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 made, without having to upload it somewhere else first (in fact, you had to attach an image if you were starting a thread).

These two characteristics made 4chan a fast-moving and creative place.  If you posted something stupid or unfunny, people would insult you, but they wouldn't know who you were, so the stupidity of your post would not be attached to you personally.  Every post was a chance to start afresh.  You could quickly put together an image using image editing software and post it on the site.  If people didn't like it, they would insult or ignore it, but if they liked it, they would save it and repost it in other threads.

Another important aspect of 4chan (which it shared with some forums) was its relative lack of censorship.  Things like child pornography and advocacy of violence were shunned, but everything else was fair game.  (Parenthetically, I want to acknowledge that 4chan moderators were not always diligent about deleting child pornography in the early days of the site.)  This contributed to the feeling of freedom on the site, and encouraged images that were more disturbing, violent, or sexual than would have been allowed on many forums.

When I started visiting 4chan in May 2007, it was in its heyday as the main site where memes were born.  People reposted popular images frequently, and riffed off one image to create other images.  The creativity of 4chan authors was astounding.  Moreover, the volume of posts that the site processed (several posts per second just on the main /b/ "random" board alone) was impressive.

Racists like to say now that 4chan was always racist.  But that's just not true.  I know because I have been watching it since 2007, and would have noticed any racism that was more pronounced than the racism outside 4chan.

Yes, because 4chan was anonymous and uncensored, people would sometimes say the n-word, or post racist images.  Occasionally someone would go on a holocaust-denial rant.  But those posts were a small percentage of the total posts, and were often countered by other people posting anti-racist text or images.  Others would reply to the post, or flood the thread with anything from the standard puerile 4chan insults to detailed counter-arguments.

It was around 2010 that I noticed racists really getting a foothold on 4chan.  People on racist forums such as Stormfront had evidently noticed that the anonymity and lack of censorship on 4chan afforded them protection for their writings that they couldn't expect from most mainstream bulletin board sites.  They became more active, and pushed back harder in their threads.  First on the /news/ board, and then on the board /pol/, racists began dominating the discussion.  By 2016, /pol/ was firmly identified as the "alt-right containment board".  4chan users were still keeping racist words and images out of other boards, with some difficulty.

As of this writing, however, maybe because of the constant, tedious drumbeat of racism from a large number of 4chan users, other boards have succumbed to tolerance of racist thought.  It's not unusual for the k-word, hatred of Black people, or "global Jewish conspiracy" memes to be thrown about freely on the entertainment board /tv/, the history board /his/, or the literature board /lit/, without any response from other readers.  There have probably been racist threads on every board on the site, from the Pokemon and papercraft boards to the hardcore porn board.

I watched this process with growing distaste.  But I never gave up on 4chan completely, mostly because I remember what a positive and creative place it had been in 2007-2010.  I often visit and post about other topics, but I also argue with the racists when I am on the site.  I do this not because I think it will change the minds of the people that I am arguing with, but because I think it might influence the views of other people reading the threads.

The current dominance of racist thought on 4chan is what prompted me to start this blog.  I'm not an expert on racism outside of 4chan, and I don't have any novel answers about how to counter it.  But I have thought deeply about how racist thought is promulgated on 4chan, because of my interest in the site itself and because of my interest in combating racism.  This blog is an attempt to make some contribution to understanding the structure of that racist thought, and to break it down into its components, so that we have more of a chance of ending its influence.