‘The filthy people’: Racism in digital spaces during Covid-19 in the context of South–South migration

Abstract

Notions of ‘race’ and disease are deeply imbricated across the globe. This article explores the historical, complex entanglements between ‘race’, disease, and dirtiness in the multicultural Chilean context of Covid-19. We conducted a quantitative content analysis and a discourse analysis of online readers’ comments (n = 1233) in a digital news platform surrounding a controversial news event to examine Chileans’ cultural representations of Haitian migrants and explore online racism and anti-immigrant discourse. Drawing on a decolonial approach, we argue that Covid-19 as a crisis has been fabricated at the expense of a constructed ‘other’. We show how colonial racist logics not only endure in digital spaces, but are made viral in new ways by representing Haitian migrants as ‘filthy’ and ‘disease carriers’. We identified two contemporary forms of racism – online cultural racism and online aggressive racism – through which people construct imaginaries of racial superiority in digital spaces.

Social cohesion and attitudinal changes toward migration: A longitudinal perspective amid the COVID-19 pandemic

“…We were able to observe significant changes in different attitudinal dimensions, as an improvement in attitudes toward migrants in terms of conviviality and identity, and lower levels of threat during 2017 and 2018 (in reference to 2016) but with a prominent decay in conviviality and threat in the last survey wave (2021). These results are aligned with international and national studies that have shown that when societies face crises, people (and sometimes governments) tend to find scapegoats to blame, who are constructed as an "other" (Ahmad and Bradby, 2007;Cecchi, 2019;Bonhomme and Alfaro, 2022); in this case, LAC migrants. In that sense, Chileans would find it more difficult to live side by side with LAC migrants after times of crisis.…”

“…Finally, we found partial evidence supporting our fourth hypothesis, which proposed that those non-migrants with lower status and who interact more with migrants would also tend to increase their negative attitudes toward them. Coincidently to these results, other studies have shown that working-class Chileans reproduce, foremost, anti-indigenous and, secondly anti-black racism through everyday practices and interactions in order to claim a white or whiter racial identity compared to LAC migrants (Bonhomme, 2022 ) and that the pandemic has reinforced an anti-immigrant sentiment, whereby Chileans perceive migrants' everyday practices as a threat to Chilean identity and customs (Bonhomme and Alfaro, 2022 ). Such negative perceptions do not take into account that what non-migrants conceive as migrants' cultural practices, which shape their forms of inhabiting, are only the inevitable outcome of the precarious housing conditions in which they are forced to live (Bonhomme, 2021 ).…”

“…In the case of Chile, the pandemic has reinforced stereotypes of migrant communities, especially Afro-descendant migrants who were targeted as threats. For instance, in digital spaces Chileans portrayed Haitian migrants as “filthy” and disease carriers, reproducing anti-black racism and reinforcing an anti-immigrant sentiment that aimed to control migratory mobilities into Chile (Bonhomme and Alfaro, 2022 ).…”

Racism in the “colony”: Towards appreciating race fluidity and racialization in social psychology of racism

“…For Bonhomme and Alfaro (2022), the categories and their inferences continue to have a significant relevance for contemporary issues. In Latin American contexts, argues Wade (2010), Black peoples occupy a more ambiguous position in relation to native or indigenous peoples who were and continue to be "othered."…”

You can't shop with us: how US-based, value- and mid-market online clothing retailers position their plus-size female clothing sections

“…Othering occurs when “through sensorial perceptions, corporeal practices, and affective atmospheres, dichotomous borders are redrawn and enacted between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Shaker Ardekani and Ahmadi, 2022, p. 4). As digital communities have formed as microcosms of the physical world, complete with similar power dynamics and embedded in larger social and cultural structures, recent research has identified enduring forms of discrimination which are perpetuated online, such as racist logic, “through which people construct imaginaries of racial superiority in digital spaces” (Bonhomme and Alfaro, 2022). Previous research has illustrated the detrimental impacts of othering in the online space, or “online othering,” which occurs in virtual spaces and in social media contexts and cultures, just as in physical spaces (Harmer and Lumsden, 2019).…”