Racial Discourse and Partisan Blogs

Abstract

This article focuses on racial discourses on political blogs during one of the first racial controversies of Obama's presidency. I examined the interactional dynamics in the comment sections of posts from left and right blogs during the controversy. I found that the majority of participants on partisan blogs either racialized the controversy to promote a racial claim or deracialized the controversy to protect a racial claim from potentially threatening aspects of a controversy. I focus on the ambiguous challenges to racialization and deracialization that occurred in the course of internal debate over the specifics of the case and over nonracial claims. I argue that blog participants preserved racial frameworks by managing the ambiguity that arises from debates. This article contributes to the literature on racial discourse and political polarization by identifying processes that help explain how each "national conversation on race" maintains and perhaps expands the partisan divide on race.

Fighting Stereotypes

“…Thus, we avoided gendered pronouns like he or she. In this type of research, the microlevel context of the comment for the individual commenter is unknown, thus researchers cannot know how strong, temporary or long-standing a belief is and cannot verify reader accounts of their own experiences (Dowd, 2017). We did not quantify comments for or against desegregation; instead, the goal of this qualitative study was to identify and elucidate the ideologies and supporting logics that provide interpretive frameworks for or against the combat ban.…”