Building upon Ross and Rivers (2018), this presentation explores the discursive intersections of racialized identities as formulated around hip-hop music and culture among the Stormfront virtual community. The Stormfront website is often cited as being the first extremist or race-based hate site on the Internet and was founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader, Don Black in 1995 (Schafer, 2002). We show how within this virtual context, the storylines observed, rhetorical positions adopted and the discursive action taken provide an opportunity to document how white nationalist discourse in relation to hip-hop locates the racialized-Self in relation to the racialized-Other. These relationships and interactions are conceived via a social constructivist approach to positioning theory and are cast as the product of the social flux generated within the landscape of a community. According to Boxer (2003) the social flux of a community represents the intersection of four dimensions including local systems of rights, duties and obligations, local moral order and public and private actions. Within the nucleus of this social flux discursive action is situated. Drawing from 278 forum posts we reveal how the speech acts performed and the positions taken by Stormfront posters were not consistently bound by racial parameters. Moreover, we show evidence of alignment between Stormfront posters and black social commentators/academics who claim that hip-hop has had a detrimental impact upon society. We conclude that while there were posters interested in posting hateful rhetoric, many posters offered considered opinions and challenged those members who could not support their views with evidence. From this, we address the dangers of categorizing individuals based on their community affiliations and memberships.
Boxer, L. (2003). Assessment of quality systems with positioning theory. In R. Harre and F. Moghaddam (Eds.), The self and others (pp. 251-278). Westport, CT: Praeger.
Ross, A.S. and Rivers, D.J. (Eds.) (2018). The sociolinguistics of hip-hop as critical conscience: Dissatisfaction and dissent. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schafer, J.A. (2002). Spinning the web of hate: Web-based propagation by extremist organization. Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 9(2): 69–88.
