Social Media Spread Of Racism

One of the most Racism can be defined as the belief or doctrine involving the idea of superiority amongst races and hate and intolerance towards other races(racism). In just a matter of two years, there was a 67% increase of hate crimes against Muslims. Aside from that, there were also 1,745 cases of anti-black racial happenings(Chan 1). Many argue that racism has long been gone, but recent events prove otherwise. One of the prime factors of the spread of racism is media. It is quite notable all across the world that once something is out on the internet, it’s never going to go away. Social media such as Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram are the quickest ways of keeping in touch with friends, but they also have a way in providing bias in what
Kathy Nakagawa, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote the article, “The Use of Social Media in Teaching Race”. In her article, she claims, “Social media also allows for alternative spaces and a creative vernacular discourse around race (Guo & Lee, 2013), especially for those left out of mainstream media. The Internet provides many opportunities for using social/new media to generate content and perspectives that are otherwise missing from broader societal discussions about race (Ono & Pham, 2009) and absent or silenced in mainstream media”(Nakagawa 6). A significant amount of opportunities to spread bias from social media will arise. Forms of social media include Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, MySpace, etc. According to Mark Changizi, the Director of Human Cognition at 2AI, media does have a significant impact on the way race is identified. This author claims that we analyze race by similarities and differences. For example, Caucasians might perceive African Americans or Asians as different because they recognize that their skin base colors aren’t the same(Changizi 1). Srividya Ramasubramanian, the Associate Professor of Communication & Associate Dean for Liberal Arts in Texas A&M University, defines media literacy as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate messages in a variety of forms”(Ramasubramanian 3). The author provides multiple cases of evidences to show that the media is not effective in trying to reduce the number of racial generalizations and