By Nicholas Martens Ph.D. and David Evans Ph.D.
Psychster Guest Analyst Nicholas Martens recently obtained his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Florida Atlantic University, where he conducted research on the cognitive and motivational determinants of the level of support for proposed public policy changes. Nicholas is currently an analyst for Psychster Inc.
This past March, a YouTube video from third-year UCLA student Alexandra Wallace went viral. Editors note: In a curious form of technical censorship, embedding of the original YouTube video has been "disabled by request." This was YouTube's choice or that of its users; it would not have been our choice. The unflattering video featured Ms. Wallace waxing racist after observing some Asian students talking on their cell phones in the library, which she turned into a general indictment of Asian culture. Ms. Wallace apologized soon after the video went viral, remarking that "I cannot explain what possessed me to approach the subject as I did...", but the damage had already been done and she was pressured into leaving the university. While the attitudes she expressed certainly seem to indicate a thing or two about the type of person that she is, (especially bearing in mind her admission that she's "not the most politically correct person"), it's worth considering whether she could ever have been induced to deliver such a rant in person. She, herself, would have us to believe that she is too "nice" and "polite" to do such a thing.
Is it plausible to suggest that her diatribe was at all facilitated by YouTube?
Internet-based communication has a somewhat different character than communication made in person. Every day, millions of people publish information about themselves on YouTube, Facebook, and countless other social media sites that they would never think of disclosing in the "real" world. Acquaintances and perfect strangers can now see who we become when we let our guards down, because we often lose some of our inhibitions when we interact with others over the web.
Certain features of YouTube contribute to this loss of inhibition. For instance, communication through YouTube is asynchronous (cf. Suler, 2003). When one person addresses another, face-to-face, the speaker receives real-time feedback from his or her audience, influencing the speaker to disclose information in compliance with social norms. In contrast, YouTube users can upload entire, uninterrupted trains of thought, without receiving another's reaction for minutes, hours, or even days. Such delays reduce the experience of normative pressure. Indeed, Ms. Wallace may not have known she was crossing a line, given her inability to witness our discomfort. If others had been present, she might have felt compelled to have either expressed herself more carefully or else suppressed her thoughts entirely, taking greater care to avoid giving offense.
Turning now to the content of Ms. Wallace's rant, the noteworthy aspect, especially given her candidness, is the type of racism that she exhibits. It's none of the "old-fashioned" or "redneck" racism that identifies certain characteristics as somehow inherent in members of a target group. These beliefs have been in such sharp decline since the 1950's that they, or at least their public expression, have become outrageously anachronistic, and are profoundly rejected by the vast majority of Americans. Instead, Ms. Wallace limits her criticisms to behaviors that have ostensibly non-racial bases. What she would want us to believe is that she objects to the values of the university's Asian population, and not Asians, per se.
This type of argument is perfectly representative of symbolic racism (Kinder & Sears, 1981), in which a person attempts to justify antipathy toward non-Whites with the belief that they violate fundamental American values. Although research into symbolic racism has focused largely on attitudes toward Blacks, the lessons of this research apply particularly well in the present case. For instance, opposition to affirmative action is associated with the beliefs that Blacks lack in individualism and self-reliance (cf. Kinder & Sears, 1981). These also happen to be the same traits for which Ms. Wallace condemns UCLA's Asian community, which she accuses of not being able to "fend for themselves". She sees these students as being overly dependent on "their moms, and their brothers, and their sisters, and their grandmas, and their grandpas, and their cousins, and everybody that they know that the brought along from Asia with them," in contrast to Americans, whom she implies are better able to take care of themselves. Strangely, she also seems to think of Asians as lacking American good manners.
Note, however, that she never implies that Asians are incapable of becoming upstanding Americans. After all, her rant is ostensibly about values, not race; her comparisons between Asians and Americans, never Asians and Whites. Ms. Wallace may very well profess to hold deeply egalitarian values (and may even mean it), but make no doubt about it, her strong negative evaluation of Asians is fundamentally about race. Her sense of intergroup threat is particularly palpable as she complains about the "hordes of Asian" people flooding UCLA. To be sure, there are real differences between Eastern and Western cultures (e.g. Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Morris & Peng, 1994), but you get the sense that when she invokes these differences, she's actually rationalizing a preexisting antipathy.
This form of racism is particularly pernicious, because it can be difficult to combat directly. People who use values as the basis for condemning certain groups often maintain a level of plausible deniability in their actions because their intentions are ambiguous with regard to race. For example, political campaigns sometimes use racial code words (e.g., "illegals") in an attempt to maintain a certain racial status quo. Similarly, some in the electorate who are troubled by President Barack Obama's race have channeled this sentiment into accusations that he is not a natural-born citizen and raised questions about the legitimacy of his office, even after evidence to the contrary. While we may know or strongly suspect that these tactics are fundamentally about race, it can be difficult to convince voters that they contain hidden meanings, to say nothing of the challenges in simply bringing this discourse out into the open.
To that extent, we might actually thank YouTube for disinhibiting Ms. Wallace to the point of publishing her opinions, which are often left to fester in the privacy of homes, dormrooms, and the quiet corners of public spaces. With the ascendancy of China economically and the struggle of many US universities to increase their tuition revenue, her reactions to this aspect of globalization can't possibly be isolated and are likely on the rise.
But if this was a teachable moment engineered by the psychological distance of YouTube, then what did we learn? Unfortunately that not everyone will be able to take the higher ground.
Just as YouTube helped to disinhibit Ms. Wallace, it helped to disinhibit her detractors, further shaping the conversation. In both comments and response videos, critics called for violence against Ms. Wallace, including death threats, which became especially significant after her exam schedule was leaked online. For many of the commenters, these reactions were made possible by the anonymity afforded by internet communication. People wanting to conceal their identity could easily do so, thereby minimizing their exposure to adverse consequences for their actions. But just as Alexandra Wallace didn't post her video anonymously, some of the most egregious responses have come from users whose identities are known or easily discovered. For them, the absence of immediate feedback led them to say things that they would likely consider unacceptable under other circumstances. To the extent that Ms. Wallace's rant presented an opportunity to have a constructive dialogue about race, online disinhibition may have derailed such an effort by causing some to respond with hate-filled racial provocations of their own.
Moving across the spectrum a bit, YouTube responder DavidSoComedy drew honestly on his offense from Ms. Wallace's attack, but chose to respond to her symbolic racism with self-confessed overt racism. To Ms. Wallace's assertion that "American" culture is superior to Asian culture, Mr. So asserted the opposite. After Ms. Wallace mockingly imitates the way Asians speak, Mr. So returns the favor. And anyone who ever gave a hoot about feminism will find it tough to swallow Mr. So's frequent salutations of "Bitch" and "Biotch." But the edgiest moments of his rejoinder are his references to violent revenge. Understandably, he was determined to wage a satirical comedic defense of himself, his family, and his culture, and his correction of Ms. Wallace's geographic errors needed to be made by someone (she imitates Chinese language but sends condolences to victims of the tsunami - in Japan) but by implicating Ms. Wallace's race, and by pitting group against group, he pollutes the discourse with almost as much hateful rhetoric as she did. We would do well to learn from the endless loop of offense, revenge, and re-offense that protracts intergroup conflicts and prevents real reconciliation, as among Serbs and Croats or Palestinians and Israelis.
But others took a different, potentially more constructive approach. User jimmy, a.k.a. Jimmy Wong of Seattle, composed an original comedic song in which he pretends to try and seduce Ms. Wallace. The fact that his response takes the form of a love song draws a stark contrast with Ms. Wallace and Mr. So who both seem intent on divisiveness and emphasizing the things that separate us (to say nothing of the richly stereotype-violating Lothario persona that Mr. Wong adopts). But the best aspects of his response are his outing Ms. Wallace's personal ignorance, rather than trying to paint her as representative of either her race or her culture. For example, after splicing in Ms. Wallace's mocking imitation of Asians speaking "ching chong, ling long, ting tong" on cell phones in the library, Mr. Wong sings "ching chong means I love you / ling long I really want you / ting tong I really don't know what that means." To Ms. Wallace's assertion that said Asian library rule-breakers interrupt the "epiphany" she has while studying, Mr. Wong sings again in his complex mix of criticism and embrace, "If you have an epiphany every single time you study that means you're probably doing something wrong - but I like it when you're wrong." Make no mistake, Mr. Wong does level personal attacks because he's a person not a professor (e.g. "underneath the pounds of makeup"). But the point again is that these jabs are personal, not collective, and as such, he navigates around the usual trappings of intergroup conflict. Rather than alienating potential allies, as Mr. So had done, Mr. Wong puts Ms. Wallace into a spotlight of logic, universal rights, and basic decency that welcomes far more people to evaluate their own sense of right and wrong. This is encouraging.
We shouldn't be surprised if similar videos by other users turn up in the future, and there are undoubtedly many more like them available already. No doubt, considerable damage is done to American multiculturalism in that over a million viewers have now been exposed to Alexandra Wallace's symbolic-racist arguments. To be sure, her diatribe resonates with many, innoculates others against stronger forms of racism, and enobles a radical few to take discriminatory or even violent action. However, nearly three times as many people have viewed the rejoinders to her video, which at a minimum demonstrate an unwillingness to passively accept such attacks, and at their best begin to describe a path out ignorance and toward forgiveness and multiculturalism. YouTube doesn't have to strip users of their decency, and user-generated videos can reflect the personal values of their authors.
But if YouTube is to contribute positively to the dialogue on race, users going forward will need to ask themselves whether their uploads reveal the goodness in themselves or reflect the badness in others.
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