It is not that funny. Critical analysis of racial ideologies embedded in racialized humour discourses on social media in Brazil

Abstract

Previous studies reveal that reported cases of racism on Facebook in Brazil have soared from 2,038 cases in 2011 to 11,090 in 2014. This phenomenon has triggered growing concerns amongst several social actors and the Brazilian society at large. Within this context, this qualitative study employs critical discourse analysis to investigate the embedded meanings of the construction and dissemination of colonial-like racialized discourses against Black Brazilians on social media. For this purpose, 217 public Facebook pages and 224 news articles have been gathered, combined with eight interviews conducted with different social actors in Brazil. The data reveals that 81 percent of the victims of online racism are upwardly-mobile Black women aged 20-35 years, whilst 65.6 percent of the proponents of such ideologies are young men in their early twenties. Moreover, in 76.2 percent of the cases analysed, the proponents had no previous relationship with the victims. Therefore, I argue that different from ordinary daily social interactions, the technology enables these people to disregard any social distance that might exist between themselves and the victims. Furthermore, since they believe that online anonymity shields them from being held accountable for their attitude; they have no crise de conscience in disseminating their racialized discourses. This scenario suggests that they have turned social media in a sort of modern-day pillory to perform virtual whipping through derogatory humour posts and associated comments. Within that, the study also reveals that such derogatory discourses tend to develop a long tail, meaning that potentially, the posts can keep attracting like-minded people for the same derogatory conversation for around three years. On the other hand, I also argue that Black women in Brazil have understood the possibilities that social media can afford them. Consequently, they are using the technology to convey their political position and, on top of that, amplify the reach of their voice in ways that in the offline context would be more difficult to achieve. Within that, they are managing to decentralise the Brazilian anti-racist discourse, inspire other oppressed women and establish new empowering communities both online and offline to deconstruct ingrained racist ideologies.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Luiz Valério de Paula Trindade: orcid.org/0000-0001-5062-8662

ORCID for Bindi Shah: orcid.org/0000-0002-5571-9755

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