Digital White Racial Socialization: Social Media and the Case of Whiteness

In the United States, social media have become a ubiquitous central element in the lives of adolescents (Anderson, & Jiang, 2018). Upwards of 96% of youth (8-17 years old) report using social media such as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, at least once a day (Ballard, 2019), and indicate doing so for an average of more than four hours (Common Sense Media, 2019). While current models of white racial socialization (WRS) emphasize the importance of social context, social media have not yet been seriously considered as settings where WRS processes may occur (Byrd & Anh, 2020). Similar to offline environments, social media are racialized social contexts that may shape how adolescents experience, interpret, and internalize understandings of race and whiteness. Furthermore, the internet, like other mainstream media, obfuscates whiteness by positioning being white as normative, universal, and default (Brock Jr., 2020). As such, this (under)current of whiteness may contribute to socializing generations of young people as participants in defending and reproducing the current racialized structures and ideologies (Bonilla-Silva, 1997).

To date, research on racial socialization among white children and families (e.g., Hagerman, 2014, 2017) suggests that WRS differs qualitatively from socialization processes among children and families of Color (Loyd & Gaither, 2018), because of the historical construction and maintenance of whiteness and white categorization as normal. However, we argue that framing race and whiteness as doings may allow for an expansive inquiry into the racial contexts of WRS and into how white adolescents practice whiteness in their everyday behaviors, including and beyond identity development. Better understanding how future generations of white adolescents are normatively socialized into whiteness and being white on and through social media may be critical for disruptions to and divestments in these processes.

This paper introduces a conceptual framework for understanding WRS processes in digital social contexts, focusing on setting-level conditions and mechanisms (Digital White Racial Socialization). We apply this conceptual framework to an opinion piece published in The New York Times titled, “Racists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons” (Schroeder, 2019). The paper begins with a brief overview of the WRS literature, highlighting the dearth of research on social media as settings where WRS processes may operate. Next, we argue for an expansive discussion of WRS as doings, by engaging race as not just a demographic characteristic and identity, but also as processes and practices of securing and maintaining white domination. We then turn to the developmental stage of adolescence as a critical time for studying racial socialization, including analyses of how social media contexts and affordances may complicate this development. Following this, to consider social media’s role in WRS, we engage the literature on race and the internet, expressing the need to consider the color- and power-evasive origins of the internet, online racism, racialized pedagogical zones (RPZs), and the concept of digital white habitus. We end with an expressed need for conceptually-guided empirical work to study the influence of social media on WRS processes with a focus on white adolescents and expansive framings of whiteness.