Hate speech and identity: An analysis of neo racism and the indexing of identity

Abstract

In the academy and society at large, there remains an area of discourse largely deemed too marginal to analyze at any length: openly racist speech. It remains unexamined, in part, because much attention has been given to ‘covert’ racism. Recently, technology has allowed openly racist groups to shift strategies for creating and maintaining their own identity. Conventional wisdom would assume that these groups use referential or direct means of indexing identity. Using theories of discourse, this analysis demonstrates that even the most ‘traditional’ racists employ a complex pattern of voicing to indirectly index a ‘neo-traditional’ racist identity. These findings illustrate that within these communities, there is not only a sense of whiteness, but also a set of practices delineating ‘good’ and ‘bad’ white identity. Implications of these findings are discussed in the light of political and identity practices.