THE “SELF-CRITICISM OF WHITENESS” ON INSTAGRAM: limits and possibilities of a movement

Abstract

The massive mobilization motivated by the brutal murders of black people in the United States and Brazil in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, became an important turning point for the understanding of the focus of anti-racist struggles. In the speeches of black activists, not only were the direct perpetrators of racist violence targeted in the fight for racial justice, but all white people in general began to be accused of demonstrating solidarity only in appearance, but without effective and committed engagement. Under the effect of these pressures, young white people created public anti-racist profiles on Instagram to share self-critical content about their own whiteness. In 2021, we analyzed the content of the posts of seven of these profiles, conducted interviews with their creators and participated in discussion groups on the topic, organized by them remotely. In March 2024, we returned to the Instagram profiles to analyze whether their activity had continued or whether it had been just a momentary effect of the pressures they had suffered more intensely between 2020 and 2022. We concluded that there had been a significant decrease in activity or a complete interruption, while black profiles remained active and increased their followers. If, on the one hand, this shows that it is in fact black people who truly maintain constancy and commitment to anti-racist struggles, on the other hand, we sought to bring in this article some of the lessons that the network engagement of “(self)critical whiteness” produced for white people involved in online racial literacy.