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Effects of Racism

The anti-Black American racism on 4chan is a tangled web of lies, out-of-context information, misinformation, and disinformation.  Before analyzing the structure of this web, I'd like to state what I believe about the effects of racism on Black Americans. I believe that racism against Black Americans has four main forms of effects on Black Americans:  direct effects, effects through the media, effects through relatives, and effects through the neighborhoods in which Black Americans live.  Let me introduce each of these forms of effects briefly. Direct effects:  When someone -- say, a doctor, or teacher, or police officer -- holds racist beliefs and assumptions, those racist beliefs and assumptions may influence how they interact with individual Black Americans.  For instance, racist assumptions by doctors can lead them to disbelieve what Black patients are telling them about their health.  Racist assumptions by teachers can lead them to judge Black students...
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Varieties of Racism on 4chan

 The kind of racism on 4chan that I will concentrate on first in this blog is racism against Black people in America.  This is not the only kind of racism on 4chan, so let me summarize the kinds of racism that I see, and motivate why I want to concentrate first on analyzing anti-Black American racism on 4chan. I see many different kinds of racism on 4chan.  In addition to racism directed toward Black Americans, there is also a great deal of racism directed toward Jews.  After those groups, my perception is that Hispanic people, South Asian people, and Muslims are the targets of the next greatest amount of racism. (Note that I am classifying prejudice directed against Jews and Muslims as racism.  I am aware that not everyone would agree with this, and I might post sometime exclusively about this issue.  For now, let me just say that I think it shares enough characteristics with other kinds of racism that it is reasonable to classify it as racism.) The target...
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My background with 4chan

Why am I interested in analyzing 4chan racism?  One reason is that I have loved 4chan in the past, and I still love some aspects of it.  Another is that I have a long-standing interest in combating racism. Discussion on the World Wide Web in the late 1990s and early 2000s was dominated by "forum" or "bulletin board" sites.  To contribute to discussion, you had to pick a user name and register with the site, and then use that name whenever you made posts.  You could attach images to posts; however, you did so by first storing the image on some other site, and then just putting the URLs of the thumbnails and the full images in your bulletin board post. 4chan was different for two reasons.  First, it was an anonymous board: you could post anytime, without registering and without picking a user name, and you could either add comments to threads or start threads yourself.  Second, it was an " imageboard ":  you could easily attach any image to any post you...
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Analyzing Racism on 4chan

This blog will be about analyzing racism on the site 4chan. I decided to open this blog because I have been reading 4chan for a long time, and I believe that it's important to examine the complex ecosystem of racist thought that has grown up on the site.  By examining 4chan racism, understanding its structure, and breaking it down into its components, I hope that you and I have a better chance of combating it -- and combating racism in the wider Internet and the wider world outside 4chan.
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