Doing Race Online: Essays on Race-Making on Social Media Platforms

Abstract

Race —a socially constructed concept that marks perceived differences in phenotype —is an active process. Race is not something that people have or are, but instead is a set of actions that are done every day by individuals and institutions. Examples include segregating jail facilities based on an imprecise racial identification system or choosing hairstyles based on their perceived racial meaning. Scholars refer to these practices as “doing race” or “race-making,” terms that signal the active social interactions that(re)produce the meanings ascribed to racial categories. The newest, and perhaps most significant, context for “doing race” is on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Social media platforms, particularly Twitter, have provided a space for Black users to build digital communities to contest and construct ideas about Blackness in the U.S. These platforms also provide a space for the companies that operate them to enact their beliefs about race through algorithmic design and content policies. As such, an examination of the doing of race online expands our theoretical and empirical understanding of race relations in the U.S. In my mixed-methods dissertation, I examine how platforms and Black users construct and contest the meanings of racial categories online and what those meanings reveal about race relations in the contemporary U.S. In the three essays that follow, I examine three theoretical and empirical questions, respectively: (1) In posts about race and racism on social media, how do Black users do race, construct Blackness, and contest oppressive structures? (2) How do social media platforms frame the problem of racism in the U.S, and what does this reveal about the online spaces in which conversations about race and racism occur? (3) What does "algorithmic bias" miss and is there a more substantive framework to describe systemic inequalities in the digital sphere?