"Sad reality": racism, identity and solidarity in a Facebook discussion

In 2016, an episode of racial discrimination that occurred in a beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was video recorded and posted on a Facebook page, generating thousands of responses. In the video, a white woman is seen shouting... [ view full abstract ]

In 2016, an episode of racial discrimination that occurred in a beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was video recorded and posted on a Facebook page, generating thousands of responses. In the video, a white woman is seen shouting racial insults at a black woman, disputing her right to spend time in the same area. This paper analyzes the ensuing discussion on this Facebook page about the contents of the video, in which the participants reacted to, and denounced, the actions of the perpetrator of racial discrimination, while building solidarity and aligning against prejudice and racism in their country. The participants of this discussion not only referenced historic and well-known Discourses (Gee, 1996) of harmonious race relations and racism in Brazil, but also made use of linguistic and extra-linguistic tools typical of computer, or technology, mediated discourse – CMC/TMC (Chovanec and Dynel, 2015)— to ratify each other’s participation. The contribution of this analysis is twofold: 1) it illustrates how interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis can supply useful tools to understand the construction of positions and identities in technologically-mediated communicative contexts, and, 2) it illuminates how solidarity is built in the context of an asynchronous discussion about a controversial theme via an online platform, a space where debates of interest to civic society (Holt, 2004) have been more and more frequent.