New Media, Old Racisms: Twitter, Miss America, and Cultural Logics of Race

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of racist speech on social media, focusing on the controversy over racist tweets about the first Indian American Miss America, Nina Davuluri. The essay highlights tensions between "old" and "new" cultural logics about race. Specifically, it explores why such an "old" form of racist discourse, which explicitly imputes racial difference and exclusion, resurfaces on social media in the era of "new" or "color-blind" racism. Our study demonstrates the perseverance of racist discourse, its complementarity with ideologies of post-racialism, and the ways in which social networking technologies shape communication about race, culture, and identity.