses may not be immediately obvious but can be drawn out through the kind of analysis allowed using CDA and MCDA. Discourses account for how things in society work, why they are the way they are, who does what in these processes, and whether they are valuable or not. It is useful to think of discourse as being comprised of a kind of discursive ‘script’ (Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999). So we look at how such discursive scripts represent participants and their motives, actions, processes, causalities, ideas, values, times and places, and consider how all these elements are evaluated. In this paper we are dealing with a discursive script that involves the identities and actions of those represented as racists as well as how those tweeting to represent themselves. It involves representation of persons, actions, motivations and evaluations.
One other concept we use to consider our data is Van Dijk’s (1998) ‘ideological square’. This accounts for the sharply polarised in-group and out-group binary oppositions that can be used when contrasting a ‘we’ to a ‘them’. Of particular importance in this case is the observation that there is mitigation of the negative qualities of the ‘we’ and mitigation of the good qualities of the ‘them’ (Kuo and Nakamura, 2005). In other words, we find a discursive script where there is an antithesis of good and evil.
We present the data below, first looking at how the people who are being cancelled are described. Here, important is how the reasons for their racist outburst are articulated. In the second half of the analysis we look at how those tweeting represent themselves.
Representing those who make racist outbursts
Individualisation of racism
On these hashtags, racism is not explained in terms of social contexts. Issues of structural or institutional racism are not considered. These outbursts are about individuals. This individualisation relates, in the first place, to things like attitudes, behaviour and localised family settings: Tweet 1 Damn right that is who #KellyPocha is. She’s just upset she was exposed for the racist POS she is. An obnoxious racist. As parents we teach our children how to behave & treat others. This is lesson for my child on how not to act, I wonder how here children view this? Tweet 2 #KellyPocha your excuse was that you were drunk and what you said really isn’t you? You do realize that alcohol brings out the inner you, you racist son of a bitch, Be a better person #FFS Tweet 3 You are implying she didn’t have a choice w her behaviour and her words because someone made her do it. More of less. . . #kellypocha said they were talking about her in their language & laughing at her. She has no idea what they said but she’s so important it HAD to be about her
We begin with these posts from the #KellyPocha feed to give a sense of the different nature these tweets take in regard to one of the people being cancelled. In Tweet 1, we see that racism is not something that is deeply infused in the social structure, or related to the specific socio-political situation, but is a matter of manners and how we treat others, in this case related to an idealised notional of parenting and childhood.
In Tweet 2, we also see racism as an instance of behaviour: on the one hand to ‘be a better person’, but on the other as in being reflective of the ‘inner you’. Tweet 3, represents racism also in relation to flawed personality traits. In this case, the outburst was a response to what the migrant men were saying in their own language, which Pocha had taken as directed at her. Here, this post accounts for this being evidence of her self-centredness.
In Figure 1 above we also see how evidence for an individual’s flawed character, here in the case of hypocrisy, is presented to delegitimise one of the other persons subject to cancelling: #CoffeeCathy. The Tweet here carries a screenshot of their LinkedIn profile, where she has signalled the causes she cares about. These include ‘human rights’ and ‘Social Services’.
Rhonda Michelle’s (aka #CoffeeCathy) LinkedIn profile.
In this case we are dealing not only with someone guilty of a racist outburst, but someone who is hypocritical, or inauthentic. This issue of authenticity has been observed as a common basis for evaluating others on social media (Shane, 2018), where social media users can act, as what Salisbury and Pooley, (2017:7) call ‘authenticity detectives’, seeking out such instances as we see in Figure 1. This inauthenticity then too becomes further evidence of a flawed and despicable nature and can also be used to dismiss any claims of regret or apologies from those being cancelled.
What we are seeing here in this individualisation of racism can be usefully thought about using Van Dijk’s (1998) idea of the ideological square. This person is the opposite of those tweeting. All aspects of their character and behavior are seen as evidence of their badness, including parenting, inauthenticity and self-centredness.
Collectivisation and generic types
The literature on contemporary understandings of racism suggests that we tend to collapse all kinds of racism from different times and places into one thing, usually with reference to more iconic instances. The risk is that we lose what is specific about a single instance. In our data we find that this is case. Firstly, we find that racists are represented as generic types.
Tweet 4 That’s too much logic. We all know or have met a #KellyPocha. We’ve dealt with them or seen them on video. Aggressive, disrespectful, ignorant, bigoted white women posturing with entitled superiority they believe can’t be challenged or consequenced.
Tweet 4 states ‘We all know or have met a #KellyPocha, giving a list of characteristic personality traits. So, we are not to understand this outburst as Gilroy (2012) might suggest by asking why an otherwise ordinary person, even if drunk, grumpy and frustrated with her life situation, might choose to speak in this way, abusing men who she took as immigrants. Here, rather, we are to see this as a generic type of ‘disrespectful, ignorant, bigoted’ person.
Also of importance here, which appeared throughout our data, is the comment that such a person believes they cannot be challenged or brought to consequence. This suggests arrogance as well as stupidity, since clearly Twitter is doing just that.
This process of dismissing racist outbursts as being related to a generic type, who is the antithesis of those tweeting, means that it is less necessary that we query or debate the meaning of what has taken place since it has been seen before and it is more of the same kind of person. These generic racists can also be related to racism in general.
Tweet 5 RACIST RANT ftom a member of ‘Knuckle Draggers 4 Trump’, one of the many bigots, racists, skin heads, KKK members, nazis, & other poorly educated white supremacist, conservative ‘Christian’ right wing simpletons who support and defend @realDonaldTrump.
Here the outburst from Aaron Schlossberg, the lawyer filmed ranting at a group of, is related to both specific historical extreme instances of racism such as Nazism, but also to poor education and skin heads. As Lentin (2014) argues, rather than understanding specific instances of racism, it becomes collapsed with fascist regimes. The danger with what we have seen so far, as Lentin (2015) puts it, is that racism becomes ‘a disjointed series of public events’ (p. 33).
Racism as social background/lack of cultural capital
Other posts raise the stupidity and uneducated nature of those making the racist outbursts: Tweet 6 Someone doesn’t know what quotations mean. Well, racists are often stupid, so makes sense. #coffeecathy #BoycottSpinGalFitness Tweet 7 Weird. Her grammar sucks and she can’t spell. #CoffeeCathy Tweet 8 It were them durn foreigners not talking #Canadian what did it, says #Cranbrook’s #KellyPocha Her having an off day doesn’t excuse her #racism in an #Alberta restaurant – it just illustrates how #racists use racism to blame others for their own problems.
Tweets 6 and 7 comment on tweets made by Rhonda Michelle (#CoffeeCathy) to explain her own behaviour. Once on the other side of the ideological square, all aspects of behaviour can be seen as further evidence of flawed character. Here, spelling errors are picked up to relate racism to stupidity and lack of education. In tweet 8, through humour, the post parodies #KellyPocha using what is presented as poor grammar, signifying a lack of education as well as regional inward-looking backwardness.
Tweet 9 Everybody! Put your right foot down and you jam it in your mouth. You say some racist stuff like you come from way down south. Say a half-assed sorry ’cause you really aren’t at all and you sit by the phone waiting for Ezra Levant to call. And that’s how you do the #KellyPocha
In tweet 9 racism is about a generic ‘south’. What is never discussed on these hashtags is how Nazism, KKK, Apartheid, skinheads, lack of education, ‘down south’, sense of privilege, the lack authenticity fit together. In the affective flow of calling out the racist, the details and nuance of what is being said is not what is salient. It is the simplified narrative, the good and evil polarity and moral outrage, which is the driving force.
In the case of Aaron Schlossberg, another kind of social grouping is referenced, again through humour, as one user writes a mock post on Schlossberg’s behalf: Tweet 10 Aaron M. Schlossberg Attorney at Law I’ll be fine, I’m a white privileged rich kid with a law degree. I’ll lay low for a while, shop a couple of interviews here and there, write a book about this whole experience where I talk about the online harassment and death threats I’m getting. I’ll get invited to Fox as a panelist and before you know it, I’ll have a full time gig as a host
Again here, racism is about flawed character. It is about arrogance and conceit. It also relates to social background, but here in terms of privilege rather than lack of education. This also deflects racism away from the routine and ordinary onto the idea of over-privilege, through wealth and an inferred elite education.
Rejection/refusal of apologies
Across the hashtags, apologies for outbursts are always rejected. These are seen as further evidence of inauthenticity and flawed character and often used as fuel for humour and brutal sarcasm.
Tweet 11 I love when racists such as Aaron Schlossberg are forced to release statements all like, ‘The racist outburst I had at JoAnn’s Fabrics is not reflective of who I am’. Tweet 12 To Aaron Schlossberg – that video was the ‘real’ you. To say it wasn’t is only to admit that you got caught being the real you on camera. Funny how people get when they are caught red-handed being themselves.
In the context of the ideological square, the subjects of the tweets have crossed over a boundary where they are dehumanised and beyond mitigation. In such a case, any apology can only be seen as further indications of manipulation, hypocrisy and deviousness. Apologies are addressed in the flow of the emotionally charged affective connectivity. As Suler (2004) suggests, the folk-devils we create in such moral campaigns become shaped in part to meet the needs of the ‘we’ of the hashtag, to which we now turn our attention.
The ‘we’ of Twitter ‘doing its thing’
We now move on to look how those tweeting represent themselves and how they communicate. It is here that we are able to draw particular attention to how the affordances of Twitter foster the kind of ideological square and collapse of context of actual racist outbursts that we saw in the above analysis.
The affective, flexible ‘we’
To begin with, we consider how those tweeting represent themselves collectively: Tweet 13 We will do it. We did the one for Racist Lawyer Aaron Schlossberg #HablamosEspanol and now for #CoffeeCathy and we will do one for her too. Send us a PM. Tweet 14 This guy needs the ‘Aaron Schlossberg’ treatment. . . . . . C’mon Twitter, let’s find him and send him a Mariachi band. . . Tweet 15 I want to know what Aaron Schlossberg, certain I spelled it wrong, I want to know what he’s up to. I feel like we’ve forgotten about him, and I really didn’t want for him to be forgotten. I wanted him to be disbarred.
In CDA, it has been shown that pronouns are one of the chief grammatic forms used for the manipulation of classifications of people, of social relations in regard to status and power (Van Dijk, 1998: 203). Pronouns such as ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘them’ can be used as a shifting concept to create a sense of imagined collective interest and also as a shared enemy or nemesis. This sense of ‘we’ has been shown to be a strong feature of the affective communities on social media, even where what is mobilising the ‘we’, or exactly what it is that binds them together in terms of arguments, priorities and aims, may be less than clear (Bouvier, 2019).
In tweets 13–15 it can be seen how the ‘we’ is evoked through the use of the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ (‘let’s find him’, ‘Send us a PM’). As is characteristic of much successful social media communication, in these statements the ‘we’ is often expressed in statements that take the form of simulated conversations, which are part of creating engagement and a sense of collective mobilisation (Bouvier, 2019; Myers, 2009). For example, in tweet 14: ‘C’mon Twitter, lets find him’.
Importantly, what the ‘we’ thinks and does is expressed in high modality. Modality relates to how certain a statement is made, such as the different between ‘we will do that’ and ‘we might do that’. In tweet 13 we find ‘we will do it’. This high modality runs through the hashtags. We do not find more cautiously suggested statements or invitations to think about things in a particular way, but rather certainty and confidence. This forms part of the affect and moral certainty of the hashtag.
Another way that the shared ‘we’ and affective bonds are created is found in tweet 14 where it is stated that ‘we’ve forgotten about him’. In CDA, it has been observed that such access to internal states and mental processes can help to foster a sense of identification and association as we are encouraged to consider the internal feelings of others (Machin and Mayr, 2012). Across these hashtags, we find posts that represent what ‘we’ think, know and need to remember.
On these feeds, interspersed with the kinds of tweets we see above, are those posted by users seeking to drive traffic to their own column, blog, website, or mainstream media outlet. Here are two typical examples: Tweet 16 LISTEN LIVE to elia_stlaw on @CKNW @jonmccomb980 NOW | Talking disability rights at work, for cause firing (#KellyPocha rehired) and #Cannabis rights at work for employers & employees bit.ly/2lqATHJ Tweet 17 #Racism to be condemned When #KellyPocha teed off group of #Racist men, the world wasn’t watching. But they aren’t as isolated as we’d like to think. #Women #Hate winnipegsun.com/opinion/editor. . .
When we follow these links, we are taken to other media content that addresses issues of racism/anti-racism to different degrees and in different ways, or deals with other issues of social injustice. These links play an important part of legitimising the moral value of the. The ‘we’ is clearly part of a wider ‘we’ fighting for social injustice. Links include other kinds of bloggers, musicians, and those seeking to attract clicks on their own media platforms, and to align with the moral capital of the hashtags.
Fearlessly calling out (and confronting) racists
It is striking how tweets address those they are calling out directly. We see this in the following examples: Tweet 18 That roid rage is going to cost you your business. Less steroids, more tacos lady. #coffeeCathy #SpinGalFitness Tweet 19 #NotAccepted! You walk around filming yourself insulting ppl! You insulted every decent human living on this planet. Your only mistake was allowing us to see the real you! #racist #AaronMSchlossberg
Here again, we find the simulated conversation, in these cases addressing the racists. They all address the person as ‘you’: ‘you racist son of a bitch’, ‘is going to cost you’, ‘You insulted every decent person on this planet’. And it involves directives such as: ‘Be a better person’ (tweet 2), ‘Less steroids, more tacos lady’. As with the high modality of the statements, this creates a sense of confident, uncompromising confrontation with the racists. This confident calling out is one important part of the affective connectivity, of the ‘we’, of its activism, its ‘We will do it’ but also of its moral certainty to engage racists and racism unflinchingly. Such is their commitment and clarity of what needs to be done. This is important to create a sense that here direct action is taking place – that racism is being targeted, attacked.
Incivility and aggression: Insults, anger and emotional intensity
Another observed characteristic of social media and of Twitter has been the presence of moral rages, incivility and insults. The following are typical of what we find on these three threads: Tweet 20 Dropping the word Canadian like that’s how it should be used? BITCH WE DONT WANT YOU IN CANADA! GET THE FUCK OUT! #KellyPocha Tweet 21 #AaronMSchlossberg Hope you rot in Pennsylfuckingtucky, you fucking trump loving traitor. I hope you call suicide prevention and they put you on hold, you coward.
What we also see is the ‘we’ used again: ‘BITCH
Tweet 21 is characteristic of those that call for the ruin of the person’s life through shaming – here through their own suicide. Such comments are never discussed as to whether what they propose are indeed the actual aim of the ‘we’, nor do others call for restraint. Rather, such posts sit in the flow of affect. As Ott (2017) suggests, those tweeting may not be so much carefully following and considering each tweet as part of a clearly formulated rational account, but rather be dipping into a highly emotionally charged flow of those speaking from a firm and worthy moral position.
Humour and sarcasm
Scholars have pointed to the role of humour, joking, sarcasm and fun in creating bonds in the affective community (Breazu and Machin, 2019) and that the merging of civic commentary, moral campaigning, incivility, shaming and humor on social media must be understood as one of its key communicative characteristics (Udupa, 2017).
The humour and fun on these feeds take a number of different forms. Here are some of the written examples: Tweet 22 It’s amazing how strong and deeprooted racism, hatred & white privileged are in people. They’re willing to lose their livelihood/respect just to get that racial slur out. #RhondaPolon #KyleThomas Tweet 23 Maybe Rosanne Barr can get Aaron Schlossberg to represent her? They seem to share the same values and both will have LOTS of free time in the days to come! Tweet 24 Does your workout include building crosses to burn, or do I get sent to a camp to ‘BURN’ fat in your infamous saunas. Spin Gal Fitness in West Hollywood, bring your own hood. #Rhondapolon #stopracism
Tweet 22 signals up the role and aims of the hashtag, with knowing sarcasm that such behaviour will be dealt with by the community. In this case the ‘we’ is not so much signalled by pronouns but by evoking knowingness of smartness and facility with irony.
Tweets 23 and 24 are typical of jokes found on the hashtags. The first, linking Rosanne Barr’s outburst with the ironic suggestion that she could use Aaron Schlossberg as her lawyer since they would have much in common.
Tweet 24 links the acts of fitness training and fat burning to the cross burning of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and also to the ovens in the Nazi death camps. Such references are part of how posts often draw on these typical extreme references. Even if this is not the intention, such jokes collapse things like the systematic state instigated murder of 6 million Jews, along with other minorities and political enemies, with this filmed outburst. There are no tweets discussing if this is appropriate.
The joking, irony and play on words in these tweets can be understood as part of how those posting demonstrate their mastery of discourse, that they are smart. In these hashtags this can take the form of the ‘we’, showing their overall superiority to the ‘other’, outsmarting them. Of course, humour can simply be a way to get likes and retweets (Udupa, 2017).
The humour on these hashtags also takes the form of a range of gifs, images and other visual material. In Figure 2 we see a mashup done for the husband of #CoffeeCathy, dubbed #BathrobeBilly. In the film clip the husband came out in his robe later in the interaction. We see an image of him is pasted in with a banner ‘Fuck White Supremacy’ in a mock-up of a poster for a party in the fashion that took place outside Aaron Schlossberg’s office, where a Mariachi band was booked.
Mock poster for Latin party outside shop.
In Figure 3 we see where Aaron Schlossberg’s Twitter apology has been edited to show his true meaning. As above, the creativity and humour here become part of the smartness, but also bring a sense of joy of having this voice, of the act of mocking and shaming the racists. It is striking how much fun is had on these hashtags – through smart sarcasm, detective work and being part of social justice.
Edited apology by Aaron Schlossberg.
In Figure 4 we see that the user found a tweet in which #CoffeeCathy posted a link to music by a Black artist. This is used to signal the hypocrisy of Rhonda Michelle, and the joke is made by the choice of song, which is Only God Can Judge Me.
Tweet referencing music by Black artist.
Conclusion
There is concern by some scholars that racism can become de-politised and decontextualised through individualising outbursts, or by collapsing all forms of racism from different eras into being the same thing, using iconic moments. So, we may be less surprised to find this reflected in these hashtags where this individualisation and conflating of racism takes place.
The question for us here, however, is whether there is anything specific about how this takes place on Twitter. For those tweeting there is a powerful sense that they are doing activism and fighting for social justice. This is seen in the emotional intensity of the moral rage, the shouting in upper case at the YOU they are cancelling. The unflinching high modality, staring the perpetrator down. And it is experienced as a collective mobilisation, a movement, as seen in the constant use of ‘we’ and simulated conversations and sense of what they have achieved before. And Twitter, for some, carries clear associations of presenting a democratic voice, the voice from below, with its track record in bringing about justice as in the case of #Metoo. It is not that the representation of racism shown on these hashtags is surprising, given the observations by critical race scholars, but we can see how these understandings can become, not only a discourse of being anti-racist, but the very social practice of doing it as a collective, as a form of activism. Such simpler formulations of racism fit with the affordances of Twitter, where simplifications and buzzwords rule.
Uniquely for how hashtags address social issues, the authenticity of those being cancelled converges with actual accusations themselves. They merge into one thing to become evidence of a totally flawed character. The perpetrator becomes a folk devil around which, at the same time as fighting for social justice, those tweeting we can have fun, joke and show how clever they are. Since it is a simple situation, an evil, generic racist, being dealt with in a familiar way, it requires little investment in terms of time and effort. In these cases, the ritual stages of the cancelling and the kinds of jokes and memes, may also be rather familiar, since they have been seen on feeds in relation to previous hashtags.
Of course, just because of these shortcomings, we cannot dismiss that such hashtags can bring about change or at least place important issues into public focus (Papacharissi, 2015; Sampson et al., 2018). Although since news outlets often use Twitter to define how events are formulated (Bouvier, 2019) the same shortcomings, presented as fights for social justice, provide the framing for national and international news. Such news will run such stories as if decrying racism, while also carrying other stories at the same time stoke xenophobia and racism.
And what may be in danger in the case of the rise of racism in our societies, promoted by populist ideologies, is the liberal democratic system itself (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018). It is in this context that even people who may otherwise be good workers, good parents, nice neighbours, etc., may find these ideas attractive, when delivered as part of a political promise of restoring order and when they feel the existing political establishment has abandoned them. In this sense the question is not so much how to cancel uneducated southern Nazis, or arrogant rich lawyers. It may be more productive to ask why ordinary people, when frustrated, tired or angry, express these views and not others. And ultimately, we need to ask how these people can be reconnected to having faith in liberal democracies. Cancel culture may not help us to do this.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.