“Who Cancelled Lee Highway?”: Expressions of White Racial Frames and Counterframes on Nextdoor


Abstract views: 7 / PDF downloads: 2

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29333/ejecs/1617

Keywords:

Neighborhood, social justice, social media, white racial frames

Abstract

In July of 2021, the Arlington County Board, just outside of Washington, DC, voted to change a major thoroughfare – previously known as Lee Highway – to Langston Boulevard. Despite this well-publicized and openly debated name change, the sight of the new road caused an uproar on the neighborhood social media site, Nextdoor. While social media sites have been central to the mobilization efforts of racial justice activists, these same sites are also often fundamental to a growing and more visible community of white supremacists. This study focuses on the ways in which geographic proximity, through the social media site Nextdoor, constructs community-based expressions of racial justice and whiteness. Using the 151 posts and responses that were published on Nextdoor the day after the street name change in a neighborhood in Arlington, VA, this study analyses how a primarily white, upper-class neighborhood publicly communicates its understanding of race and racial justice. This study was grounded in Feagin’s (2020) concept of the white racial frame, an overarching white worldview dominant in the Global North that embraces a broad and persisting set of racial stereotypes and ideologies. Findings suggest community members engaged in equal numbers in white racial frames and counterframes. Within the white racial frames, community members used whiteness as virtuousness and non-whiteness as unvirtuous, while counter-frames primarily relied on unveiling the white racial frames used. These findings indicate the ways in which social media as a form of communication works to reinforce existing spatial hierarchies while also reimagining community participation.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Shayna Maskell, George Mason University

Shayna Maskell is an Associate Professor in the School of Integrative studies at George Mason University. Her book Politics of Sound: The Washington DC Hardcore Scene 1978-1983 (2021) explores how and why cultural forms, such as music, produce and resist politics and power. Her areas of research include popular and youth culture, intersectionality, and social justice.

References

Ahmad, N. (2018, June 16). Why I quit the Nextdoor neighbor app. https://medium.com/@MzAhmad/why-i-quit-the-nextdoor-neighbor-app-fcb64bfa1eae

Arlington County Board. (2021). Renaming Route 29 and Route 309 in Arlington. https://www.arlingtonva.us/Government/Programs/Renaming-Route-29-in-Arlington

Allen, N. D. C. (2023). The misappropriation of “woke”: Discriminatory social media practices, contributory injustice and context collapse. Synthese, 202(3), Article 84. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04249-5

Barnard, S. R. (2018). Tweeting #Ferguson: Mediatized fields and the new activist journalist. New Media & Society, 20(7), 2252–2271. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817712723

Bhat, P., & Klein, O. (2020). Covert hate speech: White nationalists and dog whistle communication on Twitter. In G. Bouvier & J. E. Rosenbaum (Eds.), Twitter, the public sphere, and the chaos of online deliberation (pp. 151–172). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41421-4_7

Bloch, S. (2021). Aversive racism and community-instigated policing: The spatial politics of Nextdoor. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 40(1), 260–278. https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544211019754

boyd, d. (2010). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self (pp. 39–58). Routledge. https://www.danah.org/papers/2010/SNSasNetworkedPublics.pdf

Brasher, J. P., Alderman, D. H., & Subanthore, A. (2020). Was Tulsa’s Brady Street really renamed? Racial (in) justice, memory-work and the neoliberal politics of practicality. Social & Cultural Geography, 21(9), 1223–1244. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1550580

Brooks, M. A. (2020). It’s okay to be White: Laundering White supremacy through a colorblind victimized White race-consciousness raising campaign. Sociological Spectrum, 40(6), 400–416. https://doi.org/10.1080/02732173.2020.1812456

Brown, M., Ray, R., Summers, E., & Fraistat. N. (2017). #SayHerName: A case study of intersectional social media activism. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(11), 1831–1846. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1334934

Cho, A. (2018). Default publicness: Queer youth of color, social media, and being outed by the machine. New Media & Society, 20(9), 3183–3200. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817744784

Christian, M. (2019). A global critical race and racism framework: Racial entanglements and deep and malleable whiteness. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 5(2), 169–185. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649218783220

Clark, M. D. (2019). White folks’ work: Digital allyship praxis in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Social Movement Studies, 18(5), 519–534. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2019.1603104

Douds, K. W. (2021). The diversity contract: Constructing racial harmony in a diverse American suburb. American Journal of Sociology, 126(6), 1347–1388. https://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/populationCenter/documents/Douds%20Diversity%20Contract%20-%20April%202020.pdf

Drakulich, K., Wozniak, K. H., Hagan, J., & Johnson, D. (2020). Race and policing in the 2016 presidential election: Black Lives Matter, the police, and Dog Whistle Politics. Criminology, 58(2), 370–402. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12239

Elias, S., & Feagin, J. R. (2020). Systemic racism and the white racial frame. In Routledge international handbook of contemporary racisms (pp. 15–27). Routledge.

Ess, C. M. (2020). Internet research ethics and social media. In R. Iphofen (Ed.), Handbook of research ethics and scientific integrity (pp. 283–303). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16759-2_12

Evans, J. J., & Lees, W. B. (2021). Introduction to the special issue on reframing Confederate monuments: Memory, power, and identity. Social Science Quarterly, 102(3), 959–978.

Feagin, J. R. (2020). The white racial frame: Centuries of racial framing and counter-framing. Routledge.

Filimon, L. M., & Ivănescu, M. (2024). Bans, sanctions, and dog-whistles: A review of anti-critical race theory initiatives adopted in the United States since 2020. Policy Studies, 45(2), 183–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2023.2214088

Freelon, D., Bossetta, M., Wells, C., Lukito, J., Xia, Y., & Adams, K. (2022). Black trolls matter: Racial and ideological asymmetries in social media disinformation. Social Science Computer Review, 40(3), 560–578. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439320914853

Fuchs, C. (2014). Social media: A critical introduction. SAGE Publications.

Gamson, W. A. (1995). Constructing social protest. In H. Johnston & B. Klandermans (Eds.), Social movements and culture (pp. 85–106). University of Minnesota Press.

Gatti, F., & Procentese, F. (2022). Ubiquitous local community experiences: Unravelling the social added value of neighborhood-related social media. Psicologia di Comunità: Gruppi, Ricerca Azione e Modelli Formativi, 2, 56–79. https://doi.org/10.3280/PSC2022-002004

Gernand, B. E. (2002). A Virginia village goes to war: Falls Church during the Civil War. Donning Company Publications.

Gibbons, J. (2020). “Placing” the relation of social media participation to neighborhood community connection. Journal of Urban Affairs, 42(8), 1262–1277. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2020.1792311

Goetz, E. G., Williams, R. A., & Damiano, A. (2020). Whiteness and urban planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(2), 142–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2019.1693907

Hall, O. L. (2021). Towards a digital politics of multiplicity: Social media networks and global justice politics. Academia Letters, Article 3204. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3204

Haro-de-Rosario, A., Sáez-Martín, A., & del Carmen Caba-Pérez, M. (2018). Using social media to enhance citizen engagement with local government: Twitter or Facebook? New Media & Society, 20(1), 29–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816645652

Jackson, C. (2022). Rewriting the landscape. In J. Davis-McElligatt (Ed), Reading confederate monuments (pp. 191–211). University Press of Mississippi.

James, W. Y. (2019). Imprint of Racism: White Adult Males’ Transformational Experience from Racial Antipathy to Racial Reconciliation. American Journal of Qualitative Research, 3(1), 93-116. https://doi.org/10.29333/ajqr/5813

Jethro, D. (2022). Changing street names: Decolonisation and toponymic reinscription for doing diversity in Berlin. In S. Macdonald (Ed.), Doing diversity in museums and heritage: A Berlin ethnography (pp. 137–156). transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839464090-008

Joseph, M. (2002) Against the romance of community. University of Minnesota Press.

Kuruç, Ü. K., & Opiyo, B. (2017). Mediated activism: A case for the ‘activist’ use of social media in pursuit of global peace and justice. If You Wish Peace, Care for Justice, 131. https://doi.org/10.30935/ojcmt/5646

Kurwa, R. (2019). Building the digitally gated community: The case of Nextdoor. Surveillance & Society, 17(1/2), 111–117. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.12927

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Blackwell Publishing.

Martin, J. (2021). Breonna Taylor: Transforming a hashtag into defunding the police. Journal of Crime, Law, & Criminology, 111(4), 995–1028. https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol111/iss4/4

Massey, D. (1994). A global sense of place. Routledge.

Mills, C. W. (2022). Global white ignorance. In Routledge international handbook of ignorance studies (pp. 36–46). Routledge.

Mitchell, M. N. (2020). “We always knew it was possible”: The long fight against symbols of white supremacy in New Orleans. City, 24(3–4), 580–593. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1784580

Molla, R. (2019). The rise of fear-based social media like Nextdoor, Citizen, and now Amazon’s Neighbors. Vox. www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/7/18528014fear-social-media-nextdoor-citizen-amazon-ring-neighbors

Morley, D. (2021). Mobile socialities: Communities, mobilities and boundaries. In A. Hill, M. Hartmann, & M. Andersson (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of mobile socialities (pp. 22–37). Routledge.

Mouratidis, K., & Poortinga, W. (2020). Built environment, urban vitality and social cohesion: Do vibrant neighborhoods foster strong communities? Landscape and Urban Planning, 204, Article 103951. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2020.103951

Nagel, K. (2023). Transforming Confederate memory sites into spaces for encounter: Reclaiming space at Marcus-David Peters Circle. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 53(5), 700–716. https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2023.2232815

Nextdoor. (2018). About Us. https://about.nextdoor.com

O’Connell, H. A. (2020). Monuments outlive history: Confederate monuments, the legacy of slavery, and black-white inequality. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43(3), 460–478. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1635259

Pierce, J., & Powers, M. (2023). We and Bobby Lee: Public historians and the fight to remove Confederate memorials. The Public Historian, 45(4), 63–81.

Reece, R. L. (2020). Whitewashing slavery: Legacy of slavery and White social outcomes. Social Problems, 67(2), 304–323. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spz016

Rosenbaum, J. E. (2019). Degrees of freedom: Exploring agency, narratives, and technological affordances in the #TakeAKnee controversy. Social Media+ Society, 5(2), 1–11.. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119826125

Rose-Redwood, R., Alderman, D. H., & Azaryahu, M. (2018). Future horizons of critical urban toponymy. In R. Rose-Redwood, D. Alderman, & M. Azaryahu (Eds.), The political life of urban streetscapes: Naming, politics, and place (pp. 309–319). Routledge.

Simko, C., Cunningham, D., & Fox, N. (2022). Contesting commemorative landscapes: Confederate monuments and trajectories of change. Social problems, 69(3), 591–611. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaa067

Staeheli, L. A. (2003). Women and the work of community. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 35(5), 815–831. https://doi.org/10.1069/a35134

Sweet, E. L., & Harper-Anderson, E. L. (2023). Race, space, and trauma: Using community accountability for healing justice. Journal of the American Planning Association, 89(4), 554–565. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2023.2165530

Vaast, E., Safadi, H., Lapointe, L., & Negoita, B. (2017). Social media affordances for connective action. MIS Quarterly, 41(4), 1179–1206. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26630290

Wilkins, D. J., Livingstone, A. G., & Levine, M. (2019). Whose tweets? The rhetorical functions of social media use in developing the Black Lives Matter movement. British Journal of Social Psychology, 58(4), 786–805. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12318

Yeung, D. (2018). Social media as a catalyst for policy action and social change for health and well-being: Viewpoint. Journal of medical Internet research, 20(3), Article e94. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.8508

Zhuravskaya, E., Petrova, M., & Enikolopov, R. (2020). Political effects of the internet and social media. Annual Review of Economics, 12, 415–438. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-081919-050239

Downloads

Published

2024-11-06

How to Cite

Maskell, S. (2024). “Who Cancelled Lee Highway?”: Expressions of White Racial Frames and Counterframes on Nextdoor. Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 11(4), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.29333/ejecs/1617

Issue

Section

Original Manuscript
Received 2023-03-10
Accepted 2024-08-18
Published 2024-11-06