It’s okay to be White: laundering White supremacy through a colorblind victimized White race-consciousness raising campaign

Online discourse in the post‐ “new racism” era?: Toward a theory of colorblind nationalism

“…Colorblindness, the dominant ideology of New Racism, is comprised of four main ideological frames, although others have been proposed (Brooks, 2020; Haltinner, 2016; Jayakumar & Adamian, 2017): Abstract Liberalism, Minimization of Racism, Cultural Racism, and Naturalization (Bonilla‐Silva, 2022). These frames represent the ideological underpinnings from which people draw to create styles of racetalk which undermine claims of contemporary racism and redirect the causes of racial inequality back to the communities who experience the negative consequences of structural and systemic racism (Bonilla‐Silva, 2022; Myers, 2005).…”

“…This explicitly racist language was deemed (mostly) unacceptable in mainstream culture and discourse after the Civil Rights era and therefor the sentiment of the language was rearticulated into covertly racist codewords (López, 2013; Omi & Winant, 2015) and styles of racetalk (Bonilla‐ Silva, 2022; Myers, 2005) which repackage racist ideas into less incendiary language. While the social norms around what is and is not acceptable to say in public has changed, the sentiment of Black inferiority and cultural and personal deviance persist through the many ideological frames of colorblind racetalk (Bonilla‐Silva, 2022; Brooks, 2020; Haltinner, 2016; Jayakumar & Adamian, 2017). While socially these two styles of racetalk are treated differently, they are the same in that they both justify and reinforce structures and systems of racism.…”

“…Scholars attribute this unmasking of racism to the anonymity of online spaces (Brunsma et al., 2019; Eschmann, 2020; Gray, 2014) wherein social interactions operate in semi‐backstage space (Goffman, 1959) and therefore are not as strictly beholden to norms in in‐person socialization. In addition to the potential for anonymity online, scholars suggest that explicit racetalk persists because of a culture of free speech absolutism (Daniels, 2012; Ortiz, 2020), the prioritization of logics of whiteness (Matamoros‐Fernández, 2017), and the use of internet technologies by far right and white nationalist groups to launder their racist ideologies into the mainstream (Brooks, 2020; Daniels, 2009; Klein, 2012). These are the material conditions (Bonilla‐Silva, 1997; Doane, 2014) which contribute to the scholarly understanding of the internet as a space for an explicitly racist style of racetalk.…”

The Psychology of White Nationalism: Ambivalence Towards a Changing America

“…By portraying Whites as victims of racial discrimination in a post‐civil rights America, they are able to flip the script by co‐opting civil rights framing and protest tactics to portray Whites as an “oppressed majority” who need to fight against their supposed persecution (Blake, 2011; see also Noor, Shnabel, Halabi & Nadler, 2012). In so doing, Whites are able to delegitimize racial justice efforts and accusations of systemic racism (Bloch, Taylor, & Martine, 2020; Brooks, 2020; Lavelle, 2017). These tactics ultimately justify dismantling or reversing policies (e.g., affirmative action, voting rights, criminal justice reform) that are still needed to bring about racial parity (Pierce, 2003).…”