Race and Social Media: How to Push the Conversation Forward

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By Matt Petronzio2014-04-27 18:52:01 UTC

"2014 was the year everyone started talking about race," said Jenna Wortham, a New York Times technology reporter, at the Theorizing the Web conference in Brooklyn on Saturday. "Let's not let 2014 be the only year that everyone started talking about race."

Wortham's sentiment embodied the conference's keynote plenary, called "Race and Social Media," which considered how social media can amplify — and hinder — discourse about race, how we use social networks for social justice, and whether they're even the right tools to use.

See also: How Diverse Are Your Social Networks?

Lisa Nakamura, professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, said that in recent years, race theory has focused more on feeling: bodily experience, affects and trauma.

"Racist 'trolling' is an attempt to instrumentalize feeling, to engineer abjection, to find a way to gain the attention economy," she said. To call Internet racism "trolling" is to dismiss and minimize hate speech. At the same time, "trolling is a sign that the network is robust. Any network with a lot of traffic is going to have trolls, and it's being used, and used hard."

Nakamura said that while online racism is ubiquitous, it can't be viewed as off-topic — even when it is — because it becomes the topic. In short, online racism is "both the signal and the noise."

Ayesha Siddiqi, editor at The New Inquiry and BuzzFeed Ideas, discussed backlash toward social-media movements, the increased volume of voices from people of color and how they fit into current media trends, especially new "explainer journalism" sites.

"I see [these sites] as a direct response to the relevance of streams, of people's feeds, of self-selected feeds that people are engaging with constantly," she said. "And now that punditry no longer holds the same value and space in people's media diets ... People who identify as pundits are grappling with reasserting their importance. They're saying, 'No, you do need us, and you need us to explain things.'"

See also: 'We Are Just Humans': Portrait Project Highlights Ethnic Diversity

Siddiqi believes the people who think the Internet "makes us dumber" are the same people launching sites to tell us how to make sense of everything.

"I think those same people often mistake the Internet as being a finite space ... rather than as an open and dynamic space that they should be reaching out to, and listening to, as much as they want to pontificate to," she said.

Wortham explained that it's her job at The Times to not only see which companies are getting traction, but also which ideas are taking shape and how tech is changing they ways we live our lives.

"I think a lot about how the technology that is built for us is shaped by us, and then how we are enhanced, augmented or limited by the nature of the services that we're using," she said.

Wortham is particularly interested in how we use social media to talk about complex, serious topics such as racism and sexism, when these platforms were created for very banal use (e.g. asking your network where to eat while you're in San Francisco)

"We went from using the tools the way they were intended to using them in the way we thought was relevant to our lives," she said. Wortham cited Twitter as an example, wondering if such a specific medium, where things are constantly taken out of context or pushed into different contexts, really elevates the conversations we're able to have.

"Are these the best tools to be having the kinds of conversations, and effecting the kind of change that we actually want to be having? And why aren't there more of them? And why aren't they better?" she asked.

Wortham noted the immense power that Twitter has, giving people a platform to thousands, if not millions, of people.

"But the flatness of social media — and by flatness I mean there's very little context ... makes it easy for the people who need to be thinking about [these issues] to ignore us," she said.

In a similar vein, Latoya Peterson, owner and editor of Racialicious , discussed the benefits and challenges of using Tumblr as a platform to discuss race in a transformative way. She gave an example of an image that contained an explicit racial slur with an interesting discussion in the text below it. Reblogging it within a multiracial space, while intended to take power from a word, could potentially give it more power in the wrong context.

"That makes things extremely complicated for those of us who are trying to have interesting and transformative conversations online," she said. "Because when you start deploying these types of terms ... we're also exposing it to people who would never come across these terms, but suddenly feel like they have permission to use [them]."

These conversations, Peterson said, ultimately come down to building trust. "We're trying to talk to each other ... What happens when we try to be in explicit community together, in explicit conversation together, when we don't necessarily have that trust built up and when we are not speaking from the same point?"

"Unfortunately, there might not be an answer, which is why we're still struggling with this problem 400 years on," she added.

Watch the entire keynote in the video, above — moderated by critical cultural researcher André Brock — in which panelists dive into discussions of race and social media.

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Topics: activism, diversity, race, Social Good, Social Media, theorizing the web, U.S., World

Image: Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press