When I reflect on contemporary debates about racism, particularly in digital spaces, I am struck by the paradox that racism is both omnipresent and invisible. The mere mention of race often provokes resistance, with commentators eager to dismiss its relevance or shift the conversation toward denial. To acknowledge racism, it seems, is to be immediately pulled into an argument about whether racism exists at all, who is qualified to define it, and whether speaking of it is itself an act of provocation. This “debatability” of racism has become a defining feature of our political culture, shaped and amplified by interactive media.
I do not mean to suggest that racism itself is legitimately debatable. Its structural operations and lived experiences are real and consequential. Rather, what is open to debate—especially in public discourse—is whether particular acts, statements, or systemic inequities “count” as racism. This dynamic has significant political consequences, because it renders antiracist efforts vulnerable to endless cycles of dismissal, noise, and dilution. To name racism publicly is to invite interrogation not only of the claim but also of the claimant, and this recursive attention becomes a mechanism for undermining antiracism.
Postracialism and the Narrowing of Definitions
Part of the difficulty stems from competing understandings of what racism is. In the United States, the election of Barack Obama was heralded by many as proof that the nation had entered a “postracial” era. Yet scholars like Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have long emphasized that racism has shifted rather than disappeared. Overt segregation and explicit racial violence may have been discredited, but subtler forms of exclusion and inequality persist under the guise of colorblindness.
This problem is not unique to the American context. Across Europe and elsewhere, racism is often framed as something consigned to the past—an aberration of apartheid regimes, colonial rule, or authoritarian nationalism. Such framing suggests that what remains is residual, pathological, and marginal to liberal democratic societies. But this “overcoming narrative,” as Barnor Hesse describes it, obscures the ongoing ways in which racial hierarchies are embedded in law, governance, and everyday life.
Moreover, the elasticity of the term “racism” in public discourse has created its own complications. As sociologist Miri Song argues, the ubiquity of accusations of racism—including charges of so-called “reverse racism”—has fostered a culture of equivalence that strips the term of its historical weight. In such a climate, racialized experiences are relativized, and the political force of the concept is diminished. Social media, with its rapid-fire exchanges and character limits, accelerates this tendency, leaving little room for careful elaboration.
The Sedimentation of Denial
Denial has always been central to the operation of racism. The oft-parodied refrain “I’m not racist, but…” encapsulates a deeper logic in which modern racism exists alongside the insistence on its irrelevance. This dynamic is especially visible in online comment forums, where articles addressing race attract streams of responses that insist racism is “over,” that minority writers are exaggerating, or that the true problem is discrimination against white people.
Such responses are not merely dismissals; they are rehearsed cultural scripts, sedimented through decades of political rhetoric. The language of “reverse racism,” popularized by right-wing movements in both the United States and Europe, casts struggles for racial justice as a zero-sum threat to majority populations. Online platforms amplify these scripts by providing spaces for ritualized repetition—tweeting back at a journalist of color, responding angrily to coverage of refugees, or accusing critics of “playing the race card.” Far from silencing discussion of race, denial keeps racism endlessly debatable, requiring constant labor to secure the very terms of recognition.
Everyday Contestations and Digital Interventions
Yet interactive media also enable interventions that challenge postracial assumptions. A striking example emerged in 2014, when a Belgian newspaper published satirical images depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as chimpanzees. For the editors, the satire relied on the belief that racism was universally unacceptable and therefore available for ironic play. For Black readers, however, the images reproduced a long history of dehumanizing stereotypes.
The Nigerian-born writer Chika Unigwe used Twitter to call out the racism of the images, prompting international attention and forcing the newspaper to issue an apology. What was significant was not only the critique itself but also the way it exposed the assumed whiteness of the newspaper’s imagined readership. In effect, the satire presumed that Black Belgians did not count as part of the audience. Unigwe’s intervention exemplified how social media can puncture these exclusions, forcing recognition of muted racisms that are otherwise disavowed.
Such interventions may be fleeting, but they demonstrate the symbolic power of representation. Racism has always been contested through cultural work—through art, satire, and media critique that disrupts established norms. In this sense, social media’s connective properties provide tools for everyday acts of antiracist deconstruction, creating informal networks of learning and solidarity.
Racism as Media Content
However, there is an ambivalence in how racism circulates within the hybrid media system. User-generated videos of racist incidents on public transport, for example, often go viral and are incorporated into news coverage. These clips provide undeniable evidence of racism, yet they are frequently framed as aberrations—the ignorance of a few individuals rather than symptoms of structural inequality. The result is a cycle in which racism becomes a spectacle, fueling debate but rarely shifting systemic understanding.
News outlets benefit from this dynamic. Stories framed around “this viral tweet shows…” or “watch this shocking racist rant” drive engagement and commentary, but they also commodify racism as a content category. The debatability of racism becomes profitable, producing circulation rather than resolution.
Transnational Assemblages of Exclusion
The digital terrain also facilitates the construction of new racisms that disavow the label altogether. Consider the proliferation of online groups in Northern Europe dedicated to linking immigration with sexual violence. These spaces recycle colonial stereotypes of the “primitive Other” while layering on Islamophobic narratives of civilizational threat. They explicitly reject the charge of racism, insisting that defending national women and cultural values is common sense rather than prejudice.
Such discourses are not confined within national borders. They circulate transnationally, drawing on memes, selective statistics, and viral stories to build a bricolage of racializing “truths.” This scavenger ideology, to borrow the term of John Solomos and Les Back, coheres not through consistency but through constant accumulation and repetition. Crucially, these formations are not merely fringe phenomena. They resonate with state policies of surveillance, integration, and securitization that frame migrants as perpetual threats.
Concluding Reflections: The Future of Antiracism in the Digital Public Sphere
What emerges from these examples is that racism’s denial and debatability are not neutral miscommunications but politically generative processes. In the hybrid media environment, every act of naming racism becomes an invitation for contestation, reinterpretation, or dismissal. Yet the same environment also enables counter-interventions, acts of solidarity, and symbolic disruptions that unsettle postracial narratives.
The challenge for antiracist scholarship and practice is to grapple with this double-edged dynamic. To treat denial merely as ignorance is to miss its political function, and to dismiss everyday digital interventions as symbolic is to undervalue their cumulative force. If racism today is continually debated, then the task is not only to win arguments but to examine how the terms of debate are structured, who is included or excluded, and how these contests intersect with broader systems of governance, economy, and culture.
As I see it, the central question is whether we can transform this endless debatability into a resource for antiracism—turning recursive contestation into moments of recognition and mobilization. Or will the commodification of racism as media content continue to strip the term of its power, reducing it to spectacle rather than struggle? The answer will shape not only the politics of race but also the future of democratic discourse itself.
