My chapter looks at white anti-racism on social media as a performative discourse that works to define and demarcate the boundaries of acceptable white behaviour and discourse. 'We were surprised and upset to see the inflammatory and offensive rhetoric used on Erik Abriss Twitter account this weekend. The fantasy of transcendence “allows racism to be seen as what the working classes (or other less literate others) do” further fostering the sense of belonging through not-belonging (Ahmed). Digital company INE Entertainment said in a statement Monday that they fired a journalist who tweeted a horrible message against the Covington Catholic High School students who were being smeared by the media. Racism therefore becomes a product of ignorance not inequality, of poverty not power.
In other words, White Anti-Racism according to Kowal and Ahmed actually re- inscribes white privilege through licencing a “fantasy of transcendence” by externalising racism and a problematic heritage of racist exploitation on to ‘bad’ whites. is that ‘antiracism’ becomes a white attribute” which licences the externalisation of racism on to the ‘other’ of the less educated, unhappy, racist working- class white. Indeed, Ahmed remarks, “the most astonishing aspect. In ‘Declarations of Whiteness: the Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism’ (2004) Ahmed argued that statements of anti-racism were non-perfomative because they were “ a turn away from the white subject and towards something else, but another way of ‘re-turning’ to the white subject”. Kowal’s work in this area builds on Erving Goffman’s theory of performativity, via the work of Sara Ahmed. In ‘Welcome to Country: Acknowledgement, Belonging and White Anti-Racism’ (2015) researcher and activist Emma Kowal examines statements acknowledging native title to land as anti-racist speech acts that, paradoxically, often worked to “maintain White identities and manage White stigma by questioning White belonging” among a group that “experience belonging through a sense of not belonging” (pp.
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