I’m Not Racist, They’re Just Facebook Jokes: How Organizations Deal with Viral Racist Incidents

Abstract

An organizational dilemma for a modern era: racism and social network sites (SNSs). In this international qualitative study of nine cases, we map the stages of how organizations and the public react to incidents of racism gone viral. In the absence of a platform-based consequences, the public negotiates group reactions to offending statements. While organizations have little control over what their staff do outside of work, online spaces enable a context collapse where the traditional work-non-work boundaries are unclear, and when individuals’ racism are tied to their workplace, organizations are called to hold their offending staff members accountable. When organizations go into a stage of damage control their responses are generally considered weak. Our study contributes to critical diversity studies and racism on social media by showing the boundaries of platformed racism, outlining processes of bricolage carried out by the public to show organizational patterns of discrimination, and expand on processes of how organizations perpetuate systemic racism by only targeting ‘bad apples’.