“Dear White People Vol. 2”: Social networking as an enforcing tool for racial inequality

Abstract

Recently, social networking sites have been used as a means of spreading an alarming narrative under the premise of freedom of speech, through enraging, provocative and harmful messages. Some of them, posted by powerful and influential people, have empowered a group of individuals who have spoken up and expressed their approval of said messages through increasingly harsher language, as well as violent actions. Some of them were racist in tone, and increasingly widespread on several social media platforms, such as Twitter, where the issue of racial inequality fuels increasing division and hatred. Dear White People is a Netflix series, based on a 2014 film of the same title, depicting Winchester University, an ethnically diverse college in the United States of America, where a conflict along racial lines erupts. At the same University, Samantha White, a junior Media Studies major, begins hosting a radio show called “Dear White People”, addressed to Caucasian students in order to make them aware of what Blackness means in a judgmental, predominantly white society. The aim of this article is to present how influential social networking is in society by using the example of Dear White People Vol. 2, as well as to illustrate how the issue of racism increases in magnitude through a narrative that spreads and encourages individuals to take verbal and physical actions against the black minority.