This article examines and critiques digital media culture and its embedded postracial logics through the resistance strategies of Black women online. Specifically, I am interested in everyday resistance strategies as “seemingly innocuous” communication, which is understood from theorizations of “hidden transcripts” that black publics utilize to counteract dominance. In order to explore “everyday resistance” I employed focus groups with 20 Black women and present patterns of resistance strategies online, such as visual signifiers and posting news articles. Secondly, I interrogate how these resistance strategies “talk back” to and circumvent the underpinnings of digital media culture through the postracial logics of individuality and networked influence. Ultimately, Black women’s interconnected identities reveal the flaws of digital culture as postracial by demonstrating their resistance strategies that must work around any assumption of a “postracial parity.”

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Digital technologies claim to offer both a dazzling promise and a humbling nonpresence in users' lives. For instance, while consumers use machines that are able to learn their voices and provide immediate services, they are also largely unaware of how and when these machines listen. Other users have immediate access to a seemingly unquantifiable amount of information online through search engines without having to worry much about the presence of algorithms that collate and present such information. YouTube's autoplay function, for example, provides users with the ability to forefront their interests in a grassroots sort of way, all while searching and discovering fresh content from others, again without explicit and readable information about how such content appears on a user's suggested page. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Noble treks these surreptitious undercurrents of machine learning through Google's search functions and argues that marginalized identities-and Black girls and women, in particular-are co-opted and grossly misrepresented through Google's commercial model and algorithmic proprietary design. Noble offers an alternative, noncommercial model to think about information gathering online in ways that attend to societal inequities and oppressions. Algorithms of Oppression takes an information science, critical race, and Black feminist perspective to offer practical ways to reimagine the corporate logic of search technologies due to their "willful neglect or a profit imperative that makes money from racism and sexism" (p. 5). Corporations like Google, Noble argues, operate from a "public good" business model in which users are led to believe that the information suggested by Google's algorithms are both objective and in the interest of the public's advancement of knowledg. From this basis, Google's search results become society's 'common sense.' Noble begins by dispelling such notions of objectivity regarding algorithms by pointing out, among other things, the inevitable human components that