Racism toward the Roma through the affordances of Facebook: bonding, laughter and spite

Abstract

This article carries out a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) of a Romanian Facebook page where comments are made in response to a shared news-clip showing a Roma wedding which clearly invites ridicule. It has been documented that there are well-established discourses representing the Roma as criminal, uneducated, dirty, immoral, and as resisting assimilation into wider society. This Facebook page offers the opportunity to explore which discourses are used in 1500 posts to represent the Roma. We show that the affordances of Facebook open-up the mixing of humor, venting of frustration, extreme racism and sexual violence as those posting entertain each other, create bonds and overtly call out the Roma and others who are believed to be part of a conspiracy against ordinary Romanians. We argue that these newer patterns of representing the Roma are related to the rise of extreme right-wing populist ideology across Europe and beyond. An ideology where direct, simple and violent solutions are required.

‘Re-educating the Roma? You must be joking. . .’: Racism and prejudice in online discussion forums

“…In a way, that is hardly surprising, considering how much prominence is given to this information in the article and how the entire news story is framed. Comments of this sort reflect the common ingroup stereotype of the Roma as lacking education, being ignorant and stupid, which has been found in other studies as well – for example, Breazu and Machin (2019: 381) refer to this as the ‘illiteracy discourse’ about the Roma. The comments also attest to the broader ‘moral exclusionary discourse’ (Tileagă, 2007, 2015) that positions the Roma outside of the normal moral considerations, excluding it not only from the ‘majority’ (i.e.…”

“…However, it is in the third comment that we find very blatant racist humour: the commenter follows up on the previous commenter’s idea of refurbishing the buses to make them useful in the UK by suggesting a different technical modification (‘ Or the exhaust system ’), evidently in allusion to a method of extermination known from Nazi concentration camps. While such extreme racism is exceptional in the data, it is something that has been attested by other scholars as well, most recently in the Romanian Facebook posts analysed by Breazu and Machin (2019: 389–390), who have identified the discourse of extermination and favourable references to the Holocaust in their data.…”

“…An MP wants to re-educate them , generated the total number of 777 comments. The comments were collected and subjected to a qualitative analysis following the model provided in Breazu and Machin (2019), who analysed a similar data set of comments from Facebook with the aim of identifying the most frequent discourses of the ‘majority’ population about the Roma. After identifying the dominant themes and discourses that serve the expression of racism, xenophobia and anti-gypsyism, it was decided to limit the analysis and focus on one specific aspect of the data, namely the relation between the comments and the original news article.…”

“…This may be indicative of either (a) the journalist’s insufficient knowledge of English, and, subsequently, his inadequate metapragmatic awareness (Verschueren, 2000); or (b) the automatic and subconscious projection into the Czech version of an anti-Roma stereotype, which associates the ethnic group with criminality (as attested by numerous studies, e.g. Breazu and Machin, 2019). The third possibility might be that the journalist was actually aware of the connotation; in that case, the selection of the Czech word ‘gangy’ could be seen as the result of an intentional decision to increase the sensationalism of the text (Molek-Kozakowska, 2013) by putting a ‘racist spin’ on the story, possibly as an attempt to appeal to the anticipated attitudes of the readers, in what would constitute an interesting case of pragmatic audience design (Bell, 1984).…”

The year’s work in stylistics 2019

“…For example Morikawa (2019) examines the linguistic features of the performance of a feminist identity on Twitter, and Chen and Flowerdew (2019) analyse discriminatory discursive strategies used by different groups from China and Hong Kong in their responses to YouTube videos about the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement. Breazu and Machin (2019) examine racism towards the Roma on Facebook using multimodal CDA to demonstrate that discriminatory language is used to construct allegiances between online commentators. Facebook is also examined by Seargeant and Tagg (2019) who analyse how the site operates as a forum for debate, which is constructed not only by the ‘filter bubble’ (Pariser, 2011) of the personalisation algorithms which control the platform but also by how individual users navigate the site.…”