A Genealogy of Critical Race and Digital Studies: Past,Present,and Future

A Colorblind Utopia: Early Research on Race and the Internet

In the wake of the post–civil rights era in the United States, theories about the changing significance of race and racism have proliferated. Colorblind racism, a framework pioneered by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2002, 2003, 2015), has emerged as a prominent theory to describe the changes in the expression of racial ideologies and animus in America since the 1960s. At a basic level, colorblind racism takes the critique of colorblindness one step further to suggest that adherence to colorblindness—in the face of social facts and realities that point out the continuing significance of race—itself constitutes a certain kind of racism. Bonilla-Silva (2003) posits that instead of overt expressions of racial animus, colorblind racism is expressed via the rationalization of the status of racial minorities as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and alleged cultural deficiencies. Specifically, this framework posits that ostensibly liberal ideals make it difficult for Americans, especially whites, to see the persistent inequalities and injustices associated with race in the post–civil rights period. The concept of colorblind racism emerged from a larger literature on and critique of colorblindness (Crenshaw 1997; Gotanda 1991), a body of work which itself originated in critical-legal race theory (Bell 1992; Crenshaw 1995, 2019; Delgado and Stefancic 2012).

Within Internet studies, colorblind racism has been expressed through an imagining of the Internet as a racial utopia within which the social inequities of the physical world could be left behind. Rather than appreciating race as an organizing principle of the social world (Omi and Winant 1986), early tech entrepreneurs and Internet researchers instead imagined the Internet as a “place where there is no gender, no race, no infirmity” (Daniels 2015). This colorblind discourse also imagined a social arrangement in which the disappearance of the DuBoisian “color line” would be possible through technological advancement (Nelson 2002). Indeed, Jessie Daniels (2012) notes that “during the early days of the Internet, some scholars theorized that the emergence of virtual environments and a culture of fantasy would mean an escape from the boundaries of race and the experience of racism” (p. 695).

Colorblind ideals became so embedded in the tech industry and the early field of internet research that entrepreneurs and scholars actively resisted conversations about race in the structure of the Internet. Instead, fantasies of racial utopias permeated Silicon Valley and internet research, preventing nuanced discussions of bias and racism in technology. This practice is most evident in the turn toward research focused on the digital divide, a term born of questions about access and use of technology.

Digital Divide Studies: A Deficiency Model of Blackness and Technology

In the 1990s, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recognized the existence of a digital divide, or the divide between those with access to new technologies and those without (NTIA 1995, 1999). The emergence and recognition of the digital divide shifted the dominant conversation away from idealized notions of the Internet to focus on inequalities in access to the Internet and communication tools (Gunkel 2003; DiMaggio et al. 2001). However, the term itself is not without critique; scholars have argued that the term digital divide creates an overly simplified dichotomy between access and no access that does not reflect reality (Daniels 2015; Gunkel 2003). Moreover, the existence of the digital divide between racial groups quickly shifted to an assumption of a lack of technological prowess among racial minorities rather than simply a lack of access. This has not gone unnoticed by André Brock, who critiques the implicit deficit model in this dichotomy, arguing that “the paucity of Internet content relevant to Black interests may have more to do with the slower Internet adoption rates of Blacks than with current formulations of technological or information illiteracy” (2006:357).

Indeed, although digital divide research has been important in bringing issues of race and technology to the forefront, many scholars have critiqued this research for articulating a deficiency model of the divide (e.g., lower skill levels or higher illiteracy rates of minorities) and assuming that (1) the use of information and communication technology is desirable and beneficial for everyone and (2) Black people have inferior technological skills compared with whites (Brock 2006; Selwyn 2003). Like other colorblind theories of the web, digital divide research has resisted nuanced discussions about race on the web, although this body of work does avoid framing the Internet as a colorblind utopia given the explicit focus on racial inequities within Internet access. Instead, digital divide research uses the logic of colorblind racism to focus primarily on the structural issue of access to the Internet, which often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) frames Black people as deficient subjects in need of technological remediation. This, of course, leaves unanswered the question about how race matters even for those who have access and does not interrogate the Internet as its own subject worthy of investigation.

Critical Race Studies and the Internet

A critical body of scholarship has emerged to critique colorblind fantasies of the web and trace the interplay between race and digital technologies. Indeed, Lisa Nakamura (2002) focuses on the perpetuation of racism through communication technologies, asserting that the Internet is deeply racialized. In doing so, Nakamura develops the concept of cybertypes, defined as “the distinctive ways that the Internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism” (2002:3). Nakamura posits that cybertypes (a play on the word and meaning of stereotypes) offer a kind of “identity tourism” in which racial difference is bracketed off (2008:19), suggesting that through the use of racialized avatars like samurais and geishas, users are able to “cybertype” and temporarily appropriate an Asiatic racial identity without any of the risks associated with being a racial minority in real life (Nakamura 2008). Nakamura dispels the myth that race and racism are absent in cyberspace and instead advances a critical race approach to the study of the Internet.

Rather than examining identity, Jessie Daniels (2009a, 2009b) focuses on cyber racism, a term developed by Les Back (2002) to describe the ways that digital technologies facilitate expressions of racism. In a 2009 book titled after the concept, Daniels uses cyber racism to understand the various ways that digital media have transformed the white supremacist movement and what this means to the struggle for racial equality. Daniels’ work, and broader literature on cyber racism (Atton 2006; Bostdorff 2004), is interested in the ways that the Internet is used to undergird white supremacist ideology and racist behaviors. The work on cyber racism highlights the importance of attending to racist abuse in the digital sphere, an ever-present fact in the online lives of marginalized Internet users.

There has also been a turn toward examining how technologies themselves are complicit in perpetuating online racism and the ways that systemic inequalities are transformed via technological tools. In the 2018 book Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Noble critically examines the structural ways that racism and sexism are fundamental to search engines and coins the term algorithmic oppression to describe algorithmic data failures that particularly target people and/or women of color. In the 2019 book Race after Technology, Ruha Benjamin develops the theory of The New Jim Code to describe “the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequalities but are promoted and perceived as more objective and progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era” (2019:6). In short, The New Jim Code delineates the ways that race and racism are encoded into information and communication technologies and how technology speeds up, hides, and deepens discrimination while appearing neutral and benevolent (Benjamin 2019). As cousin concepts, algorithmic oppression and The New Jim Code both point toward the persistence of colorblind ideology in the structure of the Internet. In the drive for more “objective” methods of decision making through algorithms and artificial intelligence, tech producers pretend to live outside of the system of racial hierarchies in which these technologies are embedded. As such, in the final product, they wind up reproducing the very racial inequalities they purport to avoid through objectivity, producing unequal outcomes both online and offline (Broussard 2018; Eubanks 2018; O’Neil 2016).

The development of critical race and digital studies has also led to the articulation of Black cyberfeminist thought (an extension of Patricia Hill Collins’ famous 1990 concept), a term coined by Kishonna Gray (2017) to describe structural and intersectional oppression in virtual spaces. According to the theory, unequal outcomes are generated due to the assumed whiteness (and maleness) of digital spaces, marking women and/or people of color as deviant due to the mere presence of their bodies in these spaces (Gray 2017). As a framework, Black cyberfeminist thought has the ability to offer conceptual clarity to digital sociology’s understanding of identities by centering and articulating intersectionality and intersectional oppression online (Cottom 2016; Daniels 2016). Taken together, this body of scholarship, including work about Black women’s use of Twitter (Jones 2019; Maragh 2016; Williams 2015; Williams and Gonlin 2017), highlights the importance and centrality of Black women’s experiences in the structure and function of the Internet.

Toward a New Landscape: Race and Racism on Twitter

Embedded within a body of scholarship about social networking sites more broadly (boyd and Ellison 2010; Gruzd et al. 2011; Hargittai and Litt 2011; Humphreys et al. 2013; Murthy 2011, 2013), Twitter has become an important site of inquiry for critical race and digital studies scholars in recent years. Much of the critical race and digital studies literature about Twitter has focused on #BlackLivesMatter and the use of the platform’s connective capacities to undergird modern social movements for racial justice (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016; Ray et al. 2017). However, despite its uses as a democratizing tool to undergird movements, Twitter is also a haven for white supremacy, neo-nazism, and harassment campaigns, largely due to its technological affordances, or the built-in clues that suggest how a platform is meant to be used (Daniels 2017). Scholars, journalists, and laypeople have begun to recognize how Twitter is often used to conduct targeted harassment campaigns, particularly of Black people (Hampton 2019; Katwala 2019; Meyer 2016). However, the company has been reluctant to intervene to curb the abuse on the platform, even when famous entertainers are targeted for harassment, as was the case when Leslie Jones, an actress and comedian, suffered racist abuse after her performance in an all-female-led remake of the film Ghostbusters (Meyer 2016).

To describe this racially targeted abuse on social media, Matamoros-Fernandez (2017) developed the term platformed racism, a theory of a new form of racism articulated via social media platforms. In defining the term, the author recognizes both the ways that platforms are used as tools to create and spread racist ideology through their functionalities (i.e., sharing and liking) and the ways that platforms implicitly allow racist discourse through vague standards and arbitrary content moderation enforcement (Gerrard 2018; Gillespie 2017, 2018; Myers West 2018). In doing this, platforms obfuscate and minimize the existence of online racism (a key tenet of colorblind racism) and abdicate their responsibility to moderate content. Developed to explain racist abuse on Twitter, platformed racism is within the ecosystem of concepts such as The New Jim Code, cyber racism, and algorithmic oppression that indict technological products in the perpetuation of racist ideologies.

The contradiction of Twitter—in that it is a space that can be used both as a democratizing tool for racial justice and as a haven for white nationalists—is an important aspect that thus structures how race and racism function on the platform. Racially marginalized users must simultaneously attend with Twitter’s tacit support of racist abuse, the platform’s connective features for communicating and movement building, and everything in between. Viewed in this way, the inherent contradiction of Twitter is then central in the online lives of racially marginalized users on Twitter.

What Is Black Twitter?

A vibrant digital community, Black Twitter has become a central focus within the critical race and digital studies literature in recent years. The timeline of the formation of Black Twitter is imprecise, but the community began attracting the attention of interlopers in November 2009 with the publication of an article in The Awl that presented the musings of author Choire Sicha on his “obsession with Late Night Black People Twitter.” The term became more ubiquitous with the publication of a 2010 Slate article titled “How Black People Use Twitter” by Farhad Manjoo in which the author sought to understand how Black users used Twitter differently than their non-Black counterparts. Although it is unclear when the term Black Twitter came into the lexicon, the community of Black Twitter has become a cultural phenomenon, leading conversations ranging from live-tweeting of television shows (Chatman 2017; Williams & Gonlin 2017) to mobilization around instances of police violence (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Hill 2018).

Numerous definitions of Black Twitter exist within the broad field of research on the community. Brock (2012) understands Black Twitter as “a user-generated source of culturally relevant online content, combining social network elements and broadcast principles to share information.” However, Meredith Clark, in a 2015 interview with Donovan X. Ramsey for The Atlantic, defines the community as “a temporally linked group of connectors that share culture, language and interest in specific issues and talking about specific topics with a Black frame of reference.” In the same interview, Ramsey (2015) defines Black Twitter as “a large network of black Twitter users and their loosely coordinated interactions, many of which accumulate into trending topics due to the network’s size, interconnectedness, and unique activity.” Alternatively, Stevens and Maurantonio see Black Twitter as “a community formed around the celebration of Black achievement and the creation of awareness of previously silenced narratives of violence against Black bodies” (2017:5). Although highlighting different aspects of the community, these definitions all coalesce around community, interconnectedness, and culture.

Building upon previous definitions, I describe Black Twitter as a loose collection of Black people who tweet from the perspective of the Black experience on social issues, politics, and/or popular culture. My definition borrows from previous definitions in that I recognize the importance of Black culture to the community and the loose nature of the network. I diverge from previous definitions by eschewing the focus on temporality, anti-Black violence, and the use of Twitter’s trending topic functionality. While recognizing the importance of Black culture to Black Twitter, my definition also highlights the range of conversational domains that Black Twitter users maintain and focuses on the importance of the Black cultural perspective to those conversations. I suggest that more than just a community of Internet users, Black Twitter is instead a communicative network in which individuals meet to discuss, solve, and push forward social issues and affect change. I also suggest that Black Twitter acts as a social space for users to entertain each other with humor and light-hearted debate. Rather than just positing Black Twitter as a space that exists in opposition to oppression, it is necessary to, as Robin D. G. Kelley (1997) writes, “recognize the importance of pleasure and laughter in people’s lives, to see culture and community as more than responses to, or products of, oppression.” Indeed, recent work from Lu and Knight-Steele (2019) points toward the importance of recognizing Black joy and pleasure online.

As the range of definitions indicate, establishing what Black Twitter “is” is imperfect. In attempting to capture a definition of the phenomenon, one must attend to the fact that Black Twitter does not comprise the entirety of the Black experience on Twitter or the Internet nor is the community fixed and stable. As Brock acknowledges, “Black Twitter does not represent the entirety of Black online presence, nor do the multitude of racist responses to the phenomenon comprise the entirety of the racial matrix within which Black Twitter is understood” (2012:533). Indeed, Florini (2014) notes that “Black Twitter does not exist in any unified or monolithic sense.” Instead, what is defined as “Black Twitter” is a heuristic (Florini 2014), an imperfect definition of a visible phenomenon. Beyond a definition, it is necessary to understand the ways that Black users harness conversational tools online to fully understand Black Twitter. Indeed, Brock argues that the use of culturally relevant hashtags combined with Twitter’s algorithmic trending topic feature gives Black Twitter users the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter, leading to the “discovery” of Black Twitter and ability of outsiders to view Black discourse that was unconcerned with the mainstream gaze (2012:534). Indeed, Blacktags (a portmanteau of Black and hashtags) have been interrogated as “racialized digital objects” that underpin Black Twitter and interrupt the whiteness of the Twitter network (Sharma 2013).

Undergirding the phenomenon of Black Twitter is the practice of signifyin’, a Black oral tradition that allows for communication of multiple levels of meaning simultaneously, most frequently involving wordplay and misdirection (Florini 2014; Gates 1988). Brock (2012) posits that Black Twitter users’ tweets are a form of signifyin’ in which the user is the signifier and the hashtag is simultaneously the signifier, the sign, and the signified (p. 537). Building on this, Florini (2014) explores the use of the tradition as a means of performing racial identity online, positing that Black users employ this rhetorical practice on Twitter as a medium through which to perform Blackness in the absence of corporeal signifiers. Indeed, Florini (2014) suggests that signifyin’ functions as a marker of Black identity and serves as a resource through which Black users can be Black online through the “use of verbal performance, linguistic resources and mode of interaction on Twitter” (p. 234). In their analysis of a Black Twitter hashtag created in 2015 to mock Rachel Dolezal, Stevens and Maurantonio (2017) posit that by signifyin’ toward Black culture and racial identity via use of the #AskRachel hashtag, Black Twitter users raised questions about the social and political construct of race. As such, signifyin’, an aspect of online racial performance (Harlow and Benbrook 2019; Maragh 2018), functions as a key part of the language, discourse, community, and culture of Black Twitter.

Finally, a robust body of scholarship about Black Twitter has proliferated since the creation of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in 2012 in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin. This work often intersects with research on #Ferguson, a hashtag created in response to the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown. The research on #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and the social movement aspects of Black Twitter has focused on “hashtag activism” during the Ferguson uprising (Bonilla and Rosa 2015), assessed the different types of “race talk” that users engaged in on Twitter in the days immediately after Michael Brown’s death (Chaudhry 2016), and measured how users influenced the framing of the Black Lives Matter movement through hashtags (Ince, Rojas, and Davis 2017). Further, much of this research uses a “big data” approach to quantitatively assess the scope of #BlackLivesMatter and related conversations (Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016, 2018; Jackson and Foucault Welles 2016; Keib, Himelboim, and Han 2018; Ray et al. 2017). The research on Black Twitter as a site of social movement mobilization highlights the intellectual and conversational range of the community and provides important contemporary context for understanding how Black people talk about race and racial oppression online.

Critical Race and Digital Studies: The Present and the Future

At present, the theoretical and empirical development of the field of critical race and digital studies is in a period of considerable development. In recent years, numerous academic monographs and articles theorizing about the interplay between race and the Internet have entered the academic debate.

Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression focuses on the “digital-sense making processes” used in technological systems and the myriad of ways that marginalized people, particularly Black women and girls, experience oppression through these systems. Noble (2018) argues that technology monopolies like Google ought to be broken up and regulated, suggesting that these companies are unable to effectively operate in their current state. Ruha Benjamin’s Race after Technology explores how technologies, which are often coded as objective and neutral, often reinforce and reinscribe systemic racial inequalities. Benjamin developed the term The New Jim Code to describe the use of new technologies that reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted as objective or progressive (Benjamin 2019:5). Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software is a historical account of Black people’s relationship to the Internet and computing technology. Through intertwined histories, McIlwain (2019) tells the story of how Black people use technology to “further our own personal, communal, and political interests” while also recounting how “computing technology was built and developed to keep Black America docile and in its place” (2019:7). Finally, Sarah Florini’s Beyond Hashtags (2019) deals with the cross-platform network of Black American digital and social media users and how these users “articulate their experiences, cultivate community and solidarity, mobilize political resistance, and bypass and intervene in legacy news media coverage” (2019:4). Recently published titles from Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles (2020) and André Brock (2020) are sure to build upon and extend the discussion about critical race and digital studies.

To further develop this field, there are important areas for scholars to focus their attention. In particular, as digital technologies and social media platforms have become more ubiquitous, our lives, both online and offline, have been indelibly shaped by what we see and experience online. And, because social media platforms act as “custodians of the Internet” (Gillespie 2018) by governing online discourse with their own rules, society too is being indelibly influenced by opaque guidelines with little explanation or recourse. Moreover, that these platforms are notorious for their failure (and, sometimes, resistance) in dealing with race suggests that more scholarly work is necessary in this area in order to understand the interplay between race and content moderation decision making. As such, researchers ought to focus their efforts on theoretical and empirical studies about the role of content moderation systems in the perpetuation of racial ideologies. Indeed, previous findings about linguistic biases against Black Vernacular English in automatic hate speech detection models (Davidson, Bhattacharya, and Weber 2019; Sap et al. 2019) and the punishment of Black activists by content moderation policies on social media (Sankin 2017) indicate that social media platforms’ algorithmic and content moderation systems target and marginalize Black users, perpetuating what Ruha Benjamin calls The New Jim Code. Moreover, although there is abundant evidence about algorithmic bias within social media, search engines, and other institutions (Broussard 2018; Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018; O’Neil 2016), we know little about the impact of content moderation on marginalized communities and how marginalized users navigate and understand the systems that dictate their online lives.

Another area of development is a focus on the ways that race and technological systems interact outside of the U.S. context. Indeed, much of the work in this review is focused within the United States on U.S.-centric racial hierarchies. Although scholars have focused on the online communities by diasporic Indian communities (Mallapragada 2014) and the algorithmic colonization of Africa (Birhane 2019), this work is often supplanted in favor of U.S. perspectives. Bringing this important, critical work to the fore presents an opportunity for new developments and theories of the interaction between race and digital technologies that take global perspectives into account.

In delineating a genealogy of critical race and digital studies, I have mapped the intellectual terrain of the field, allowing future scholars to build on this work as the field continues to grow. Although I work to trace a genealogy of race and digital studies, I do not suggest that the knowledge within the field is fixed and unchangeable. Indeed, the history of the Internet evolves every moment of every day, and new forms of knowledge are constantly being uncovered. This is particularly true when focused on marginalized communities’ use of the Internet. Looking forward, it is my hope that the field will continue to develop and grow. And indeed, there are signs that this is the case—New York University’s Critical Race and Digital Studies Initiative has brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars focused on the ways that racial identity is shaped by digital technologies. In 2018, the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities Center at the University of Maryland convened a two-day gathering of scholars for the inaugural “Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black” conference. Doctoral dissertations about the social and cultural implications of Internet inequalities and web applications in public policy (Bui N.d.) and digital Blackness on Black Twitter (Hamilton N.d.) indicate that critical race and digital studies will continue to occupy an important space in the study of the Internet in the next decade. It is my hope that this review (and the articles that follow it in this issue of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity) will offer sociologists an introduction to critical race and digital studies and highlight the urgency and importance of this field.