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Abstract

In this article, I critically examine the New Zealand Human Rights Commission’s interactive website the Voice of Racism, to highlight the limitations and radical potentialities of vernacular affordances for anti-racism campaigns. I draw on Melissa Harris-Perry’s concept of the Crooked Room, to assert that online encounters across difference operate within a “crooked platform,” which can problematize the recognition of marginalized bodies. I use a multimodal analytic technique called Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis to analyze the anti-racism campaign and explore the complex and interdependent relationship between user experiences and architectural structures of inequality. I show how vernacular affordances of platforms and audio-visual cues influence users’ perceptions of self and “other” in relationship to their environmental reality. I encourage anti-racist activists to attune themselves to the often imperceptible tilt of digital platforms by listening and engaging in reflexive practices of digital recognition. Throughout this article, I maintain that our perceived alignment with digital platforms is an optical illusion, inequality remains an invisible structural feature of the online environments that we inhabit. The room is still crooked, we simply can no longer see the walls.

Keywords

affordances critical theory crooked platform digital inequalities social media

Introduction

It can be hard to stand up straight in a crooked room.

—Melissa Harris-Perry

In this article, I focus on how technological inequalities are sustained through our online interactions and the structural affordances of digital platforms. I maintain that digital platforms, which for the purposes of this article can be defined as software-based online infrastructures that facilitate interactions between users, are the modern equivalent of the crooked room. Building on Melissa Harris-Perry’s (2011) and bell hooks’ (2015) arguments of misrecognition, I assert that the affordances of digital environments allow privileged bodies to co-create a “crooked platform” in which they encounter and “Other” non-dominant bodies. Crooked platforms are digital spaces that are architecturally and ideologically structured to prioritize the experience of privileged users. The privileges associated with Whiteness¹ and the disadvantages projected upon marginalized bodies have become an invisible structural feature of the social, economic, and political backdrop of the digital environments that we inhabit. It is no surprise then that when marginalized users seek to engage with these platforms, they experience similar challenges to those they face in the physical world and quickly identify that the supposed neutrality of these platforms is a dream that has not been realized.

There is a rich body of literature from feminist and critical race scholars that consider the inequalities sustained through the architectures of digital platforms, including literature on algorithms (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018) users’ cultural practices (Brock, 2012; Maragh, 2018; Sweeney, 2013), capitalist logics (Dean, 2005, 2009; Saraswati, 2021), the “digital divide” (Norris, 2001; Ragnedda & Muschert, 2017) and legacies of colonization (Du Bois et al., 2018; Risam, 2018). I contend that it is no longer a question of whether or not social media platforms are crooked—they are—this is well established by interdisciplinary literature. The question becomes: Are we, as users and architects, aligning ourselves with these crooked platforms and, if so, how do we recognize our misalignment and find a way to stand up straight? Ultimately this article seeks to understand how the affordances of platforms provide environmental cues calling us to acknowledge race and gender bias. The affecting and interdependent nature of platforms provides an opportunity to listen to those cues and engage in productive anti-racist work. It considers how users’ unique positionalities and platform design can be used to challenge or reinforce our own misalignment and that of others in crooked spaces.

This article is divided into four sections. The “Methodology and Case Study” section outlines my methodology and provides an overview of a digital anti-racism case study: the New Zealand Human Rights Commission (2019) “NZHRC”’s Voice of Racism campaign and interactive website developed in 2019. The purpose of the campaign is to help people understand the impact of racism and reflect on how their own words and actions may be contributing (even unintentionally) to racism in Aotearoa New Zealand. I use Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis “CTDA” (Brock, 2018; Sweeney & Brock, 2014) to evaluate the campaign, providing an in-depth assessment of the campaign’s development and use. I focus specifically on the technological features of the campaign, delving deeply into its construction, execution, and representation as conceived within a critical feminist framework. I will use this case study to critically explore and apply my conception of the crooked platform and highlight the importance of vernacular affordances when engaging in anti-racism campaigns.

In the “The Crooked Room” part, I draw on Harris-Perry’s (2011) concept of the “crooked room” to explain how the structure of the digital architecture affects our conceptions of self and “Other.” I maintain that there is a need to acknowledge positionality in online spaces, examining how digital architecture informs people’s use of them, and how privileged users’ usages in turn affect conceptions of self. Leading critical race, gender, and media studies’ scholars have found that the Internet has entrenched capitalist logics and status quo biases. The economic, social, and political logic of platforms are sustained and stabilized through the kinds of practices that technology allows for or constraints. This suggests platforms prioritize the experience of privileged users and well-meaning anti-racism campaigns can promote misrecognition of marginalized bodies if they are not ideologically and architecturally attuned to positionality.

In the “The Crooked Platform” section, I use an affordance lens to examine how the “architectural” aspects of digital platforms problematize recognition of precarious bodies who fall outside dominant conceptions that universalize platforms as a heteronormative White space.² I use the term “architecture” to describe the functional aspects of digital platforms: the coded software processes, communicative platforms, informatic flows, networks, and affects (Resmini & Rosati, 2011). My premise is that social media platforms present as architecture structured in code, and that the functionality of platforms is designed in such a way that it guides normative usages of them that make it difficult to listen across difference and acknowledge positionality. I use Mcveigh-Schultz and Baym’s (2015) concept of vernacular affordances from media studies to highlight the complex and interdependent relationship between user practices and technological developments. I am interested in how this architecture tilts online spaces in such a way that they favor particular usages, impacting the digital potentialities of marginalized users and stress the need for anti-racist engagements that are attuned to the rhizomic, interdependent and identity based affordances of online platforms.

In the “Navigating Which Way Is Up” section, I explore the possibilities for anti-racist work to help privileged users to recognize their positionality, role in co-creating inequitable spaces, and responsibility to challenge crooked spaces. I examine the Voice of Racism campaign highlighting the potentiality and pitfalls of affordances for listening across difference, reflexivity, and processes of digital recognition. I suggest that anti-racist allies cannot do this without first reconceptualizing digital platforms as a racially marked spaces, acknowledging their structural role in the online marginalization of “Others.” For those in positions of privilege, this calls us to develop new practices of digital recognition in which a relational online praxis is conceived in affective terms, then “perhaps we can hear things we cannot see” (Ratcliffe, 1999, p. 203).

Methodology and Case Study

Critical race and feminist scholars emphasize the importance of visibility, maintaining that research should aim to bring problems to light, redress oppression, and prioritize the voice of marginalized people. While it is critical that minority voices are centered and listened to within research, this need for intersectional dialogue is held in tension with the added emotional labor anti-racist work asks of marginalized communities. Through my methodological approach, I want to stress that anti-racist work should not fall to marginalized communities; it is of utmost importance that I (and those I address who are located at a similar proximity to Whiteness and privilege) engage in my own race work. Accordingly, I aim to embrace discomfort and engage in the work of learning about my own Pākehā Tauiwi (non-Māori foreigner) histories and social privileges in relation to those around me. As a Tauiwi researcher in Aotearoa New Zealand, I strive to uphold Te Tiriti o Waitangi and recognize how my own whakapapa (genealogy), lineage, and traditions formulate how I perceive the world and influence my research (Mead, 2016). Rather than advocating neutrality, I aim to acknowledge how my own lived experience, my position in the world, identity, intellectual and political beliefs, and cultural lens has come to influence my research. Therefore, this research should be seen as a production of embodied knowledge reflective of my own position as a cisgendered Pākehā Tauiwi immigrant to Aotearoa New Zealand learning how to move in response to my own precariousness and the corporeal precarity of those around me.

The Voice of Racism campaign was designed by the NZHRC to bring to light racist micro-aggressions and challenge the notion that racism does not exist in Aotearoa New Zealand. The New Zealand Government allocated $1.3 million to the NZHRC to address ongoing concerns in society about racism, including research, strategic advice, and the development of the Voice of Racism website in 2019 (Human Rights Commission, 2020). The website is an interactive audio tool that allows listeners to hear a stream of racist comments as if they were directed at the listener. The hundreds of micro-aggressions in the Voice of Racism are the true personal experiences of real people from around Aotearoa New Zealand voiced by popular actor and director Taika Waititi. The audio-visual experience is paired with a learning tool that allows the user to question and learn why the remarks are damaging and provide actionable responses.

The Voice of Racism campaign is an excellent case study to explore vernacular affordances because of its emphasis on the architectural aspects of website design and the affects it has on user experience. The campaign was designed with technical affordances in mind, focusing on visual and listening design to evoke emotional responses. I used a multimodal analytic technique developed by André Brock (2018) called CTDA to examine how the architectural aspects of technologies problematize recognition of precarious bodies who currently fall outside dominant conceptions of what it means to be human. CTDA has been used by critical race, feminism, queer, or disability theorists to start from the epistemological standpoint of marginalized social media users and avoid deficit-based models of underrepresentation in populations’ technology use (Kuo, 2018; Maragh, 2018; Sweeney & Brock, 2014). Raven Maragh’s (2018) version of CTDA draws on critical race theory and focuses on Twitter users’ articulations of “acting White” to foster broader conversation about the complex nuances of Black communities online. Maragh (2018) couples in-depth interviews with an analysis of interviewees’ tweets to contextualize racial authenticity and practices. Similarly, I use CTDA to better understand how the architectural structures of the Voice of Racism website help develop conceptions of self and establish our own positionality in crooked spaces.

CTDA requires an in-depth knowledge of campaign development and use, which I obtained through interviews and close observation of the campaign design. Brock (2018) stipulates that “technocultural discourses must be framed from the cultural perspectives of the user AND of the designer [emphasis in original]” (p. 1020). Accordingly, I conducted in-depth interviews with digital campaign designers at the NZHRC to contextualize the affordances and design choices of their anti-racism campaigns. I employed the critical feminist approach to interviews called responsive interviewing (Rubin, 2004). Responsive interviews with campaign designers revealed how anti-racism ideologies are “written into technologies” for legibility by users (Brock, 2018). I also analyzed the website functionalities and affects by participating in the Voice of Racism experience myself. When engaging in the Voice of Racism experience I focused on the technological features of the campaign, the colors, sounds, voice, and its affects on me, while considering a critical feminist framework. For example, the creative engineers, Clemenger BBDO, explained the “face” of racism made from soundwaves which gave voice to racist micro-aggressions was designed to be an enigmatic shapeshifter, so that “users participating in the experience all perceive it differently sometimes as an evil monster, sometimes as a friend” (Phillips, 2019). In accordance with critical feminist praxis, I reflexively visualized and placed the voice—was it a voice from the playground, in the office, my parents voices, my grandparents voices—was it my own inner voice? Depth of analysis was achieved by pairing architecture with affect (Rubin, 2004); dealing with the complexity of multiple overlapping and occasionally conflicting themes (such as vulnerability and ignorance) and paying attention to my own positionality as a Pākehā Tauiwi.

The Crooked Room

To capture the multi-relational dynamics of social media platforms and the encounters that various algorithmic features facilitate, I employ Melissa Harris-Perry’s (2011) concept of the crooked room, which she uses to explore the particular epistemology Black women face in White spaces. In Sister Citizen, Harris-Perry (2011) claims that in their confrontation with race and gender stereotypes, Black women are standing in a crooked room and have to navigate which way is up. The concept of the crooked room is based on a hypothesis in cognitive psychology research on field dependence, which, much like the theory of affordances, explores the influence of environmental and visual cues on ones perception of self in relationship to environmental reality (Harris-DeBerry, 2021). Harris-Perry (2011) summarized the sociological experiment of the crooked room in the following description:

In one study, subjects were placed in a crooked chair in a crooked room and then asked to align themselves vertically. Some perceived themselves as straight only in relation to their surroundings. To the researchers’ surprise, some people could be tilted by as much as 35 degrees and report that they were perfectly straight, simply because they were aligned with images that were equally tilted. But not everyone did this: some managed to get themselves more or less upright regardless of how crooked the surrounding images were. (p. 29)

To understand why Black women’s public actions and political strategies sometimes seem tilted in ways that accommodate dominant groups and negative stereotyping of Black women, Harris-Perry (2011) argues that it is important to first recognize the structural constraints that influence their behavior. Harris-Perry (2011) maintains that the crooked room is designed in such a way that it makes you believe that the room is straight, normal, and nothing to be opposed to but rather to embrace. Harris-Perry urges Black communities not to accept the imbalance of the crooked room and to push back against its normalization “no matter how many times they say, ‘It’s NOT a crooked room!’” (Pettiford-Wates, 2021).

Harris-Perry (2011) characterizes Black women’s struggle with the slanted images of the crooked room as a problem of self-recognition, an important theme for feminist and critical race scholars interested in issues of anti-racism. Harris-Perry (2011) references Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man for its treatment of the recognition crisis faced by Black Americans opening with a declaration of misrecognition: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see” (Ellison & Callahan, 2004). Ellison’s protagonist struggles with multiple forms of misrecognition, finding that he is sometimes hyper visible, “exposed to the aggressive and unwanted gaze of tormentors” (Ellison, 1995, p. 3) and at other times transparent, as though the people he encounters can simply see through him. Harris-Perry (2011) concludes that racism and the stereotypes projected within the crooked room keep others from seeing the figure of the Invisible Man accurately. Feminist scholar bell hooks (2015) asserts that recognition is a political act in her book Black Looks. hooks (2015) argues that the very act of looking at or encountering individuals from marginal groups is infused with power because power is developed in relation to one another; to be a person of relative power and privilege viewing another person of less power and privilege is inherently a political act. For hooks (2015) the gaze of the powerful can never be “neutral nor benign” (p. 115); misrecognition of marginalized bodies hinders their political autonomy. Building on hooks (2015) conception of misrecognition, Harris-Perry (2011) asserts that “challenging White people’s assumptions about what they see when they view Black people is a critical step toward liberation and equality” (p. 40). The misrecognition experienced by Black women who attempt to engage in the public sphere is what Harris-Perry (2011) conceptualizes in the crooked room.

I draw on Harris-Perry’s (2011) concept of the crooked room and apply it to the NZHRC’s Voice of Racism campaign to explore the impact of misrecognition and the internalization of racist micro-aggressions by marginalized bodies in Aotearoa New Zealand. In an interview, Pasifika well-being consultant Dr Monique Faleafa discussed the Voice of Racism campaign and the harm of microaggressions for women of color and explained,

You actually don’t know they’re happening sometimes . . . sometimes we tolerate this, these racist micro-aggressions, I call them continuous jellyfish stings, you actually don’t know that they are happening sometimes because they’re so covert, they’re so fast and non-specific, that you don’t realise its happened. It’s taken a long time to get to a place where I feel that I can address it constructively within myself because of that internalised racism that happens when your everyday world explains that you are worth less and that you will have to try harder than most. (Faleafa & Lawrence, 2020)

Lisa Lawrence from the National Council for Women explained that when you are on the receiving end of racist micro-aggressions it can feel like “death by a thousand cuts” and is extremely damaging to one’s sense of self over time (Faleafa & Lawrence, 2020). As a clinician working with Pasifika communities, she found that young people would internalize these comments and start believing them, stating: “we get this negative inner voice saying you are not good enough, you are not worthy, leading to symptoms of anxiety, depression and even trauma” (Faleafa & Lawrence, 2020). The concern is that if you find yourself in a crooked space in which you are constantly being told that your cultural identity is not a good thing, you end up rejecting your rahingatahi (cultural identity) and aligning yourself with the crooked images. As an example, users accessing the Voice of Racism would hear a sequence of racist remarks similar to the following:

She didn’t give you a perfume sample, she probably thinks you can’t afford it.

Why are YOU in this meeting?

Before I take you through are you aware of the level of real estate in this area?

That’s a hard name to pronounce can I just call you “T”?

Be careful how you act you don’t want to stand out.

You brown people can’t make a simple decision.

You are all drunks. (Human Rights Commission, 2019)

The Voice of Racism can act as an important and powerful way to counteract mainstream and inherited realities that suggest one off experiences with casual racism or microaggressions do not have an effect. Some felt that the anti-racism platform finally gave voice to the experience they have on a day to day basis. Those who belong to marginalized communities got to tell their stories or counter-stories as a way to counteract the perceived realities of the oppressive mainstream systems they inherit. The Voice of Racism experience is created and constituted between users with differing access to power and privilege. While there is potential for anti-racist campaigns to be empowering, it is increasingly clear that the majority of the digital labor falls to marginalized users, resulting in the reproduction of status quo social hierarchies (Jackson & Banaszczyk, 2016). It is important to acknowledge the difficult and ongoing digital labor that often falls to minority bodies to keep racial justice movements going (Jackson & Banaszczyk, 2016). Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon stated “We are indebted to all those who contributed their experiences to help us build the Voice of Racism” (Foon, 2022). The invisibility of embodied and affective labor is specifically experienced by marginalized bodies in relation to the Voice of Racism campaign.

The Voice of Racism campaign was met with mixed reaction from racialized New Zealanders. The immersive visual-audio platform can be overwhelming for people who experience racism. Educational expert Manjeet Birk (2022) engaged in an ethnographic examination of the Voice of Racism campaign, saying:

Immersing myself in the project for the first time was powerful. The website has incredible audio visual and production quality, and it was immediately clear the campaign was well funded and had involved many digital experts. As a result, the experience is incredibly immersive. I can imagine that, for a person who has never experienced racism first hand or thought about it for an extended period of time, it could be transformative to literally “experience” racism in such a way. (p. 550)

The Voice of Racism campaign was intended to target Pākehā Tauiwi who may be unintentionally contributing to racism. In an interview I conducted with one of the NZHRC’s communications team, they explained one of the key problems the NZHRC have when it comes to tackling racist attitudes, saying:

New Zealanders generally―they think racism is bad, but they don’t think it is a problem here in New Zealand. So, part of the challenge is how do we show it is a problem here and show that it has an impact―in a way that the people sharing also feel like they are empowered. Telling people’s stories is a way of connecting people’s daily lives so that it would spark some sort of idea change. (New Zealand Human Rights Commission Senior Digital Campaign Manager, Personal Communication 20 June, 2019)

The NZHRC needed to show privileged bodies that racism can take many different forms, and that more meaningful engagement is required to fully appreciate the prevalence and impact of racism in Aotearoa New Zealand society. There is potential for Pākehā Tauiwi users who go onto the Voice of Racism website to experience discomfort that provokes their awareness to the harm of racism, leading to behavioral changes. However, this places marginalized bodies in the position of having to “teach” privileged bodies about the experience of being “Othered.” Birk (2022) cautioned “even though the goal of the project is to reflect the everyday lived experiences of people of colour, the project still falls into the paradigm of centring the expectations and needs of white people” (p. 552). As such, the campaign risks re-centering Whiteness and further traumatizing racialized bodies. This well-meaning desire to know and learn from diversity inevitably expresses aspects of the colonializing tendencies that intersectional feminists actively oppose. Birk found that despite the limitations of the Voice of Racism digital experience, “a number of things can be gained from analysing and understanding this project, both within the context of Aotearoa New Zealand and in other white settler countries” (p. 553). In that spirit, I will use an affordance lens to shed light on the “architectural” and affecting aspects of the Voice of Racism campaign.

Privileged users have a responsibility to recognize how their online performances of self affect corporeal realities of marginalized users. Anti-racism and decolonial work should not fall solely to marginalized communities. However, the question of how dominant bodies should (or should not) go about using their digital privileges to support marginalized bodies is heavily contested (Jackson et al., 2020). There is a growing body of literature from intersectional feminists that highlight the shortfalls of White allyship (Hunter & Van der Westhuizen, 2022). I subscribe to the critical feminist ethic that scholars must do a better job of integrating questions of race and other identity matrices in studies of digital platforms “if we are to avoid replicating the conditions that force women of colour to the margins of both academic and activist feminism” (Jackson & Banaszczyk, 2016, p. 396). I suggest that, as a first step, privileged users must come to see platforms as a racially marked space and embrace their own positionality to develop a better understanding of the affecting and interdependent nature of digital platforms and anti-racist campaigns. This requires privileged users to recognize the ways in which precarity is distributed unequally in online spaces in such a way that it reaffirms privileged class, gendered and racial hegemonies. Importantly for researchers who are situated in proximity to privilege (including myself, as a White, middle class woman and academic), this calls for further dedicated explorations of how we can learn to detect, locate, and challenge our own willful ignorance on crooked platforms.

The Crooked Platform

Technology is often presented as an objective tool, a level platform that affords equal opportunity to all who use it. Andrew Chen (2020) suggests it has always been convenient to think of technology development as “value neutral,” a notion that has been adopted from scientific research” (pp. 8–9). Platforms are conceived as value neutral spaces. What platforms are used for (whether good or bad) is determined by the user irrespective of the platform’s design. What this ignores is the fact that all technologies, like real-world environments, are designed in a particular way that makes them best suited for particular usages and structures of use (Burgess et al., 2018). Cyberculture scholar Daniel Punday found that

Quite contrary to the early belief that cyberspace offers a way to escape gender, race and class as conditions of social interaction . . . recent critics suggest that online discourse is woven of stereotypical cultural narratives that reinstall precisely those positions. (Punday, 2000, p. 199)

Critical race scholars confirm that platform architecture is encoded with bias that can reaffirm or even exacerbate inequalities and discrimination relating to gender, race, and class (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). Rachel Kuo (2018) finds that divisions of identity are performed and reproduced online, and these technologically mediated divisions of identity affect public discourse. She argues that as a “racially unmarked space” (Kuo, 2018, p. 449), platforms are rarely understood as constitutive of White identity. Similarly, I focus on how inequitable online architectures, and the affordances of these crooked platforms, go unnoticed and remain racially unmarked, affecting identity and self-recognition. Social constructs of self are created in complex online environments in which discourse, algorithms, and platform architectures interplay with how users encounter and “Other” bodies.

The Voice of Racism experience uses affordances to highlight one’s positionality in relation to racialized New Zealanders in Aotearoa. In a presentation at the Designers Institute, the Voice of Racism creators explained the idea that guided their design process sharing:

When you are part of the majority you never have to think about your race, it’s irrelevant—you are just you. But for everybody else navigating a White dominated world—they are constantly conscious of their race and how they come across. So our first creative “way in” came as a challenge to New Zealanders: how often are you made to think about your race and how often are recipients of racism made to think about theirs? (Human Rights Commission, n.d.)

In my interviews with campaign designers at NZHRC, they maintained that the Voice of Racism campaign was not designed to facilitate privileged bodies’ ability to “walk a mile someone else’s shoes.” Rather, the Voice of Racism campaign addresses the problem of self-recognition. The campaign calls privileged bodies to recognize themselves as “the voice of racism,” to sit with discomfort and consider their own bias, privileges, and its affects. By listening to a condensed vocalization of racist discourses, privileged users can reflect on their own discourses (whether internally present or externally expressed), realize their affects and become more attuned to the invisibility of the crooked room. The Voice of Racism campaign brings to light the unmarked nature of the crooked room and how privileged bodies misrecognize and misrepresent the experiences of marginalized bodies to normalize a dominant Pākehā Tauiwi culture in Aotearoa New Zealand.

There is a complex interplay between real-world power structures, online architectures, and user practices. Vernacular affordances account for both the material structure of platforms, and user practices which provide “clues to the ways that people understand and negotiate technology in their everyday lives” (McVeigh-Schultz & Baym, 2015, p. 1). Astrid Mager (2012) challenges the idea that providers and designers are solely in control of inflicting algorithmic functions on users, suggesting a vernacular relationship instead where users “comply and stabilise” (p. 770) the structure of platforms. Mager (2012) refers to computer engineers as the people who “architect the code” (p. 775). She suggests that the future of interdisciplinary research shifts its attention from the impacts of technology on society toward the social practices and power relations that co-construct our digital environments (Mager, 2012). The affordances or use value of a platform is both unique to each individual and is developed in relation to other users with whom they share their online environment. I believe that the purpose of architecture is not just to design walls; what is really being created are the spaces between walls, where one’s perception of self is developed in relationship to environmental reality. What architects do is design the best ways to use a particular space by applying an understanding of how physical structures act upon us. The architecture of online spaces can serve to create shared, embodied, and political orientations that shape patterns of life and work to facilitate the production of boundaries between people (Solomon & Steele, 2017).

The Voice of Racism engineers paid careful attention to the “enormity and brevity of the creative brief” and considered the impact of the audio-visual aspects when constructing their interactive website. Clemenger BBDO, remarked that “depicting racism visually was a challenge” (Phillips, 2019). The moving illustration, or “face” of racism they created was designed to be an enigmatic shapeshifter, “we portrayed the Voice of Racism as a ‘character,’ and this non-descript, disturbing face represents this evil entity that has the potential to reside inside all of us” (Phillips, 2019). Each microaggression was performed and motion captured, enabling the performance to be lip-synced to the treated binaural audio. The result is a reverberating digital “face” made of soundwaves that responds in real time, the voice rebounds off the user. The microaggressions are coded based on how long you’ve been in the experience, meaning that everyone’s experience is completely unique. These phrases were coded by tone, frequency and severity to ensure each user has a true-to-life experience while randomizing the content to be unpredictable. There are hundreds of phrases, and the randomization means the experience is never-ending—it will never loop. The site is ultimately educational but is designed so that users must navigate through discomfort and “find their way upright” before landing on the anti-racist resources. The Voice of Racism is structurally designed to act upon us and challenge our boundaries and conceptions of self.

These insights suggest audio–visual affordances can encourage reflexivity. The ambiguous “face of racism” and resonant voice were purposefully designed to allow the listener to sit with and critically examine their own feelings and responses to microaggressions, identifying how racism “can come out of the mouths of strangers, friends, and even your own inner voice” (Phillips, 2019). The designers considered the affordances of different mediums when creating the “face of racism” explaining,

We found executions such as film wouldn’t really work, because people would simply see someone else’s face and disassociate themselves . . . nobody wants to see that they are capable of being racist. So we needed something that encouraged our audience to reflect upon how often they are made to reflect upon their race and how often they are making others think about theirs . . . and encourage our audience to help lift some of the burden by understanding the role they play [in perpetuating racism]. (Human Rights Commission, n.d.)

The Voice of Racism experience calls users to rethink their positionality and acknowledge how spaces are systemically tilted to favor White usages. One of Birks (2022) key criticisms of the Voice of Racism campaign is that there is no clear connection made to settler colonial histories and how ongoing colonization continues to fuel smaller acts of everyday racism in Aotearoa. An important question for anti-racist and decolonial scholars then becomes: how do users and designers apply their digital knowledge and strategically use digital affordances in a way that acknowledges their own histories and complicity without recentring Whiteness and dominance?

Navigating Which Way Is Up

I suggest a relational and situated understanding of online spaces and an acknowledgment that as users we never experience or create in isolation to historic hegemonic systems of power and dominance. I assert it is possible for privileged users to engage productively in anti-racism spaces, like in the case of the Voice of Racism campaign; however, they cannot do this without first understanding their own identity and histories, recognizing their role in the online and offline marginalization of “Others,” and beginning self-reflexive processes of digital recognition. By recognizing platforms as racially marked spaces, embodied by real people with varying proximities to Whiteness and privilege, we can resist hegemonic settler culture that perceives online spaces as structurally even, neutral and unmarked by privilege. My contention is that we need to create anti-racism campaigns that pay attention to how affordances and structural inequalities in these spaces open up new possibilities for rethinking how race and privilege work online. By challenging the difference-blindness of online spaces and highlighting precarity in this way, privileged users are forced to encounter their own positionality in online spaces, offering them the chance to become aware of the affecting nature of their online practices and privileges. For those in positions of privilege, this requires that they develop new practices of digital recognition in which self-reflexivity is conceived in affective terms, where the primary function of reflexivity is to listen, remaining open and responsive within crooked platforms.

How we go about best using our digital affordances to challenge online inequalities is still in its early days of development. What is promising about the Voice of Racism campaign is the affecting nature of the audible-visual affordances of the platform. The video begins with the question: “Are you willing to listen?” The audio recording requires users to listen to marginalized people sharing stories of their experiences of racism and encourages the listener to absorb that information and simply sit with the discomfort that they feel. Interestingly, the audio recording does not play automatically; rather, it requires the listener to “press hold to listen” as an active, intentional undertaking, listening requires your full attention (which is countercultural in online spaces). The attentive action required of users counters the passive listening or mindless scrolling often associated with online platforms. The designers explained people’s emotional responses to the interactive experience saying, “we’ve seen people rip their headphones off after a few seconds; others have sat with it for a while and choose to come back to it after miniepiphanies.” While the Voice of Racism gives users a sense of “how it feels” to be a recipient of incessant racism in Aotearoa New Zealand” (Phillips, 2019), I want to stress that, in the real world racialized bodies do not have the ability to “click stop” to cease hearing racism, and the experience (while affecting) can never allow a person to truly understand the lived experience of another. Campaign designers need to think critically about the power and limitations of vernacular affordances for listening across difference.

In her assessment of listening-based anti-racism approaches, Emily Beausoleil (2020) argues that we must not simply “learn from” the experience of “Others,” but rather learn to listen to and from one’s own group difference, “to learn to hear one’s own accent, to sense and own the particular history and inheritance from which one inevitably speaks, as a member of historical and structural collective” (p. 3). Beausoleil (2022) and Laura O’Connell Rapira (Te Ātiawa, Ngāpuhi, Te Rarawa, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāruahine) are co-founders of Tauiwi Tautoko (meaning non-Māori settlers in support), a nationwide anti-racism program in Aotearoa New Zealand where Pākehā Tauiwi address racism online using listening and values-based interventions. The Tauiwi Tautoko anti-racist community listens first and foremost for the user’s whakapapa (genealogy): a fundamental Māori principle that proclaims one’s identity and importantly connects “people, place and purpose” (Walker et al., 2022, p. 135). Whakapapa explores “what lies behind” any given comment the individual and collective experiences, affects, and values that premediate and structure such expressions. Beausoleil (2022) claims that listening for whakapapa calls into view “the particular histories and structural conditions that at once lie behind settler structures of feeling and unfeeling, and are largely unsensed for our people.” A systematic study of 9000 Tauiwi Tautoko interventions on Facebook (Fitzpatrick, 2020) found that when volunteers use Tauiwi Tautoko’s distinct listening approach, they see more frequent shifts in tone to calmer responses that are more open to others. This shift suggests that listening and positionality can help navigate the rhizomic, connective, fast-paced, and high-identity affordances of a platform like Facebook.

When reflecting on the differences between the grassroots, Tauiwi Tautoko and government Voice of Racism campaign, Beausoleil (2022) found that the NZHRC’s approach may work in particular contexts to prevent racist views from being normalized, but “taken alone it can also lead to retreat from difficult conversations, thus leaving racist views to thrive” (p. 717). Listening requires a “critical distance from false victimhood, the celebration of White saviors and the desire for reassurance,” the kind that is often prevalent in pro-diversity campaigns (Dreher, n.d.). Dreher (n.d.) suggests users’ need to understand “White supremacy as foundational and enduring,” (Dreher, n.d.) and that the systems of dominance developed in colonial projects manifest themselves in everyday contemporary encounters both on and offline. Privileged users also need to listen for implication and complicity, opening themselves to learning the ways in which they are implicated in oppressive norms and structures of Whiteness. We need to listen to cues of cultural difference and positionality on crooked platforms. Following Beausoleil (2022) and Dreher (2009, 2010), I assert that those situated in proximity to Whiteness must learn to listen for structures of White supremacy, particularly in crooked platforms that are dominated by White voices. Listening requires an openness to our own positionality and complicity in reproducing the structural tilt of crooked platforms. Listening for cues and calls to action is crucial to ensuring that online activism does not become an endpoint but rather a necessary process for broader transformative decolonial practices of recognition.

In order to become decolonial, antiracist campaigns must address deep-rooted systemic issues grounded not only in our everyday practices and conceptions of self and “Otherness” but the underlying settler-colonial norms written into the architectural codes of platforms. We must learn to listen and attune ourselves to the often imperceptible affordances of crooked platforms. There is a burgeoning area of research that seeks to understand the relations between platform affordances and activist practices. Xinyu Zhao and Crystal Abidin (Zhao & Abidin, 2023) demonstrate how activists are activating platform-specific knowledge and savvy to mobilize and produce multimodal audio-visual accounts of the racist “Fox Eye” trend on TikTok, explaining to their audience why it is harmful, and pleading with users to stop performing it. Adrienne Shaw and Katherine Sender (2016) consider the central role of technological affordances in understanding intersections among gender, sexuality, and media suggesting that “even the most heteromasculine technologies can be queered” (p. 2). Meredith Clark (2015) illustrates how the Black Lives Matter movement has “honed its ability to stick to a program, and to correct those who deployed affordances naïvely” giving the example of the Black Out Tuesday trend and the sea of black boxes which drowned out the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag with critical information and resources (Hu, 2020). The strategic use of social media platforms suggests that “digital activism has entered a second act” in which users are beginning to understand that our digital affordances have material consequences (Hu, 2020).

Government and educational anti-racism workers can certainly learn from these grassroots movements that are adept at manipulating affordances to shape the contours of anti-racist movements and decolonial projects. These grassroots anti-racist approaches, while remarkably effective, are still in their infancy and cannot on their own change the power relations in digital platforms. As platforms grow in scale in popularity, digital labor increasingly falls to marginalized, in-group assemblages, and still risks being monopolized by privileged users. I advocate for a broader consideration of the affordances of crooked platforms, specifically “those that may be invisible to most users” (Chen, 2020) and call anti-racism allies to remake these inequitable spaces. There is a growing need for further research into how historic inequities can be replicated during design and development of digital platforms and anti-racism campaigns (Pendergrast, 2022). Around the world, organizations are creating digital campaigns to fight racism and work toward systemic change. These anti-racism campaign designers must ask how platforms can support alternative, non-hegemonic enactments of recognition, as a means to challenge and rework how race is constructed in and through crooked platforms. Campaign designers and anti-racist activists can strategically utilize affordances to confront systemic issues and find their way “upright” in crooked environments.

Conclusion

I maintain that the vernacular affordances of digital platforms, specifically audio–visual applications that encourage listening, can draw attention to crooked platforms and enable users to re-orient themselves. Many privileged users are completely unaware that they are inhabiting, and reinforcing the structure of, a crooked platform because they aren’t subject to the negative experiences that racialized groups face. The Voice of Racism campaign, with its strategic use of technical affordances designed to facilitate listening, holds transformative potential for future anti-racism campaigns. It illustrates how affordances are constituted across difference in racially unmarked spaces that affect self-recognition. If we are able to listen and attune ourselves to the tilt of our digital environments we can strategically use vernacular affordances to create cracks and rupture the usually imperceptible architectures of a crooked platform rendering it visible and opening it to critique. In spite of the structural limitations of platforms that favor dominant corporate, cultural, and technological logics (Jackson et al., 2020), anti-racist and feminist allies still critically engage and thrive within these crooked spaces. The “second act” (Hu, 2020) of digital activism signals a change, and anti-racist campaign managers, activists and everyday users are still learning how they can best apply their digital knowledge and strategically use digital affordances in a way that forwards racial justice and decolonial futures. Changing dominant structures will not be easy, it will require difficult and ongoing work on the part of privileged users who will undoubtedly fail, fall short, and must persist in this iterative and uncertain process of digital recognition. The tilt of the crooked platforms we inhabit becomes a vital part of broader anti-racist conversations and changes in public perception and practices over time.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Claire Fitzpatrick

Notes

Author Biography

Claire Fitzpatrick (PhD, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington) is a researcher and teaching fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research interests include the affectual workings of vulnerability, ignorance, and precariousness in digital atmospheres.

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