Racist Speech Research Articles

Do White Women Gain Status for Engaging in Anti-black Racism at Work? An Experimental Examination of Status Conferral

Businesses often attempt to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) by showcasing women in their leadership ranks, most of whom are white. Yet research has shown that organizations confer status and power to women who engage in sexist behavior, which undermines DEI efforts. We sought to examine whether women who engage in racist behavior are also conferred relative status at work. Drawing on theory and research on organizational culture and intersectionality, we predicted that a white woman who expresses anti-Black racism is conferred more status in the workplace than a white woman who does not. A pilot study (N = 30) confirmed that making an anti-Black racist comment at work was judged to be more offensive than making no comment, but only for a white man, not a white woman. Study 1 (N = 330) found that a white woman who made an anti-Black racist comment at work was conferred higher status than a white woman who did not, whereas the opposite held true for a white man, with perceived offensiveness mediating these effects. Study 2 (N = 235) revealed that a white woman who made an anti-racist/pro-Black Lives Matter comment was conferred lower status than a white woman who did not, whereas the opposite held true for a white man. Finally, Study 3 (N = 295) showed that people who endorse racist and sexist beliefs confer more status to a white man than to a white woman regardless of speech, but that people low in racism and sexism confer the highest status to a white woman who engages in anti-Black racist speech. These studies suggest that white women are rewarded for expressing support for beliefs that mirror systemic inequality in the corporate world. We discuss implications for business ethics and directions for future research.

Laughing about race in “colorblind” France: Racial stereotypes in French television comedy

This article examines the portrayal of race in two iconic French television series, H and Platane, exploring how they negotiate racial stereotypes within the context of France's purportedly colorblind society. Through a comparative analysis, we analyze the comedic strategies employed by these shows, drawing on humor theory to elucidate the dynamics of superiority and relief in laughter. While H often reinforces racial stereotypes under the guise of criticizing racist speech, Platane adopts a more nuanced approach, inviting viewers to engage with the complexities of racial discourse. By contextualizing these representations within France's sociopolitical landscape, we demonstrate the evolving nature of race talk in French television and its implications for broader societal attitudes. This study underscores the significance of television comedy as a space for both reflecting and potentially challenging cultural norms surrounding race and identity.

Making the impossible possible? Framing confrontations of racism on social media as norm-setting

Although confronting racist speech online can reduce future discriminatory behavior, people may be reluctant to confront because they perceive that it will be ineffective in changing racist attitudes. We test one theoretically grounded strategy for increasing white social media users’ willingness to confront online racism: reframing the confrontation goal from attitude change to norm-setting. We examine whether re-framing the confrontation goal in this way is effective under conditions where confrontation is least likely: (a) when the potential confronter is highly cynical about the efficacy of political discussions and (b) when the confrontation target is relationally distant. In a two-wave panel survey experiment collected during the 2020 US presidential election, participants reported greater likelihood of confronting a target when the goal was to set norms regarding racist speech, when they were less cynical of discussions, and when the target was relationally closer to them (e.g. family members as opposed to strangers).

Digital Rage: Testing “the Obama Effect” on Internet-Based Expressions of Racism

The concept, “White Rage,” has previously been used to describe the way Whites have historically responded to Black advancement with policies and practices designed to quietly disrupt the progress Blacks had been making. White rage is typically subtle, masking its true intent. In contrast, recent research has found that the covert, subtle expressions of racism that are so normal in most mainstream spaces may be less common in internet-based communication. The extent to which online racism is connected to real-world racist attitudes, behaviors, and events, however, is unclear. In this article, we test the effects of real-world racialized events on explicit expressions of racism in online spaces using days that Obama gave speeches as our treatment effect and explicit usage of the “n-word” on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) as our measurable outcome. Does usage of the n-word, a racial slur, increase in the days following speeches made by President Obama? Our results of over 9 years and more than 2.9 million tweets demonstrate a statistically significant increase of racist speech in response to those speech cycles, which are further placed in contrast to the speeches of other political actors, including President Trump.

THE TOXIC TURN? CONCEPTUAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES ON PROBLEMATIC CONTENTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

The ‘toxic turn’ in social media platforms continues unabated. Hate speech, mis- and disinformation, misogynistic and racist speech, images, memes and videos are all far too common on social media platforms and more broadly on the internet. While the diminishing popularity of populist politicians led to hopes for less social toxicity, the Covid-19 pandemic introduced new and more complex dimensions. Tensions have emerged around what constitutes problematic content and who gets to define it. Co-regulation models, such as for example the EC Code of Conduct against Illegal Hate Speech, focus on the legality of certain types of contents, while leaving other categories of problematic contents to be defined by platforms. In parallel, the social media ecosystem became more diverse, as new platforms with hands off moderation policies attracted users who felt too constrained by the policies of mainstream platforms. The proposed panel examines this complex and dynamic landscape by problematizing what is understood as toxic, deplatformed, removable and in general problematic content on platforms with the aim to probe the boundaries of what is constituted as acceptable discourse on platforms and to map its implications. In particular, this panel discusses the broad definition of ‘problematic content’ employed by social media platforms, a catch-all term that cuts across hate speech and propaganda, including more politically topical content such as mal-, mis-, and disinformation, hyperpartisan and polarising content, but also abusive, misogynistic, racist, and homophobic discourse. The term is also employed to refer to spam and content that infringes upon the Terms of Service or the Community Standards of social media platforms. As such, it is a broad category that resists a narrower classification given the operational scope of its use. Defining what constitutes problematic content is a key operation of platform content moderation policies but is also the subject of intense debates (de Gregorio, 2020; Gillespie, 2018; Gillespie et al., 2020; Gorwa et al., 2020). The panel interrogates the many definitions and applications of problematic content on social media platforms and applications through an empirically informed lens and focusing on deleted contents, complex mixed narratives, and grey areas, including hidden misinformation on voice applications. Problematic Content according to Twitter Compliance API presents ongoing work on the Twitter Compliance API and the Compliance Firehose, which allow researchers to identify content that has been deleted, deactivated, protected, or suspended from Twitter, a proxy for problematic content. In Multi-Part Narratives on Telegram Siapera presents ongoing research that probes the intersection between Covid-19 scepticism, far right and other political narratives in vaccine hesitant groups on Telegram. The third contribution, What if Bill Gates really is evil, people? Investigating the infodemic’s grey areas discusses the conceptual and methodological definitions of problematic content in relation to work on anti-vax and other conspiratorial narratives on Instagram and on Twitter. The fourth contribution, Misinformation and other Harmful Content in Third-Party Voice Applications focuses on problematic content that is yet to be identified on voice applications such as personal assistants. The article addresses the methodological challenges of identifying and defining such contents on applications that have currently no content moderation policies. All contributions foreground the difficulties and costs of identifying and dealing with problematic contents on social media. The panel fits with theme of decolonization in two ways: firstly, because it is concerned with the tensions around how toxic/problematic contents are defined and who gets to define them; and secondly, because of its focus on neo-colonial discourses or justifications for colonialism in both narratives hosted by platforms and in platforms’ attempts to regulate content. As some narratives are flagged for removal by social platforms, they also raise the question of who is deciding and what does problematic content mean, with far right discourses exploiting this tension and ironically denouncing any attempt to regulate the public discourse as ideological enforcement and justification for (neo)colonial practices performed by social media platforms. From this perspective, platforms' own claims about what constitutes acceptable content is uncomfortably close to colonial narratives of civilised discourse and brings to the fore the potential for neo-colonial narratives and practices in digital spaces.

Racism and free speech: Commentary on O'Donohue and Fisher (2022).

In arguing for the addition of an enforceable section on free speech to the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (American Psychological Association, 2017; hereinafter, referred to as the Ethics Code), O'Donohue and Fisher (2022) rely on insufficient evidence of a threat to free speech. They also privilege individualistic over communitarian values and calibrate the risks of racist speech narrowly, and at the individual level. A recent resolution by the American Psychological Association (2021) calls upon all psychologists to "eliminate processes and procedures that perpetuate racial injustice" (para. 29, p. 3). In response to that call, I examine evidence pertinent to the proposal and conclude that the recommended addition to the Ethics Code is not empirically supported and could serve to institutionalize racism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Detection of Racist Language in French Tweets

Toxic online content has become a major issue in recent years due to the exponential increase in the use of the internet. In France, there has been a significant increase in hate speech against migrant and Muslim communities following events such as Great Britain’s exit from the EU, the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and the Bataclan attacks. Therefore, the automated detection of offensive language and racism is in high demand, and it is a serious challenge. Unfortunately, there are fewer datasets annotated for racist speech than for general hate speech available, especially for French. This paper attempts to breach this gap by (1) proposing and evaluating a new dataset intended for automated racist speech detection in French; (2) performing a case study with multiple supervised models and text representations for the task of racist language detection in French; and (3) performing cross-lingual experiments.

Hate Speech in Japan: The Possibility of a Non-Regulatory Approach ed. by Shinji Higaki and Yuji Nasu

Reviewed by: Hate Speech in Japan: The Possibility of a Non-Regulatory Approach ed. by Shinji Higaki and Yuji Nasu Celeste L. Arrington (bio) Hate Speech in Japan: The Possibility of a Non-Regulatory Approach. Edited by Shinji Higaki and Yuji Nasu. Cambridge University Press, 2021. xviii, 506 pages. $125.00, cloth; $100.00, E-book. Hate Speech in Japan is an information-packed new book about a significant recent development in Japanese society: hate speech. Public demonstrations [End Page 435] and online comments against ethnic Korean residents of Japan (zainichi Koreans) attracted media attention within Japan and worldwide a decade ago and spurred international criticism. Particularly shocking was the targeting of a Korean primary school in Kyoto by the Zaitokukai (Zainichi Tokken o Yurusanai Shimin no Kai, or Citizens Association against Special Privileges for Resident Koreans). This book analyzes such hate speech and its relationship to older forms of discrimination against Japan's Korean and outcaste (burakumin) communities. It also details and assesses the diverse recent efforts to address the problem of hate speech, including via new national legislation, subnational government ordinances and guidelines, administrative measures, and court rulings. Through both formal legal analysis and nuanced examinations of policy implementation, this book's 20 chapters significantly advance scholarship about regulatory styles, law and social change, and the balance between freedom of expression and the right to human dignity in Japan. The term "hate speech" (heito supiichi) gained currency in Japan in the early 2010s, and new legislation to address the problem was enacted within just a few years. The 2016 Hate Speech Elimination Act (HSEA) defines hate speech as "unfair discriminatory speech and behavior against persons originating from outside Japan" or "their descendants who are lawfully residing in Japan." This narrow definition reflects what Erin Chung has called "rights hierarchies" in the South Korean context; noncitizens have different human rights protections depending on their visa category.1 And it excludes Japanese minorities like burakumin, Ainu, and Okinawans (for political debates about the definition, see pp. 233–36). Many of this book's contributors document discrimination against burakumin and zainichi Koreans long before the term "hate speech" began circulating and grapple with why zainichi Koreans were targeted most recently (chapter 16). This volume is empirically rich, drawing on formal legal analyses, comparisons of legal scholars' arguments, media and online content analyses, and interviews. For example, chapter 12 uses interview quotes to expose the traumatic impacts of hate speech on members of Kyoto's Korean community. And the social psychological discussion of discrimination, prejudice, and stereotypes illuminates phenomena adjacent to hate speech and the hateful Internet content analyzed in chapter 17. Despite such evidence, the Japanese government reported to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination as recently as 2013 that it "does not believe that, in present-day Japan, racist thoughts are disseminated and racial discrimination is incited to the extent that … legislation to impose punishment … [End Page 436] should be considered even at the risk of unduly stifling legitimate speech" (p. 66, note 30). Indeed, Japan long resisted regulating discriminatory speech, which led some of this book's contributors to worry that Japanese people were unaware of hate speech until the Zaitokukai demonstrations (pp. 222, 239–40). This volume persuasively documents, in a great service to scholars without Japanese-language abilities, one reason for the lack of hate speech regulations: Japanese legal scholars tended to privilege freedom of expression, usually citing the U.S. model rather than the German approach, which emphasizes human dignity (chapters 1 and 15, pp. 242–43, 415–21). Part 2 of the volume (chapters 7–9) details how few legal tools existed for addressing hate speech and racial discrimination in Japan. Criminal and civil claims can be made regarding defamation or insult, but such speech must be targeted against specific individuals or organizations. Since hate speech generally targets broader categories of people, it falls outside existing criminal and tort frameworks in Japan. The book's contributors conclude that it is unlikely that Japanese courts will recognize racist speech and discrimination as a new type of tort anytime soon (p. 204). Ryangok Ku summarizes the weaknesses of Japan's legal and institutional frameworks...

Multimodal Hate Speech Detection in Greek Social Media

Hateful and abusive speech presents a major challenge for all online social media platforms. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Understanding allow for more accurate detection of hate speech in textual streams. This study presents a new multimodal approach to hate speech detection by combining Computer Vision and Natural Language processing models for abusive context detection. Our study focuses on Twitter messages and, more specifically, on hateful, xenophobic, and racist speech in Greek aimed at refugees and migrants. In our approach, we combine transfer learning and fine-tuning of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Residual Neural Networks (Resnet). Our contribution includes the development of a new dataset for hate speech classification, consisting of tweet IDs, along with the code to obtain their visual appearance, as they would have been rendered in a web browser. We have also released a pre-trained Language Model trained on Greek tweets, which has been used in our experiments. We report a consistently high level of accuracy (accuracy score = 0.970, f1-score = 0.947 in our best model) in racist and xenophobic speech detection.

Valuing Liberty or Equality? Empathetic Personality and Political Intolerance of Harmful Speech

Political tolerance is a core democratic value, yet a long-standing research agenda suggests that citizens are unwilling to put this value into practice when confronted by groups that they dislike. One of the most disliked groups, especially in recent times, are those promoting racist ideologies. Racist speech poses a challenge to the ideal of political tolerance because it challenges another core tenet of democratic politics – the value of equality. How do citizens deal with threats to equality when making decisions about what speech they believe should be allowed in their communities? In this article, we contribute to the rich literature on political tolerance, but focus on empathy as a key, and understudied, personality trait that should be central to how – and when – citizens reject certain types of speech. Empathy as a cognitive trait relates to one’s capacity to accurately perceive the feeling state of another person. Some people are more prone to worry and care about the feelings of other people, and such empathetic people should be most likely to reject speech that causes harm. Using a comparative online survey in Canada (n = 1,555) and the United States (n = 1627) conducted in 2017, we examine whether empathetic personalities - as measured by a modified version of the Toronto Empathy Scale - predict the tolerance of political activities by “least-liked” as well as prejudicially motivated groups. Using both a standard least-liked political tolerance battery, as well as a vignette experiment that manipulates group type, we test whether higher levels of trait empathy negatively correlate with tolerance of racist speech. Our findings show that empathy powerfully moderates the ways in which citizens react to different forms of objectionable speech.

Confronting the Lies That Protect Racist Hate Speech: Towards Honest Hate Speech Laws in New Zealand and the United States

This Article provides a comparative critique of hate speech jurisprudence in New Zealand and the United States by building on insights from Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholars.  My main argument is that neither of these liberal democracies protect the right to freedom of expression/speech as they claim, but in fact dishonestly protect a right to “freedom of expression of racism” or “freedom of racist speech.”  They do this by telling lies that inflate the value of free expression/speech and diminish and dismiss the harms that hate speech inflicts on marginalized groups.  To move towards honest hate speech laws in both jurisdictions, I propose a communications strategy that seeks to reframe hate speech from a free speech issue to a public health issue.  This is in order to push for reforms that will enable the courts to better protect people of color from the physical, mental, psychological or spiritual harms of racist hate speech.

Political (In)tolerance of the Far-Right: The Importance of Agency

This paper examines the impact of far-right agency on public political tolerance—what the parties on the far right do to disconnect themselves from accusations of extremism and thus increase their political tolerance by the public. Examining such patterns is challenging because of the multiple varieties of party attributes and strategies that are used by the far right. This paper uses a conjoint survey experiment conducted in the Norwegian Citizen Panel. Each respondent was presented with one vignette describing important attributes of a hypothetical far-right initiative and was then asked to evaluate whether this initiative should be allowed to hold an event. The conjoint design makes it possible to test the impact of the ideological and organizational varieties of the far right. The results demonstrate that what the parties on the far right do is crucial for public political tolerance. Denying extremism and excluding extreme members increase tolerance. However, the features that the far right is not in control of, such as its ideological legacy and the fact that some of its members have been convicted of racist speech negatively affect public political tolerance. The paper concludes that the agency of the far right is a necessary but not sufficient condition for public political tolerance of the far right.

Rassistische Sprache – Eine Untersuchung zu Strategien für das Simultandolmetschen vom Englischen ins Deutsche hinsichtlich ihrer Praktikabilität

AbstractThis article offers an insight into strategies in English-to-German simultaneous interpretation that can be applied when a speaker uses racist language. Six interpreters were first introduced to a selection of strategies. They were then asked to interpret a staged panel discussion in which racist language was used. Each time they recognized racist speech they were supposed to intuitively apply one of the strategies they had previously been introduced to. In a final step, all six interpreters took part in a focus group interview during which they assessed the applied strategies and discussed difficulties.The results from both the interpretations and the focus group interview illustrate how racist speech can be interpreted critically. They offer a new perspective on traditional translation and interpretation theories as well as on the role of interpreters. The article concludes with some ideas as to how the results could be incorporated into interpretation didactics. Given the fact that we live and work in a time in which power relations and the world’s landscape continue to shift and change, it appears appropriate to challenge the current self-image of interpreters.

Freedom of speech at the intersection of racist speech and online political hate speech

Freedom of speech at the intersection of racist speech and online political hate speech

Does Public Racist Speech Constitute Hostile Discrimination? Comments on McGowan

ABSTRACT In ‘Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm: An Overview and an Application’, Mary Kate McGowan argues that some racist speech in public places should be made unlawful in the United States for the same reason that sexist behaviour in the workplace is already legally actionable—namely, to protect individuals from a hostile discriminatory environment. While McGowan may be correct that some public racist speech may constitute an act of discrimination in some morally significant sense, I present several reasons for doubting that such speech constitutes a hostile discriminatory environment in the relevant legal sense.

Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm: An Overview and an Application

ABSTRACT This paper argues for a hidden way in which speech constitutes harm by enacting harmful norms. The paper then explores the potential legal consequences of uncovering such instances of harm constitution. In particular, the paper argues that some public racist speech constitutes harm and is thus harmful enough to warrant legal remedy. Such utterances are actionable, it is contended, because they enact discriminatory norms in public spaces.

Pandemic of Racism: Public Health Implications of Political Misinformation

Misinformation amplified by political elites can lead to an increase in racism and discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities and other populations who experience vulnerabilities. Politically-motivated misinformation, as observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, can have far-ranging public health consequences, including negative physical and emotional health outcomes. Misinformation, political or otherwise, and racist rhetoric must be categorically rejected. Scientists and the general public have a moral duty to advocate against and repudiate the racialization of disease and racist speech in all forms (Yore, 2020).

Conflicts associated with migratory processes: a political perspective

The objective of the research was to discuss the conflictive nature of the migratory processes that occur in the world today. The need to adapt and solve daily problems inevitably requires the State to implement international, state and regional standards for the implementation of the rights and opportunities of migrants both in the territory of the donor country and in the territory of the recipient country. On the other hand, we see an increase in the phobia of migrants and the characteristic racism of countries where labor migration flows are increasing. In methodological terms, use was made of hermeneutics close to political ethnography. It is concluded that, for a long time, the criticism of racism has developed as a criticism of colonialism, Nazism, including anti-Semitism, and in modern times as a political criticism of migration-phobia and nationalism, in which the Racist speech and practices have found and do find obvious and complete expression. Migrant phobia is a concept that latently generates motives of political, ideological, racial, national, religious hatred, xenophobia, or hostility towards an ethnic or social group within the framework of social practices.

The Marketplace of Racist Ideas

This commentary examines academic freedom in the context of racist campus speech. Drawing on both historical and contemporary events, it argues that the protection of racist campus speech – and the emphasis from some elements of the political left and right on the importance of of protecting such speech – in fact suppresses ideas and speech from faculty and students of color. In particular, protecting racist campus speech silences anti-racist ideas and speech. This suppression results in substantial harms to academic freedom for groups and ideas that badly need it: faculty and students of color, who are often underrepresented and marginalized on campus, and anti-racist speech, which is frequently treated as unimportant or unintellectual.

Multiple Identities and Non-Prototypicality: Intersectionality at Work

Everyone has multiple social identities that influence the way they are perceived and treated and, in turn, how they perceive and respond to their social worlds at work. To date, research has tended to focus only on one identity at a time. The papers in this symposium investigate how different combinations of multiple identities affect a variety of outcomes at work, from biases and beliefs to recruitment, fundraising, and perceptions of speech and discrimination. This symposium has three goals: (1) to shed light on emerging theory on intersecting social identities, (2) to present innovative scholarship about how multiple intersecting social identities affect how individuals negotiate their workplaces and what treatment they receive, and (3) to create space for complicating the conversation about diversity and inclusion in order to examine the complexities of intersectionality and non-prototypicality. Black Women’s Experiences of Mistreatment and Withdrawal Presenter: Kathrina Robotham; U. of Michigan Presenter: Veronica C. Rabelo; San Francisco State U. Presenter: Courtney Lynn McCluney; U. of Virginia Darden School of Business Presenter: Kelsie Thorne; U. of Michigan Invisible Discrimination: Divergent Implications for the Non-Prototypicality of Black Women Presenter: Rebecca Ponce de Leon; Fuqua School of Business, Duke U. “Geeky” Rules of the Game: The Effects of Nerd Masculinity on Entrepreneurial Funding Presenter: Soojin Oh; Pennsylvania State U. Presenter: Aparna Joshi; Penn State Smeal College of Business Do White Women Get Away with Racist Speech? The Effects of Identity on Perceptions of Speech Presenter: Barnini Bhattacharyya; Sauder School of Business, U. of British Columbia Presenter: Jennifer L. Berdahl; U. of British Columbia Re-Aligning Multiple Identities by Tweaking Job Advertisement Language Presenter: Joyce He; U. of Toronto Presenter: Sonia Kang; U. of Toronto