White Allies and the Semiotics of Wokeness: Raciolinguistic Chronotopes of White Virtue on Facebook

Abstract

This study examines how the figure of the white ally is constructed on Facebook via raciolinguistic chronotopes of “white virtue,” which is the idea that whites who can identify racism are good people who cannot themselves be racist. Using data I collected from a public group called “White People ACTING for Change!” (WPAC) I use semiotic discourse analysis to highlight how participants produce histories of becoming a woke white ally towards an imagined future of anti-racist praxis in which “people of all colors” are equally positioned. These posts appear to promote inclusion and equality while actually recentering white perspectives on race and the racial difference by recruiting individualist understandings of race and racism. This study considers how allyship recruits liberal democratic discourses of racial difference such that white supremacy is reconstructed as an ordinary ideology of governance.