Issues with White Anti-Racism on Social Media: The Case of the American Reparations Movement

The redress of historical racism has since the 19th century concerned a debate about reparations for chattel enslavement in the Americas. While there is currently a vivid discussion in activist, media, and academic spheres about potential federal reparations, little research has looked at the discourse on the self-declared “reparative” programs that have already been initiated in the US. According to representatives of the reparations movement, these initiatives are highly controversial and not considered actual reparations. However, my analysis of the discourse on these programs enabled unprecedented qualitative analysis of the public’s support or rejection of the reparations movement itself.

In this study, I am utilizing the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory (Stern et al., 1999) to explore whether X-users are in support of, or against the reparations movement in the US. I analyzed the discourse surrounding self-declared reparative programs executed by six local governments in the US between 2019 and 2022, mainly claiming to pay out reparations for chattel enslavement. I utilized data from 1,400 X-posts, posted between June 2019 and March 2024 which I gathered manually and analyzed in NVivo. I found that individuals who self-present as Black tend to be critical of these initiatives while showing support for actual reparations, aligning with support of the movement according to VBN. On the other hand, both those who reject the initiatives, or support them, tend to self-present as White and did not meet the VBN criteria of being supporters of the reparations movement. The latter finding illustrates the very real implications of uncritically supporting self-declared anti-racist programs, reflecting both issues of White anti-racism practices and misinformation in social media discourses.

This research contributes with a novel analysis of how online anti-racist social movement discourses can both reproduce challenges common to in-person activism and produce new challenges through the proliferation of misinformation.