The Secret Lives of Internet Racists

Several weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to help coordinate and participate in a die-in demonstration on my campus. Our goal was to bring awareness to racial injustice on campus and nationwide following the killings of people of color such as Aiyanna Gardner, Ryo Oyamada, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and John Crawford. Our demonstration was staged in two parts-- for the first segment, we stood in silence for four minutes (representing the four hours that Brown's body remained in the street) in the university student center as we held signs containing facts about police brutality and racial inequality. For the second part, we moved to a corridor of the student center and staged our "die-in" portion for several minutes in silence.

Prior to the demonstration, many of the organizers and participants were concerned about the threat of racial retaliation through physical or political attacks from White students on campus. Our campus is disappointingly familiar with home-grown acts of blatant racism, so it was reasonable for many of us to be concerned either for our physical or social safety. However, we were pleasantly surprised during the demonstration as the White students who did not participate in the protest did not heckle, accost us, or attempt to violate the sanctity of the demonstration's message through other vulgar actions. In fact, many students murmured polite "excuse me"s as they worked their way through our silent group. At the end of the protest, many of us expressed our awe and pride that the students of our university were possibly beginning to accept and understand the struggles and perspectives of individuals who exist outside of their tiny microcosms. Could it be, as Langston Hughes mused nearly a century before, "Daybreak in Alabama" (and, in a larger sense, nationwide)?

Nope just kidding. People are still horrible.

After the demonstration, we immediately turned to our social media accounts to upload photos and details about the event in order to raise awareness and stand in solidarity with other similar campus demonstrations across the country. One of these social media platforms was Yik Yak, which succinctly can be described as an anonymous version of Twitter that allows people within a set radius of each other (typically on a college campus) to upload short statements called "yaks." And in this freshly typed set of yaks, dozens of students angrily labeled the demonstrators "niggers," "porch monkeys," "coons," "nigger lovers," and other offensive epithets that are the bedrock of the vocabularies of the permanently uninformed. Threats to "roll over those damned  _________ (insert race-based unoriginal insult) in my truck" made several appearances in the newsfeed, and variations on the ubiquitous "Black people are racist too!" and "Black people are just a bunch of criminals anyway" were strewn throughout the ideological wasteland.

 I am certainly quite aware of the persistence of racism and other forms of intolerance in our society-- most (if not all) people of color are subjected to some form of passive-aggressive or direct racism on a daily basis, and for the time being, there is nothing that I can do to end or alter this deeply embedded practice in our society. I was, however, taken aback by the sheer virulence and intensity of the hatred and disgust that many of my White classmates continue to hold toward Black people. Taken out of the context of social media, the bigoted statements that these adolescent and twenty-something individuals were making in 2014 easily could have been spewed from a segregationist's megaphone in 1954. Racism is still a very real issue in 2015 (and perhaps an even greater issue now in the wake of so many demonstrations against racial inequality), but because of the taboo associated with publicly holding racist views, these same racially problematic ideologies have simply migrated to the relative anonymity (or so people think) of the Internet.

Actual rare footage of an Internet racist

By deeming it “socially unacceptable” to be a racist, sexist, homophobe, or elitist in public simply ignores the underlying systemic issues of inequality in our society, rather than forcing them to be brought to the forefront to be discussed, analyzed, and ultimately eliminated from our culture. It would be naïve and remiss to assume that simply because it is “unacceptable” to publicly express racist (or otherwise offensive) ideologies, racism has suddenly disappeared from the American social fabric. Many, many people in American society are still wildly racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist in the privacy of their own homes, and by shaming those who hold these views into silence, it becomes impossible to subdue their ignorance and hatred before it can spread to the following generation.

Society is swift to condemn those who break the verbal taboo and publicly express their racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic views (Donald Sterling, the cast of Duck Dynasty, and Mel Gibson come to mind) because it gives the overly idealistic image that American society has somehow “conquered” hatred and intolerance, rooting out the few exposed bigots who camouflage themselves within a suspiciously idyllic post-racial, post-homophobia, post-classism, and post-sexism society. Not talking about discrimination by making it “socially unacceptable” does not solve the problem. It merely dusts it under the rug and forces it into becoming an even more systemic, multi-generational issue.

The appearance of racist or racially questionable Facebook statuses, tweets, Instagram posts, and yaks by relatively young people in response to national or local stories of police brutality or racially motivated crimes is significant. This is not only because it shows that racism is allowed to continue because of certain environmental factors that people are exposed to during childhood, but also that the way people express racism is evolving in order to stubbornly root itself within the cracks of our lofty ideological designs of a post-racial culture. Until it becomes standard fare to openly discuss the inherent moral, social, and intellectual wrongs of racism and other forms of intolerance, there can be no hope of us truly expunging these toxic ideas from our society.

And honestly, do you really want to spend the rest of your life getting into Facebook arguments with that friend from high school who genuinely thinks President Obama was born in Kenya?