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 targets of 4chan racism vary with time of day.  At times of day when you can expect Americans to be online making comments on 4chan, you can see racism against Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, South Asians, and Muslims.  You may also see the occasional thread targeting Chinese people (or East Asians in general), or North American aboriginal people.

At other times of the day, you can expect other varieties of racism.  At times of day when you can expect Australians to be online, you can see racism against Australian Aborigines.  At times of day when you can expect Europeans to be online, you can see racism against Roma, and also against immigrants to Europe from Turkey, the Middle East, or the African diaspora.

But the core audience of 4chan, and the core of people who post to 4chan, is still Americans, and anti-Black racism is still the dominant form of racism in America.  Analytics sites agree that roughly 30% of 4chan traffic is from America.  The "front page" (the 10 threads with the most recent new posts) of /pol/ is still dominated by racism against Blacks.  In some of these threads, the OP (original post) is explicitly targeted against Blacks -- for example, "n----- hate" threads.  In others, the discussion is ostensibly about some other issue, such as gun rights, but the comments are motivated by racism against Blacks -- for example, they try to justify incidents in which people with guns killed unarmed Black people.

For this reason, anti-Black American racism sets the tone and provides the template for other forms of racism on 4chan.  Analyzing it helps in analyzing the other forms of racism on 4chan as well.